The start of any client/agency relationship is always a time of anticipation and optimism, but what happens when you don’t see the results you expected?
Brand-side marketers are under enormous pressure. Time, money, and trust are all at a premium (the so-called “triple trap”) and unlocking marketing’s incredible potential to drive growth is a daily challenge.
With demands coming from all sides, it’s no surprise that client/agency relationships can suffer under the weight of expectation – and when poor performance becomes an issue, organisations might assume their agency is the problem.
At AAR, we think it’s important to challenge this assumption. The industry may be used to defaulting to a full agency review – with all the cost, upheaval and resources attached – but this isn’t always the best step forward. Because often, organisations don’t have the wrong agency. They have the wrong agency model.
Should you replace your agency or rethink the way you work together?
AAR Partner Rebecca Nunneley works with organisations to design more effective marketing and agency ecosystems, appoint the right agency partners, and build operating models that are aligned to business ambition, marketing strategy and customer demands.
In her experience, when there are question marks over agency performance, there’s usually a gap between what the client thinks they’re buying and what they feel they’re getting. The work isn’t strong enough, things take too long, everything feels harder than it should, or they’re questioning the value.
Sometimes it’s less tangible: “they’re not proactive with us”, “our agencies don’t feel joined up”, or “they don’t seem to understand our business like they used to.”
However, these issues are often symptoms, not the root cause in themselves. Across agency reviews and consultancy projects, we see organisations questioning their agency when the underlying challenge is actually the agency model, operating structure, governance, decision-making process or internal alignment.
Before deciding whether to replace an agency, here are the five questions she thinks every organisation should ask itself.
1. Are we asking our agency to solve the right problem?
Frustration with work and working processes deserve to be taken seriously, but they’re the starting point for a diagnosis, not the diagnosis itself. Separate the symptoms from the problem. “The work isn’t good enough” is a legitimate concern, but you need to understand why. Is it capability, an unclear brief, conflicting expectations, an outdated scope or something else?
If there is an underlying mismatch between what your organisation needs and what the agency believes it is there to solve, friction is inevitable. Imagine an agency receiving a brief from one part of the business, feedback from three others and a completely different steer when the final decision-maker sees the work. The frustration becomes “The agency keeps missing the brief.” But there may never have been one agreed brief to hit.
2. Has our business changed faster than our agency model?
A new marketing strategy can require a very different combination of capabilities, but the agency can still be working to a model agreed for the old one. Ask yourself: Have you brought work in-house, added specialist partners, changed your marketing strategy without revisiting the agency’s role? Has the commercial model changed over time? Has the scope shrunk or grown?
Once you have your answers, a structured option is to give the incumbent a clear brief – including proper scrutiny and an agreed decision point – to respond to your future needs. This isn’t a “Please reassure us” exercise, but a way to state: “This is where the business is going; starting with a blank sheet of paper, show us the model, capabilities, ways of working and commercial approach you would propose.”
3. Are roles and responsibilities actually clear?
As business goals shift, the biggest challenge is that agency models can grow by addition rather than design. A specialist is brought in to solve one need, an in-house team is built to solve another, a platform is introduced, and another agency takes on a new channel. Each decision might make perfect sense individually, but collectively, you can end up with duplication, gaps and a huge amount of coordination.
The answer lies in leadership and genuine collaboration. Across multiple partners, somebody needs the authority to resolve trade-offs. If everyone is responsible for integration but nobody can make the call, you haven’t really allocated responsibility. You also can’t ask agencies to operate as one team while setting up scopes, budgets and measures that encourage each to protect its own territory. Attitude matters enormously, but goodwill is not a substitute for properly resourcing collaboration.
4. Is the issue capability, chemistry or governance?
You can’t move forward positively without being specific about what is going wrong. The useful question is: “What is stopping us getting the outcome we need, and who has the ability to change it?”
Take the “agency is too slow” complaint. You need to understand how much time is spent producing the work and how much is spent waiting for a decision. Where approvals are sequential, feedback conflicts and decisions are reopened late, a different agency might respond more quickly to individual requests, but it cannot remove the approval structure.
Governance is easier to test than it sounds. In practice, it means asking who sets the direction, who makes the decision, whose input is needed and what happens when people disagree. If those answers are unclear, the problem may also sit on the client side of the relationship, not only with the agency.
The signs that a relationship is worth repairing are also something you can diagnose. Can you point to good work and genuine value in the relationship? Can both organisations agree on what is going wrong, rather than offering two completely different explanations? And, crucially, are both prepared to change something? One note of caution, however – if you find yourself asking “Why are we only seeing this now?”, trust may have broken down too far for a reset to be credible.
5. Have we genuinely explored alternatives to a full agency review?
There’s so much opportunity for brands between doing nothing and putting the whole account out to pitch. You can reset the relationship around a new ambition. You can revisit the scope, simplify decision-making, clarify responsibilities, review the commercials or redesign how the agency works with other partners and the in-house team. If you believe there’s a specific capability gap, you might add specialist support rather than replace an otherwise valuable relationship.
If a new partner is required, a full speculative pitch is not the only way to select one. The process should establish the evidence you need (which can be through a mix of relevant work, working sessions, capability assessment or a tightly scoped exercise) so it doesn’t need to follow the traditional format.
The point of diagnosing the model is not to avoid changing agencies at all costs. It is to make that decision with confidence. For Rebecca, the key piece of advice would be not to start with the sentiment “our agency isn’t working, so who else should we appoint?” Start with “what needs to change?”. Not only will you make a much better appointment if you do embark on an agency selection process, you may well discover that a new appointment wasn’t the right answer in the first place.
