What Brand Leaders Actually Want from Their Agencies

I'm going to tell you something that most brand leaders will never say to your face. Not because they're hiding it, but because they don't think it's your job to know. They think it's their job to evaluate you against it silently, and either keep you or replace you based on the result.

I spent 25 years on the brand side. Compaq, 5.11 Tactical, Nutrabolt. Over that time I hired, managed, and fired more agencies than I can count. I sat through the pitch decks, approved the budgets, reviewed the monthly reports, and made the decision, every quarter, every year, about whether each agency relationship was worth continuing.

I can tell you with certainty that what brand leaders want from their agencies is not what most agencies think. And the gap between those two things is where most agency relationships quietly fall apart.

What agencies think brand leaders want

Most agencies operate as if the brand leader's primary concern is performance metrics. ROAS. CPA. Revenue growth. Click-through rate. Conversion rate. And to be fair, these metrics matter. I looked at them every month. I compared them to benchmarks. If they were consistently bad, that was a problem.

But here's what most agencies don't understand: performance metrics are table stakes. They're the minimum. They're what gets you in the door and keeps you from getting fired in the first quarter. They are not what makes a brand leader say, "This agency is indispensable. I'm never letting them go."

The agencies that treated performance as the entire relationship always felt replaceable to me. Because they were replaceable. If all you bring is campaign optimization, I can find ten other agencies that optimize campaigns. Your ROAS might be 5% better than the next agency's. That's not enough to build loyalty on. That's a rounding error that could flip the other direction next quarter.

Performance is the cost of entry. It isn't the reason I stay.

What brand leaders actually want

What I wanted, and what every brand leader I've talked to over the years wanted, comes down to three things. They aren't complicated. But they're surprisingly rare.

The first thing: tell me something I don't know about my customer. This is the big one. The thing that separated the agencies I kept for years from the agencies I cycled through every six to twelve months. I don't need you to confirm what I already believe about my market. I need you to show me something I missed. A segment I hadn't considered. A fear that's driving purchase behavior that I didn't realize was there. A gap in the competitive landscape that my product is uniquely positioned to fill.

When an agency walked into a quarterly review and said, "We've identified something interesting in the data. Your highest-LTV customers aren't who you think they are. Here's who they actually are, and here's what that means for the next quarter's strategy," I leaned forward in my chair. That's the moment when the agency stopped being a vendor and became a partner. Because they brought me intelligence I couldn't get anywhere else.

Most agencies never did this. Most agencies reported on what happened. The ones I valued told me what it meant.

The second thing: have a point of view and defend it. I can't overstate how much brand leaders value an agency that will push back. Not argue for the sake of arguing. Not resist feedback because of ego. But genuinely push back when they believe we're making the wrong call.

Some of the best marketing decisions I've made in my career came from an agency telling me I was wrong. "I know you want to target the 25-35 demo, but our research shows the 40-50 segment has three times the purchase intent and half the competitive pressure. Here's the data. I think we should go after them instead."

That takes courage. It also takes preparation. You can't push back with "I just feel like we should try something different." You push back with evidence. With research. With a specific, defensible recommendation that you're willing to stand behind.

The agencies that always agreed with me were pleasant to work with. The agencies that challenged me with evidence were the ones I trusted. There's a significant difference between those two things.

The third thing: make me look good to my boss. This one is rarely talked about, but it's the silent driver of almost every agency retention decision. Brand leaders have bosses. CMOs report to CEOs. VPs report to CMOs. Directors report to VPs. And every single one of them has to justify the agency spend to someone above them.

When I walked into a board meeting or an executive review and presented the agency's work, I needed two things: results I could point to, and a strategic narrative I could explain. The results part is straightforward. The narrative part is where most agencies fail.

"Our agency is doing a great job optimizing our Meta campaigns" doesn't impress a CEO. "Our agency identified a customer segment we'd been overlooking, repositioned our messaging around their specific pain point, and it's driven a 40% improvement in customer acquisition cost" impresses a CEO. The first sentence describes activity. The second sentence describes strategic value. Brand leaders need the second sentence, because that's how they justify keeping you.

If I can't explain your value to my boss in two sentences that include the word "strategy" or "insight" or "research," your contract is at risk every budget cycle. It doesn't matter how good your ROAS is. If the only thing I can say is "they run our ads and the numbers are okay," you're a line item that's easy to cut.

The moments that matter

Let me give you some specific moments where agencies won or lost my trust. These are the moments that most agencies don't even realize are happening.

The onboarding presentation. When a new agency came on board, their first strategy presentation told me everything I needed to know. If it was a campaign plan, audiences to test, creative approaches to try, budget allocation, I knew this was going to be an execution relationship. Fine, but fragile. If the presentation started with "Here's what we've learned about your customer and your competitive position, and here's why we recommend this specific approach," I knew this was going to be a strategic relationship. That first presentation set the tone for everything that followed.

The first rough month. Every agency relationship hits a rough patch. ROAS dips. A campaign underperforms. A product launch doesn't land the way everyone hoped. How the agency handles that moment determines whether the relationship survives. The agencies that came to me with "Here's what happened, here's why, and here's what we're changing" kept my trust. The agencies that came with "Performance was down but we're testing new creatives" lost it. The difference isn't accountability. It's depth of understanding. Do you know why it happened, or are you just reacting to it?

The quarterly review. Most agencies treat quarterly reviews as reporting sessions. Here's what we did, here's how it performed, here's the plan for next quarter. The best agencies treated them as strategic conversations. "Based on what we've learned about your customer over the past 90 days, we think there's an opportunity you haven't explored yet. Here's what we recommend, and here's the research behind it." One of those approaches makes me want to renew. The other makes me check what else is out there.

The pricing conversation. When an agency asked for a rate increase, the ones I said yes to were the ones who had consistently brought me strategic value beyond campaign management. They'd earned the raise by making themselves irreplaceable. The ones I pushed back on, or replaced, were the ones whose value was entirely in execution. Because execution at a higher price is just execution that's harder to justify.

The pattern underneath all of this

If you read everything I've just described, the pattern is clear. Brand leaders want agencies that understand the customer better than they do. That's it. That's the whole thing.

Not better creative, although that matters. Not better media buying, although that matters too. Understanding. Specifically, the ability to say "Here is who your customer is, here is what drives them, and here is the evidence behind it" with enough depth that the brand leader feels like the agency knows something they don't.

That understanding is the foundation of everything else brand leaders value. The point of view they can defend? It comes from customer understanding. The insight they can present to their boss? It comes from customer understanding. The strategic narrative that makes budget conversations easy? Customer understanding.

When an agency has that understanding, every other aspect of the relationship gets better. Trust is higher. Communication is easier. Rough months are forgiven faster. Rate increases are approved without negotiation. Referrals happen naturally. The client becomes an advocate instead of an evaluator.

When an agency doesn't have that understanding, the relationship operates on a month-to-month basis, even if the contract says otherwise. Performance is scrutinized rather than trusted. Competing agencies get meetings. And eventually, someone else comes along who seems more strategic, and the brand leader makes the switch.

Why most agencies don't deliver this

I want to be direct about why most agencies fall short here, and it isn't about talent or effort.

Most agencies are built to execute. Their teams are hired for execution skills: media buying, creative production, analytics, account management. Their processes are designed for execution: intake, launch, optimize, report. Their pricing is based on execution: monthly retainer for campaign management.

Customer understanding, real, deep, researched customer understanding, isn't an execution task. It's a research task. And most agencies don't have a research methodology, a research process, or a researcher on staff. They have smart people making smart guesses based on experience. And that's genuinely different from structured, validated, evidence-based customer research.

This isn't a criticism. It's a structural observation. Agencies weren't built to be research firms. But the brand leaders who hire them increasingly expect research-level customer understanding as part of the package. The gap between what's expected and what's delivered is where agency relationships go to quietly erode.

The agencies that figure out how to close that gap, whether by building the capability internally, partnering with someone who has it, or developing a methodology that produces it consistently, will be the agencies that brand leaders fight to keep. The ones that don't will continue to compete on execution, which is a race that gets harder to win every year as AI makes execution cheaper and more accessible.

From someone who was on the other side

I'm writing this because I've been the person making the decisions I've just described. Not theoretically. Not based on research about what brand leaders think. Based on decades of actually being one.

I've renewed agency contracts because the agency understood my customer better than I expected. I've ended agency contracts because the agency, despite good results, never moved past execution. I've approved rate increases for agencies that brought me strategic value and replaced agencies that only brought me campaign management.

The pattern was consistent across every company, every product category, every budget level. The agencies that knew the customer lasted. The agencies that optimized without understanding didn't.

If there's one takeaway from 25 years on the brand side, it's this: the agency that can answer "Who is your customer?" with specificity, depth, and evidence doesn't just win the account. They change the nature of the relationship from vendor to partner. And that shift, that single shift, changes everything about how the brand leader sees you, trusts you, and values you.

You don't need to become a different kind of agency. You need to add one capability that most agencies are missing. The capability to know, with real confidence, who the customer is before the first campaign launches.

The brand leaders are waiting for it. Most of them just aren't telling you.