The first hour of any agency review is the same. A CMO opens a deck the agency built about the agency, and someone from finance asks, quietly, what we are actually buying. The answer is almost never the answer in the deck.
We were brought into an £18m media budget split across four agencies, two of whom were also reselling inventory back to the client through a 'preferred partner' arrangement nobody had signed off on. The CFO had stopped reading the quarterly plan months earlier. Not because she didn't care - because she couldn't tell what was a strategic decision and what was a commercial one made by someone whose bonus depended on the answer.
That is the moment a consultancy earns its fee. Not by writing a better plan. By drawing a line, in ink, between the people who decide where the money goes and the people who get paid when it lands.
We spent six weeks unpicking the roster. Two partners left. The measurement framework was rewritten against bookings, not impressions. Fees came down by a third. The plan the board now defends is twelve pages long and the CFO reads every one.
The cleanest line on our invoice is the one that says we don't sell media. We don't take rebates, we don't run trading desks, we don't have a preferred anything. That line is the product. Everything else is just the work of explaining what it means in practice - which, in this case, meant telling a nine-year incumbent that their contract was over.
If your agency is also your strategy, you don't have a strategy. You have a supplier with an opinion about how much of your money they should keep. There is a place for that supplier. It is not the same place as the person advising you on whether to spend the money at all.
