I've been in media long enough to see what good looks like. And, if I'm honest, I've seen enough of what bad looks like too. Recently, we experienced it firsthand. More on that shortly.
Here's what I actually think about choosing an agency partner in 2026.
Media costs are rising. That's a fact. Fragmentation means you can't reach your audience through a single channel the way you once could. The audience is split, and finding an efficient path to them takes more thinking and more channels than it used to.
But here's where I see a lot of clients come unstuck: they arrive at the table with a list of everything they want to do, and very little willingness to hear what the data is telling them.
A good agency's job isn't to spend your money. It's to help you make trade-offs clearly. To explain the likely consequences of each decision and to tell you, honestly, where the budget won't stretch. That means saying no sometimes. It means reframing the plan. It means having the conversation nobody wants to have about what you can realistically achieve with what you've got.
If your agency isn't doing that, if every meeting feels like an enthusiastic yes, that's a red flag.
Healthy competition between agencies is fine. Good, actually. Agencies should have to earn trust and keep proving their value. I believe that. We operate that way.
But there's a behaviour in the market that I find genuinely troubling, and it's not just an agency problem, it directly hurts clients.
Some agencies are approaching clients who are already working with someone else, with very little context, and implying that the current agency is underperforming, overcharging, or missing opportunities. Without understanding the strategy. Without knowing the constraints. Without any visibility of the commercial history or the decisions that have been made along the way.
We experienced this recently. I'm not going to name names. But I'll tell you it's desperate behaviour, and it shits me.
For clients, the risk is real. When a new agency approaches you with an easy answer from the outside, they can make anything sound possible. Cheaper media. Better performance. More senior attention. But without context, those promises are shallow. They're built on incomplete information and a sales pitch, not on a genuine understanding of your business. Getting pulled into that conversation is a distraction you don't need.
If an agency is genuinely trying to understand your business, they'll want to know about your commercial model, your margins, your sales process, your audience behaviour, previous campaigns and what worked and what didn't, your internal pressures, your budget reality, and what success actually looks like for the business, not just the campaign.
They will not jump straight to a channel recommendation or a flashy idea. They won't arrive at the first meeting with a deck full of media solutions to a problem they haven't diagnosed yet.
Transparency is the other major signal. Here are some genuine questions/watch outs you need to ask your agency, to help you establish if they can truly be considered as your partner.
And something that doesn't get said enough: being a good person matters. Caring enough about the decisions you're making for a client — their money, their business, their risk — is not a soft value. It's a baseline requirement. For me personally, it's non-negotiable.
Greater commercial understanding of business outcomes.
I'll be the first to put my hand up here. We were humbled recently by a client who pointed out that we didn't know enough about their sales process. That one landed. And we owned it, because they were right.
To do this job well, to genuinely function as part of a client's business rather than just a supplier to it, you need to understand how they make money. Where it comes from. How they price. Key commercial timings. Margins. The levers that actually move the business forward.
The best agency relationships I've been part of are the ones where we're genuinely embedded in the commercial conversation. That only happens when the agency takes the time to understand the business, and when the client trusts you enough to let you in. For example, we have just taken on a major retailer, we go in there every Tuesday, they talk about the weekend’s trade, we discuss current sales week data, which products were profitable and where the priorities are for the week. That only happens when you position yourself as a functioning arm of the business. In their business every week and not just reporting on media vanity metrics.
No pitch. No agenda. Just an honest discussion about what good looks like and whether we might be a fit.
