Best strategy and objectives agencies 2027: guide

No agency is best in general. The question is only ever which one is best for the specific thing you cannot do yourself, and brands that skip that step end up paying a retainer for capabilities they already had.

That is especially true for work on strategy and objectives, where what looks like a shortage of expertise is often a shortage of internal decisions that no outside party can make for you.

This page contains no agency names and no fee figures, because a ranked list of shops goes out of date faster than it can be published and a fee quoted without a scope is meaningless. What follows is how to work out which kind of partner you need and how to test whether a given one can do the job.

What to take away

• Agencies in this space sell some combination of five distinct things, and they are not equally scarce.
• Talent-side agencies and management companies represent creators.
• Treat agency selection like any other procurement, and give every shop the same document so the responses are comparable.
• Guaranteed results, guaranteed reach at a fixed rate, or a promised return multiple.

First establish what you are actually buying

Agencies in this space sell some combination of five distinct things, and they are not equally scarce.

Access. Existing relationships with partners you cannot easily reach, or with the representatives who control them. Genuinely valuable at the top end, largely illusory in the long tail, where anyone with a research process can reach the same people.

Judgment. Knowing which partner fits which brief, and which will not work despite looking right. This is the hardest thing to buy and the hardest to evaluate in a pitch, because everyone claims it.

Throughput. The operational capacity to run many partners at once: contracting, briefing, chasing, approvals, payment. Unglamorous, real, and frequently the actual reason a brand needs help.

Craft. Creative development, brief writing, and knowing what will work in a format.

Measurement. Setting up and interpreting the evaluation. Buy this cautiously from anyone who is also being judged on the results it produces.

Write down which of the five you are short of before you talk to anyone, and settle your own strategy and objectives first so the shortfall is a real one. A brand that needs throughput and buys judgment will be dissatisfied, and so will the reverse.

Types of shop, and what each is good at

Talent-side agencies and management companies represent creators. They are not working for you. They can be excellent to deal with and they will always be optimizing for their roster. Useful for access to specific people; inappropriate as an advisor on who to book.

Brand-side independents work for you and typically compete on judgment and craft. Quality varies enormously and depends heavily on the individuals, which is why the team question below matters more than the credentials.

Network-owned agencies sit inside holding groups. Strong on process, integration with your other media, and the ability to absorb scale. Watch for internal preferred-partner arrangements and for the campaign being staffed by people other than the ones who pitched.

Platform-adjacent and marketplace operators run on top of a tool or roster. Efficient for volume work in the mid and long tail. Their recommendations are constrained by who is in the system, which is a limit you should know about rather than a flaw.

Production companies moving into creator work are strong on craft and often weaker on the relationship and rights management side. Reasonable when what you actually want is content to run as ads.

Specialists in a category or region are worth a premium when the category has genuine domain requirements or the region has its own norms, and are worth nothing when it does not.

The conflict questions

This is where most of the value of a diligence process sits, and where the answers are most revealing.

Do you take money from both sides? An agency earning a fee from you and a commission from the creator is conflicted about which creator you book and at what rate. This arrangement is not always improper and it is always material. Ask directly and get the answer in writing.

Is the media buy marked up, and by how much? If they are placing amplification spend, establish whether you are paying the platform's price or theirs. "Net" and "gross" are doing a lot of work in most agency contracts.

Do you hold any equity or commercial interest in tools or platforms you recommend? A recommendation from a part-owner is a sales call.

Is any part of your roster exclusive, and would you tell me if the right partner for this brief was outside it? The answer everyone gives is yes. The follow-up (when did you last recommend someone outside it, and for what), is more informative.

Who negotiates the rate, and whose interest are they representing? If the same person negotiates the creator's fee and earns a percentage of it, you have a problem that no amount of goodwill fixes.

Do you accept payment for inclusion in your recommendations? Rare among reputable shops and worth asking anyway.

An agency also cannot hold your disclosure obligation for you. It can build the process and check the posts; the responsibility stays where it was, and what is currently expected is in the FTC's guidance on endorsements, influencers and reviews. The terms that make any of this enforceable are in contracts and disclosure.

What to put in the brief you send them

Treat agency selection like any other procurement, and give every shop the same document so the responses are comparable.

State the objective and the mechanism, not just the budget. Agencies pitch against what you give them, and a brief consisting only of a number produces a pitch consisting only of names.

Say which of the five capabilities you are buying. This alone eliminates the mismatches.

Ask for the team, by name and by time commitment. The most common complaint about agency work is that the people in the pitch are not the people on the account. Ask who will be on it, how many other accounts they carry, and what happens if they leave.

Ask for their process on the things that go wrong: a partner who misses a deadline, a compliance failure discovered after publication, a creator whose past content surfaces mid-campaign. Process under failure is more diagnostic than process under success.

Ask how they would measure this campaign, and specifically what they would do about the parts that tracking cannot see. An agency that answers this with a dashboard screenshot has not understood the question, and the reasons are set out in measurement and ROI. Ask too whose metric definitions they report against, and ask for them in writing; a definition you can read is a neutral answer and a proprietary methodology is not, which matters because the underlying units were never standardized, as the entry on audience measurement sets out.

Ask what they would tell you not to do. The answer separates advisors from order-takers.

Reading the pitch

Case studies. Apply the same skepticism you would to any published result: baseline, counterfactual, full cost, distribution across partners rather than the average. The questions in campaign case studies apply directly, and asking them in the room tells you a great deal about how the agency thinks.

Named partners in the deck. Ask whether those relationships are confirmed for your dates and category, or illustrative. Frequently they are illustrative, and the deck does not say so.

Proprietary tooling. Ask what it observes directly versus what it infers, where the underlying data comes from, and whether you can export your own data if you leave. A dashboard is not a methodology.

Speed of response on the awkward questions. Conflicts, markups, and team allocation are questions a well-run shop has ready answers to. Evasion at pitch stage predicts evasion later.

Contract terms that matter specifically for agencies

Fee structure and transparency. Whether you are on a retainer, a project fee, or a percentage of spend, and what that percentage is calculated on. Percentage-of-spend arrangements create an incentive to spend, which is worth naming out loud.

Pass-through and markup disclosure. A right to see what the creator was actually paid. Some agencies resist this; the resistance is informative.

Who holds the creator contract. If the agency contracts the creator directly, you may not hold the rights you think you do. Check that the usage you paid for actually flows through to you.

Data and asset portability on exit. Contact records, contracts, performance data, and the content itself. Agree in advance, in writing, what you take with you. This is the clause brands most regret not having.

Roster exclusivity and non-solicitation. Whether the agency can prevent you working directly with a partner they introduced, and for how long. Some restriction is reasonable; an indefinite one is not.

Termination and notice. Including what happens to campaigns in flight.

Approval authority. Whether the agency can approve content on your behalf, and where the limits are.

Red flags

Guaranteed results, guaranteed reach at a fixed rate, or a promised return multiple. Nobody controls platform distribution, and a guarantee means either a hedge you cannot see or a number that will be met by buying the cheapest available impressions.

A pitch built entirely on follower counts. It signals that the shop prices on the wrong variable, which means you will too.

Reluctance to discuss what has gone wrong on past accounts. Every agency has had a campaign fail; the ones that will not say so are managing you rather than working with you.

An unwillingness to be measured. A shop that resists a defined evaluation of its own performance has told you something.

Pricing that only makes sense at volume you have not committed to. Check what the terms become if you do half of what was discussed.

Bottom line

Decide which of access, judgment, throughput, craft, and measurement you actually need, then test candidates on that alone. Ask the conflict questions in writing, get the named team and their time commitment, secure data portability and rights flow-through in the contract, and treat guaranteed results as disqualifying.

Common questions

Should we hire an agency or build in-house?

It depends which of the five capabilities you lack and whether the volume justifies fixed cost. Throughput is often cheaper to buy; judgment and relationships are often better to build, because they compound and they walk out of the door when an agency contract ends.

Is a percentage-of-spend fee acceptable?

Common and workable if the percentage is disclosed and the base is defined. Be aware of the incentive it creates and consider whether a fixed fee suits a plan whose right answer might be to spend less.

Can we use a talent agency to advise on partner selection?

Not impartially. They represent the talent. Use them for access to their roster and take selection advice from someone without a stake in the answer.

How long should a first engagement run?

Long enough to complete a real cycle including measurement, short enough that you are not locked in before you have seen how they work under pressure. Define what the review at the end looks at, before you start.