A great agency is an incredibly inspiring place to be—the hum of ideas, the creative energy, the brilliant people, the beers in the fridge. So how can it be that agency work is growing increasingly stale, repetitive and gimmicky?

After many years in the industry myself, and many attempts at an answer, it’s become tough to avoid the sobering conclusion:

The agency model is in desperate need of an overhaul.

As it stands, the current agency model suffers from three fundamental flaws:

1. Agency work is interruptive.
Agencies are paid to capture attention and convert it to action. They’ve gotten quite good at it over the years, and are constantly optimizing their approaches to attention-grabbing. But no amount of incremental gains in skill can overcome the speed at which attention is becoming our culture’s most valuable currency. Being in the business of grabbing attention in a world that is increasingly resentful of interruption is bad strategy.

2. Agencies are literally dis-integrated from the things they sell.
The freedom from corporate restrictions and autonomy to create that has always been the strength of the agency model have become its weakness. Disruptive new brands like Warby Parker and Uber are demonstrating a new way of reaching fans, one that flows seamlessly from the corporate mission to the service itself (“starting with why” as Simon Sinek would say) and into every meticulous detail of the customer experience, from sign up forms to shipping policies to twitter accounts. Philosophy infuses product, which delivers value to people, whose voices become the best possible marketing program. It’s becoming about finding better ways of doing things, not just a better ways of talking about them. That shift is setting a standard that siloed corporate behemoths and their even less integrated agency partners can’t possibly measure up to.

3. The agency model is adversarial.
For all the talk of partnership, the truth remains: The agency will be most successful by completing the work as quickly and cheaply as possible, and the company will always want to squeeze the most work out of the agency that they can within the agreed budget. When agencies and their clients align on a scope of work, it sets in place a system of incentives that are at cross-purposes to creating consistently great advertising or digital work. Billing for time and materials only exacerbates the problem, as it introduces a constant opportunity to pull the plug on top of the conflicting priorities. Neither team is incentivized by the quality of the product, and it results in either simplistic and corner-cutting solutions, or overstretched and ineffective solutions.

These structures have become a fundamental problem because they run counter to the current evolutionary flow of culture. So what should agencies and their leaders do to correct the above disconnects?

It starts by shifting priorities from capturing attention to providing value. In a constantly connected culture, this is the only long-term way to creating better, more loyal customers—or even better, turning those customers into fans, advocates, and even consultants. To do that, agencies must be able to more fully represent the “why” of their clients’ companies and products. (Sidebar: If doing that doesn’t attract more customers, maybe they’re not a very good client.) And to reflect that purpose in their work, they must embrace full partnership, going so far as to function quite literally as an extension of their client’s companies—just with all the constraints of internal teams removed. Think of the “embedded journalist” approach, living and traveling as a part of the group to best tell the story of the company’s work and impact.

At its best, agency work in 2014 and beyond should do the following:

1. Make an immediate impact by doing something that the client is incapable of doing themselves.
2. Share learned insights to arm clients for the next time around.
3. Move on to the next opportunity with that company or another.

In short we, as agencies and their employees, should aspire to leave our clients’ businesses in better shape than we found it.

Until we really learn how to do that, we’ll be fighting between ourselves over quickly diminishing scraps, while smart startups and visionary leaders claim the territory in this new frontier where UX is branding, and everything is UX. Sounds like a proposition in need of a rethink to me.