It starts with understanding your business and its objectives, rather than taking a budget and dividing it across a few channels. A good agency wants to know what you're trying to achieve, who you need to reach, what those people care about, and what needs to happen commercially for the campaign to be considered a success.
From there, it should build the strategy, recommend the right mix of media, negotiate the best possible value, manage the campaign and measure what happens.
Most importantly, it should be able to explain its thinking in plain English. Why these channels? Why this audience? Why this level of investment? What does success look like? And what will we change if it isn't working?
You're paying for judgement, expertise, leverage, accountability and better business outcomes. The spots, impressions and clicks are simply the mechanism.
The biggest gap I see is between being promised a strategic business partner and ending up with a media schedule and an automated monthly report!
During the pitch, clients meet senior people and hear plenty about strategy, innovation and the concept of partnership. They're sold the sizzle. Once the account is won, however, they can find themselves with a relatively junior team that knows the platforms well enough but doesn't understand the business behind them.
Now, I can understand how it happens; the problem is what follows, because from that point the relationship turns transactional, and once it's there, it’s often doomed to fail.
Why? The agency reports only what happened without offering a clear point of view on why it happened, what it means, or what should happen next. The opposite is when you feel your agency is invested in your business and actively helping lead it forward, rather than waiting to be handed a list of tasks.
Every client need and agency setup is different, so there's no single right structure. What matters is setting servicing expectations clearly at the outset. Assuming the founder will answer every email may not reflect what was actually sold, though senior people should stay genuinely involved in strategy, major buying decisions, commercial reviews and the difficult conversations. Ask for that upfront and have it declared in writing.
Your day-to-day contact also needs enough experience and authority to move things forward, rather than relaying messages to somebody else in the building. Plenty gets lost in translation that way.
We wholeheartedly believe that the senior people who make the promises should stay connected to the work. No disappearing act once the agreement is signed, which is our standard practice, as we have the processes and technology embedded in the business that allow us to do so.
Meeting rhythm matters too, though frequency matters far less than quality. Weekly during onboarding or a major launch, moving to fortnightly working sessions and a monthly performance review tends to work well. Every meeting should cover what happened, what we learned, what needs deciding and who is doing what next.
Who has time for another agency meeting where someone reads a dashboard aloud?
Before booking a dollar of media, you need to complete the groundwork: commercial objectives, ideal customer profiles, customer journeys, competitive position, historical performance, and whatever you already know about your customers. Only after that should anyone recommend a channel mix.
You should come out of that process holding a clear strategic brief, an audience definition supported by data, a channel strategy explaining the job of each channel, a media plan and buying schedule, a transparent budget, a measurement framework and a responsibility matrix.
At 30 days, you're confirming the foundation holds. At 60 days, you should be seeing decisions, not observations, and at 90 days, you should get a proper strategic review. Silence is your worst enemy throughout. [What to expect in your first 90 days]
Everything.
You should be able to see the total budget, what's committed to each channel, the actual negotiated rates, the buying schedule, the planned audience delivery and what the agency is being paid. So, media, agency fees, creative costs, technology fees and any third-party expenses should all be separated and itemised. If you can't distinguish the working media from the cost of managing it, the arrangement isn't transparent enough.
Fee models vary, with retainers, a percentage of media spend, hybrids and performance-based arrangements all common in the Australian market, and each has its place. The questions that matter are whether the incentives are aligned, the scope is clear, and the fee is visible. [Read more about agency fees in Australia]
Media delivery tells you whether the advertising ran as intended, i.e, budget spent, audience reached, frequency obtained, impressions served, CPM attained, and spots delivered. Those are important questions, though they don't tell you whether the campaign helped the business.
Business outcomes matter commercially, so focus on qualified leads, new customers, cost per acquisition, sales, revenue, market share, awareness, consideration, and customer lifetime value (among others!). Your agency should connect media delivery to those outcomes as far as the data honestly allows and be straight with you about the limits of attribution.
A report should lead to a decision. [Read more about media agency reporting]
The best results happen when you treat the agency as part of the business, not a supplier at the end of an email chain.
That means stakeholder alignment, clear commercial objectives, access to the right platforms and information, timely approvals, open communication, and honest feedback on what happens once the lead or the sale reaches you. It also means sharing the metrics that genuinely matter in your business, whether that's revenue, customer value, conversion rates, operational capacity or which products carry the margin. Without that, an agency can optimise media activity while having very little influence on business growth.
It also means giving the strategy enough time to work. Trust the process and resist being trigger-happy. We are currently onboarding a new client, with target CPAs clear and KPIs locked in. The first 3.5 weeks saw that target CPA blow way out as things bedded in, prompting nervous internal conversations, but we had transparent external conversations to stay the course. Then 5 weeks in, we saw a drastic (positive) correction of the CPA, well below the target, and a testament to the nerve held and strategy implemented.
The behaviours that reliably wreck results are unclear objectives, slow approvals, a brief that changes every fortnight, withheld sales data, treating every channel as direct response, and judging a campaign against a KPI nobody agreed to. Then there's personal preference: "I don't watch that", "I never click on those", "my kids don't listen to radio". You aren't the audience, which is why we use real-time audience intelligence through SQREEM to drive channel decisions, not instinct.
It depends on your category, buying cycle and competitive set, though you should see the foundations working within 30 days, genuine performance patterns and active optimisation by 60, and a full strategic review at 90. Immediate results are rarely realistic, and patience through that first quarter is often rewarded.
Yes. You own your advertising accounts, analytics properties, pixels, audiences and business data. Your agency needs access to do the work, and you shouldn't lose your history, learnings or ability to trade simply because you change agencies.
