I did a thing last month that I probably should have done years ago. I pulled the homepages of 40 marketing agencies. Not the big ones. Not Ogilvy or Wieden+Kennedy. The middle ones. The ones that serve businesses between $2M and $20M in revenue. The ones that are, technically, my competitors.
I put all 40 into a spreadsheet. Headline. Subhead. First paragraph. CTA. Hero image description. Color palette. I wanted to see the landscape.
What I found made me want to lie down on the floor.
37 out of 40 used the word "results-driven" or "results-focused." 34 out of 40 had a hero image of either a team in a conference room or an abstract graphic with upward-trending lines. 31 out of 40 used the phrase "data-driven strategies" within the first 100 words. 28 out of 40 promised to "take your business to the next level."
The next level. As if business is a video game and the agency is the warp pipe.
Here's what gets me. These are smart people. Many of them do good work. Some of them probably get real results for their clients. But their language is dead. Not dying. Dead. It's been dead for years. They're speaking in a tongue that nobody hears anymore because hearing requires surprise, and there is nothing surprising about promising to be results-driven. That's like a restaurant promising to serve food.
So why does everyone sound the same?
Rene Girard has an answer, and it's uncomfortable.
Girard's big idea is that desire is mimetic. We don't want things because we independently decided to want them. We want things because someone else wants them. Desire is triangular: there's you, there's the object, and there's the model, the person whose desire taught you to desire. You don't want the toy. You want the toy because your brother wants the toy. You don't want the job. You want the job because that person you admire has the job. The object is almost irrelevant. What matters is the model.
Now apply that to agencies.
Agency #1 sees Agency #2 getting clients. Agency #1 doesn't study why Agency #2 is successful. Agency #1 studies what Agency #2 looks like. The website. The language. The positioning. And then Agency #1 copies it. Not consciously. Mimetic desire isn't conscious. It operates beneath strategy, beneath intention, beneath the brand meeting where everyone agrees they need to "differentiatespecificity."
Agency #3 sees Agencies #1 and #2 and copies the copy of the copy. By the time you get to Agency #37, you have a perfectly preserved fossil of language that no one chose but everyone uses. "Results-driven" isn't a value proposition. It's a mimetic artifact. It's the residue of desire copying itself across an industry until the original signal is gone and all that's left is the echo.
Let me give you some of the specific dead language I found. These are real phrases from real agency homepages:
"We partner with ambitious brands to unlock growth."
"Our team of experts crafts tailored solutions."
"We don't just build campaigns, we build relationships."
"Full-service digital marketing agency focused on ROI."
"Scaling your business with proven strategies."
Read those out loud. Do you feel anything? Anything at all? Your pulse didn't change. Your pupils didn't dilate. Your brain filed each sentence in the same folder it files terms and conditions. You read them without reading them. They're invisible.
Now think about what that means. These agencies paid someone, maybe a lot of money, to write words on their homepage. The homepage is the front door. It's the first impression. And the first impression is a string of words that produce no neurological response in the reader. The homepage is functionally a blank wall with a "Contact Us" button.
And nobody notices. Because everyone's homepage looks like this, so it seems normal. Mimetic desire doesn't just copy what works. It makes the copy invisible by making it ubiquitous. When everyone sounds the same, no one sounds like anything.
Here's where I'm supposed to say "and that's why my agency is different."
I'm not going to say that. Because claiming to be different is also mimetic. It's the rebel pose, and the rebel pose is the most copied pose in marketing. "We're not like other agencies" is on at least 15 of those 40 homepages. They're all not like other agencies, together, in exactly the same way.
What I will say is this: the methodology I use starts somewhere else entirely. Not with the competitor. Not with the industry. Not with what other agencies are saying or doing or claiming. It starts with the buyer.
Not the buyer persona. Not the ideal client profile. The actual buyer. The human being who woke up this morning with a problem they've been carrying for months, who typed something into Google or asked a friend or scrolled past an ad and stopped, and who is right now, in this moment, trying to figure out who to trust with their money and their hope.
That person doesn't care if you're results-driven. That person is scared. Or frustrated. Or tired of being burned by the last agency that promised the next level and delivered a PDF and a monthly call.
When I sit with 200 buyer quotes before I write a single word, I'm not doing research in the way most agencies mean research. Most agencies mean competitor research. What's the landscape. What's the positioning. Where's the white space. That's all mimetic. You're studying the models and adjusting your desire accordingly.
What I'm doing is leaving the mimetic field entirely. I'm sitting with the buyer until the buyer's language replaces the industry's language in my head. Until "results-driven" sounds as alien to me as it should sound to everyone. Until the only words I have are the ones the buyer actually uses when they're talking to their spouse at 11 PM about whether this is going to work or if they're throwing money away again.
That's not positioning. That's not differentiation. It's closer to what Girard would call a conversion: the moment you see the mimetic structure from outside it. You can't unsee it. You can't go back to writing "tailored solutions" once you've heard a real person say "I just need someone who actually listens to what I'm dealing with."
I don't know if this makes me anti-mimetic. That's a term people use now, and I'm suspicious of it because the moment anti-mimetic becomes a brand, it's been absorbed back into the mimetic field. You're now the agency that's anti-mimetic, which is a position, which is a pose, which is copyable.
What I know is that 37 out of 40 agencies are saying the same thing, and none of them know they're doing it, and the reason they don't know is that mimetic desire is invisible to the person inside it. You can only see it from outside. And the only way I've found to get outside is to stop looking at the competition and start listening to the buyer.
Not listening as a technique. Listening as a discipline. As a practice that takes weeks, not hours. As something that feels like stalling until the moment it doesn't.
Those 40 homepages are still open in my browser. I keep going back to them. Not to judge. To remember. To remind myself what happens when you let the industry think for you. What happens when you let desire do its triangular work and call the result a strategy.
It's a Tuesday night. I'm reading buyer reviews for a client who sells something I didn't know existed six weeks ago. I've read 140 of them. I haven't written a word of copy. My client is getting nervous.
I'm not.