Your TV advertising agency calls. You ignore it. The last few conversations felt more like negotiations. Or worse, they fall in line with everything you say, leaving you and your campaign completely uninspired.
Your partnership with your ad agency shouldn’t feel like an uphill battle. If it does, it might be time to declare war.
Here are three questions that’ll help you determine if you should go to war with your ad agency or on your ad agency.
1. Does your ad agency invest in your success?
Is your advertising agency risking anything by working with you? Meaning, when you win, do they win?
Most agencies get paid regardless of how your campaigns perform. Win or lose, the invoice arrives monthly. That's a comfortable position for them, but a risky one for you.
The best agency partnerships tie the agency’s success to the brand’s. When campaigns underperform, they feel it too. This creates aligned incentives. Agencies who are genuinely invested will push harder for breakthrough creative, dig deeper into performance data, and stay committed through the challenges that come with any TV advertising campaign.
So the question remains, how do you create a scenario where winning is a mutual benefit? The best way to do that may be to find an ad agency who is willing to make a meaningful (and ideally monetary) investment in your campaign.
2. Can you measure what matters in your campaigns?
Incentive alignment means little without real accountability. And that requires clarity.
It’s easy to sit in a conference room and talk about the hypothetical success you’ll have from your TV advertising campaign. It’s much trickier to make good on those promises. That’s why you need to hold your agency accountable for their actions and performance with clearly defined, tangible KPIs. Not vanity metrics that only look nice in a report. Results that move the needle.
TV attribution is complex, but it's not impossible. The right agency will establish clear, measurable goals that tie directly to your bottom line.
Performance TV campaigns have an advantage here. When someone redeems an offer or calls a tracked phone number, you can directly attribute that action to your TV spot. But even brand-focused campaigns can and should be measured effectively through media mix modeling, brand lift studies, and holistic attribution approaches.
The key is working with an agency that insists on using multiple measurement models to paint a complete picture of TV's impact on your business. When all the data tells the same story, you can trust that the results on paper match reality.
Because we’re all experts in our opinion. But at the end of the day, it’s about what drives the results you and your agency agree on together.
3. Does your ad agency bring new, divergent ideas to the table?
Perhaps the most important question: Is your agency bringing fresh perspectives to the table? Or are they simply executing your vision without adding strategic value?
The best TV agency partnerships involve healthy creative tension. Your agency should understand your brand deeply enough to push back when needed. They should bring campaign concepts you never would have considered. They should challenge assumptions about your audience, messaging, and media strategy. It’s not about being contrarian for the sake of it. It’s about being a full creative partner, one that’s confident enough to say “There’s a better way.”
You’re not hiring an agency to mirror your team. You’re hiring them to stretch it. One of the best benefits of hiring an external ad agency to handle your advertising campaigns is gaining access to creative thinkers with a fresh perspective.
If working with your agency feels like looking in a mirror, you're probably not getting the strategic partnership you need to break through in a crowded marketplace.
What does true partnership look like?
Here’s how these principles can show up in practice. At Marketing Architects, we’ve asked ourselves how we can create win-win scenarios and provide fresh campaign concepts with measurable metrics for success. And after more than 25 years in TV advertising, we've learned that the most successful campaigns happen when agencies and clients are genuinely aligned. That's why we built All-Inclusive TV around three core principles:
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Shared investment. We invest millions of our own dollars into client campaigns. We cover everything from creative production to attribution modeling because we believe in putting skin in the game. Our success is directly tied to yours, which changes everything about how we approach your business.
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Measurable impact. We also insist on being held accountable by working with our clients to create specific, measurable metrics to track success throughout campaign life cycles.
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Strategic and creative challengers. And as far as bringing divergent, fresh perspectives? We’re not afraid to get out of the box with ideas. And with over 25 years of aggressive real-world testing, we know how to take firecracker concepts and make them boom. Especially when we can predict a spot’s performance before it’s even produced thanks to AI-driven creative pretesting.
Don’t wave the white flag on your advertising just yet. Instead, explore All-Inclusive TV or connect with our team so we can help you win your marketing battle.