By Sarah Potemkin, Canvas Worldwide, SVP- Managing Director-Performance Media
In the mid-1970s, Kodak invented the first digital camera. Decades later, it had already invested in the future—acquiring Ofoto and launching products like the Kodak EasyShare One. And yet, Kodak chose to protect the high margins of its film business rather than fully commit to digital.
This wasn’t a failure of innovation. It was a failure of conviction.
That same dynamic is playing out inside modern agencies. What we call “tech debt” isn’t just a technical issue—it’s a cultural one. Left unchecked, it quietly erodes an agency’s ability to evolve, compete, and lead.
Avoiding it requires more than better tools. It requires operating differently.
1. Treat Technology as a Strategic Asset—Not Overhead
In many agencies, technology is still treated as a cost center—funded indirectly through client work and bundled alongside more obviously valuable investments. The legacy tools may be outdated, stuck in “maintenance mode,” or only loosely relevant to a client’s actual remit. They persist not because they’re effective, but because they’re nearly impossible to disentangle or challenge.
Over time, agencies stop asking a critical question: Is this technology helping us win and serve clients better today—or are we simply paying to preserve yesterday’s decisions?
The shift is simple but profound: technology should be evaluated as a strategic driver of growth, not a background expense. That means holding every tool—no matter how embedded—to the same standard of relevance, performance, and impact.
2. Design Processes That Evolve—Not Defend the Status Quo
Process debt is the silent partner of tech debt. You hear it when an ad tech vendor pitches an agency and gets the response from the agency tools lead: “Cool tool, but we don’t know how this would fit into our process.”
What that usually means is that a process already exists to support a different tool—one that may no longer be best-in-class, but is deeply embedded. The perceived switching cost feels enormous, not because the alternative is worse, but because the organization lacks the energy, incentives, or change-management capability to evolve.
Years of prioritizing short-term shareholder value then often manage out the people needed to lead that change. The result is an organization optimized for stability, not progress. I think here of the recent Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang quote that companies that do layoffs due to AI are “out of imagination.”
Best-in-class agencies flip this dynamic. They design processes to be flexible by default—capable of absorbing new tools, new workflows, and new ways of working without friction. The question shifts from “Does this fit our process?” to “How should our process evolve to support this?”
3. Deploy Talent Against the Future—Not the Past
As tech and process debt accumulate, especially within larger organizations, agencies often form internal “fiefdoms”—teams built around maintaining specific platforms or systems. Over time, these groups can become defensive, spending more energy protecting their turf than asking what’s best for the business or for clients.
These teams are frequently staffed with highly capable people. But instead of driving innovation or growth, they’re tasked with sustaining legacy infrastructure and justifying its continued existence.
The cost isn’t just inefficiency—it’s opportunity cost. Talent that should be exploring new capabilities, partnerships, and solutions is instead locked into maintaining the past.
Reducing tech debt requires actively reallocating that talent. The goal is to move people away from defending legacy systems and toward building future-facing capabilities that create real client value.
4. Institutionalize Curiosity and External Perspective
Perhaps the most subtle—and damaging—effect of tech debt is what it does to curiosity, often the first casualty. In tech debt-heavy agencies, an overwhelming share of time is spent on defending proprietary technology and responding to client requests versus being proactive about tech-led solves. More energy shouldn’t go into internal shootouts between competing in-house tools than into building a future-facing roadmap.
External conversations with vendors can’t continue to dry up. Sometimes this is rationalized as confidence—we’re smarter; we can build it ourselves. Sometimes it is budgetary. And eventually, vendors simply stop calling, knowing there is a high likelihood their ideas would be reverse-engineered rather than adopted.
Imagine instead a world where product teams are rewarded for curiosity—where they actively explore what’s next and help pull clients forward, rather than constantly playing defense.
Clients don’t need monolithic, one-size-fits-all operating systems– every holdco (and many indies) has its OS. These platforms promise scale but frequently sacrifice flexibility, speed, and relevance. Clients need thoughtfully assembled, lightweight toolsets configured to their specific challenges, and adaptable as those challenges change.
The Harder Path Is the Only Sustainable One
Avoiding tech debt isn’t the easiest path. It requires saying no to comfortable legacy systems, investing in change management, and staying relentlessly curious. It requires humility and the willingness to admit that the best solution may not be the one you built yourself.
But as Kodak’s story reminds us, the real risk isn’t change. The real risk is mistaking temporary comfort for lasting advantage. Instead, a no–tech debt ethos is ultimately a commitment to our clients’ futures, and to building an agency that’s designed to evolve, not ossify.
