Above low-level and well-defined things, or things that require industrial-style scaling, marketing consulting game is trust/relationship based, not activity based. People seem to figure out who to work with first, factor out the tasks and responsibilities second.

They prefer to make the partitioning subtimal, and with gaps, rather than taking on people risks, which are substantially higher.

We are also in a transitional period where the old agencies have no idea how to be effective (and therefore burn money in dumb ways), but newer people who do know are generally lost in a sea of douchebags and shady characters, and haven't yet been able to stand out effectively or scale what they can do effectively. I am fairly effective as a one-person show, and could probably pull 4-5 person teams together for more complex things, but nobody seems to have their act together at larger scales. Everybody I've met who claims they can do it turns out to either be lying, or able to do it only in one extremely narrow way. In-house expertise is better than consulting expertise in about 10% of companies, and much worse in 90%.

It's basically a chaotic, unreliable mess out there.