The Agency Audit: How to Know If You're Getting What You're Paying For

Most marketing leaders know when an agency relationship isn’t working. The hard part is working out whether it’s fixable and being honest enough with yourself to act on the answer.

The signs usually come before you’re ready to admit them. The monthly report lands and you read it, but nothing in it surprises you or changes what you’re going to do next. The account manager is responsive but hasn’t brought you an idea in six months. The creative is technically fine but feels like it could have come from any brand. You’re spending half your time writing briefs for the brief.

None of these things are damning on their own. But when they stack up, they’re telling you something.

This is the guide to working out what that something is — and to being honest about whether the problem sits with the agency, with you, or with both.

The thing most people miss: bad output often starts with bad briefing

Before you audit your agency, audit yourself. This is uncomfortable, but it’s important.

In my experience, a significant portion of underperforming agency work is downstream of poor briefing from the client side. The agency can only work with what you give them. If the brief is vague, the output will be generic. If the strategy hasn’t been clearly communicated, the creative will be directionless. If you’re not giving the agency enough context about your customer, your competitive position, and what good looks like for your business, you’re not giving them what they need to do good work.

I’ve seen this play out more times than I can count. A business brings in a well-regarded agency, the work comes back mediocre, and the reaction is “they just don’t get our brand.” Sometimes that’s true. But just as often, the brief was two paragraphs long with no customer insight, no competitive context, no clear objective, and no indication of what success looked like.

The test for this is honest and quick: look at the last three briefs you gave your agency. Were they specific enough that another capable team could have delivered something useful from them? If the answer is no, the agency isn’t the only one with a problem.

Good briefing doesn’t mean writing a 30-page document. It means giving the agency four things: who the audience is and what they actually care about; what you want them to think, feel, or do; what the constraints are (budget, channel, brand, time); and what good looks like so they know when they’ve hit it.

That’s it. If your briefs don’t cover those four things, start there before you have any other conversation with the agency.

What a healthy agency relationship actually looks like

It’s worth being clear about what you’re comparing against, because a lot of people tolerate unhealthy agency relationships simply because they’ve never had a healthy one.

A healthy agency relationship has a few consistent characteristics.

The agency brings ideas you didn’t ask for. They’re not just executing your briefs — they’re paying attention to your business, your category, and your customers, and they’re bringing you things that might be worth trying. You don’t have to act on all of them. But if the agency is never proactively bringing you anything, they’re not invested in your success.

The reporting tells you something useful. Not just metrics in a dashboard. It has a point of view on what’s working, what isn’t, and what they recommend doing about it. If every monthly report is just numbers with no recommendation attached, the agency is reporting rather than thinking.

There’s a consistent point of contact who knows your business. Account turnover is one of the most underrated risks in an agency relationship. When the person who understood your brand and your history rolls off your account — and this happens constantly — everything resets. You’re explaining context again, re-briefing on things that should be institutional knowledge, and often paying for the agency to relearn what they already knew. If you’ve had three account managers in two years, that’s probably a structural problem with the agency, not just bad luck.

The relationship improves over time. The output six months in should be better than it was in month one, because the agency knows your brand better, knows what you respond to, knows the constraints and the opportunities. If the output isn’t improving, either the learning loop is broken or there’s a capability ceiling you’ve hit.

The red flags that don’t show up in the monthly report

Some of the most important red flags in an agency relationship are invisible in the standard reporting. These are the ones worth paying attention to.

You’re doing their thinking for them. The clearest sign that an agency relationship has gone wrong is when you’re the one generating every strategic direction, every brief idea, every creative concept — and the agency is just executing. That’s fine if you’ve consciously decided to use them as a production resource. It’s a problem if you’re paying for strategy you’re not getting.

The work looks right but feels wrong. Creative work that’s technically on-brief but doesn’t feel like your brand is a subtle problem that’s hard to articulate but easy to spot. It’s usually a sign that the agency is working from a surface reading of your guidelines rather than a genuine understanding of your brand. Good agency creative feels like it could only have come from your brand. Generic agency creative could have come from anyone.

They tell you what you want to hear. The agency’s job isn’t to make you feel good about your decisions. It’s to do work that delivers results. If every idea you have is met with enthusiasm and every campaign is reported as a success, something’s off. A good agency will push back when they think the brief is wrong, and they’ll give you an honest read when something underperforms.

The relationship is reactive rather than proactive. You initiate every conversation. You set every agenda. The agency responds but never leads. That’s a sign that the relationship has become transactional, which is usually the beginning of the end.

The reset conversation

If you’ve identified a problem, the reset conversation is the right first move — not an exit. Ending an agency relationship before you’ve had a direct conversation about what’s not working is both wasteful and unfair.

The reset conversation doesn’t need to be adversarial. In fact, the more direct and clear you are, the better the outcome tends to be.

Start with what you value. This isn’t a softening tactic — it’s useful context. It tells the agency what to protect as you work through the rest of the conversation.

Then be specific about what isn’t working. Not vague impressions, specific examples. The last three reports didn’t include a recommendation. The creative on the April campaign felt generic. We haven’t had a proactive idea from you since January. Specifics give the agency something to respond to. Impressions just create defensiveness.

Then ask for their perspective. What are they seeing from their side? Is there something in the briefing or the process that’s making it harder for them to do their best work? Sometimes the reset conversation reveals that the agency has been frustrated too, and both sides have been working around a problem that nobody’s named.

Then agree on a specific test period. Not an open-ended commitment to “do better” — a clearly defined 90-day window with clear expectations for what needs to change and how you’ll know if it has.

If the agency responds well to that conversation and the 90 days shows genuine improvement, the relationship is worth continuing. If they’re defensive, evasive, or the improvement doesn’t materialise, you have your answer.

The in-house question

At some point in every agency relationship, the in-house question comes up. Should we be doing this ourselves?

The honest answer is that it depends, and the right answer changes as your business changes. There are situations where in-housing makes clear sense: when the volume is high enough to justify full-time headcount, when the institutional knowledge loss from agency turnover is a genuine business problem, when your creative or strategic needs are distinctive enough that external teams consistently struggle to deliver them.

There are also situations where staying external makes sense: when the capability you need is specialist and you can’t attract or retain that talent internally, when the work is genuinely cyclical and you don’t need it full-time, when the agency gives you access to tools, technology, or scale that you can’t replicate internally.

The mistake is treating the in-house question as a permanent decision. It’s not. I’ve had roles where I’ve pulled significant capability in-house because the business had grown to a point where it made sense. I’ve also had roles where I’ve deliberately stayed external for certain functions because the alternative was hiring specialist talent that would be underutilised half the time.

The right question isn’t “which is better?” It’s “which is right for this specific capability, at this specific stage of the business, right now?”

Five questions to ask at your next agency review

If you’re not sure where to start, bring these to your next agency check-in. The answers will tell you a lot.

What’s one thing we could be doing differently that we’re not? A good agency will have an answer to this. An agency that’s been doing exactly what you’ve asked and nothing else probably won’t.

What’s the one piece of work you’ve done for us that you’re most proud of, and why? The answer tells you what they think good looks like. If it doesn’t match your view, that gap is worth understanding.

What do you wish we told you more about? This surfaces the briefing gap. The answer is usually something about customer insight, business context, or forward-looking plans that would help them do better work.

If you were us, what would you do differently with the budget we’re spending with you? This requires the agency to think like a partner rather than a supplier. A good agency should be able to answer this honestly.

Who on your team knows our business best, and what happens when they move on? This forces a conversation about the institutional knowledge risk that most people never have.

You don’t need to ask all five at once. But working through them over a couple of sessions will give you a clear picture of where the relationship is genuinely strong and where the gaps are.

The goal isn’t to catch the agency out. It’s to create a relationship where both sides are being honest about what’s working and where the output keeps getting better because of that honesty.