Critical insights on modern client relationships
The Perception Gap
What brands want vs what agencies think
41% Disconnect
Source: w3 Awards Research
So, what’s happening?
Do brands want a bigger strategic partner, or not?
And is it worth it, or not?
We asked our Leap Group CEO, Alan Gilleo his thoughts on agency/brand partnerships, what they should look like, and their overall value.
What gets in the way of real agency partnerships and what uncomfortable truths do companies need to hear about how they manage agencies?
The biggest barrier is control, disguised as risk management. Companies say they want strategic partners, but:
They limit access to data
They over-direct creative and strategy
They optimize for internal alignment over market impact
The uncomfortable truth: Most brands say they want a partner, but what they really want is a vendor that thinks like a partner, but behaves like an employee.
Can’t have both. If your agency isn’t pushing back, you’ve trained them not to.
And then there’s one subject that doesn’t get talked about enough: budget transparency. Too many brands make agencies guess, or worse, deliberately withhold budget to “see what they come up with.”
That creates misaligned thinking.
If you want a real partner:
Give them a budget or at least clear guardrails
Be honest about constraints and expectations
Let them solve within reality, not hypotheticals
We’ve seen every budget level. We don’t judge. That’s not the job.
Our job is to maximize value within whatever budget exists.
Your job is to determine if that value is worth it. When budgets are hidden, you don’t get better ideas, you get wasted time, misalignment, and solutions that were never viable to begin with.
The more an agency knows, the more creative solutions they can bring to the table.
Where do you see brands leaving the most value on the table in agency relationships, and what should they be expecting from their agencies that they aren’t getting today?
Two big gaps:
1. Not leveraging agencies upstream
Most agencies are brought in too late after positioning, product, or pricing decisions are already locked.
That’s where the biggest impact is. By the time an agency is briefed, the real decisions have already been made and your agency is left optimizing around constraints instead of helping define the strategy itself. The missed opportunity is to use your agency as a thinking partner early, not just an execution partner later.
2. Underutilizing data, insight, and consultative thinking
Brands sit on massive amounts of data but don’t translate it into decisions. At the same time, many agencies are only being used for execution.
A true consultative agency brings:
Dedicated research and insight capabilities
Data & analytics teams that go beyond reporting
The ability to connect disparate data points into a clear narrative and direction
This is where a model like ours comes in—combining market data, behavioral insight, and (when available) first-party data to actually diagnose business problems, not just describe performance.
Brands should expect agencies to:
Turn data into insight (not just reporting)
Identify growth opportunities and inefficiencies
Challenge assumptions with evidence
Translate insight into clear strategic action
3. Not knowing what kind of agency you actually have
This is the part most brands don’t evaluate honestly.
Not all agencies are built to be consultative partners, and that’s okay. Some are structured to be excellent executional vendors.
But if you’re expecting strategic thinking, business diagnosis, and proactive guidance, you need to be working with an agency that’s actually designed for that.
There’s a real difference between:
A vendor that executes well
And a consultative partner that can help shape business direction
Agencies like VML, Leap Group, or DEPT® are structured to operate more consultatively—bringing together strategy, data, creative, and media to solve broader business problems.
If your agency isn’t bringing that level of thinking, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re failing, it may just mean they were never built for that role.
But it does mean you’re leaving value on the table.
At the end of the day, brands should be asking:
Is our agency helping us make better business decisions, or just executing the ones we’ve already made?
That answer usually tells you how much value you’re actually getting.
How should CEOs and CMOs think about the role an agency plays in driving real business growth, and what separates a true strategic partner from a traditional vendor?
Most companies still think about agencies in terms of outputs—campaigns, content, media, deliverables.
That’s outdated, and actively limits growth.
Because none of those things are the business. They’re inputs. Too many organizations are optimizing inputs while wondering why outputs (revenue, pipeline, market share) aren’t moving.
That’s why we say Market Less. Matter More.
Because a true agency partner exists to make the business perform better.
A vendor executes against a brief. A partner questions whether the brief should exist at all.
Instead of waiting for direction, they’re interrogating it. Asking:
Why are we doing this?
Is this even a marketing problem?
What problem are we actually trying to solve?
Are we trying to drive demand for something that isn’t resonating?
Are we mispriced, mispositioned, or talking to the wrong audience entirely?
Here’s the reality most teams avoid:
A lot of “marketing problems” aren’t marketing problems.
They’re:
Product-market fit issues
Value proposition gaps
Misaligned targeting
Internal assumptions that haven’t been challenged in years
And if your agency is only focused on execution, they will happily optimize around a broken system. You’ll get better ads. Better content. Better media efficiency. But still not get meaningful business growth. That’s the trap.
A true partner steps above the system and looks at the entire ecosytem:
The business model
The customer
The actual drivers of growth
The economics (LTV, CAC, margin)
The competitive landscape
They connect data, behavior, and business reality, not just channels.
And that’s where the uncomfortable shift happens.
Vendors are measured by what they produce.
Partners are measured by what they influence.
Which also means:
If your agency isn’t occasionally making you uncomfortable—challenging decisions, pushing back, reframing the problem—they’re probably operating as a vendor, whether you call them a partner or not. A true partner helps you decide what’s worth doing in the first place.
Marketing can’t fix a broken business, and that’s exactly why the right agency matters.
If your service is bad and customers don’t come back, you’ll always be stuck chasing new acquisitions. If your competitors are evolving and you’re not responding, you’ll lose ground, no matter how good your campaigns are.
You can’t out-market:
Poor customer experience
A stagnant or outdated value proposition
Weak product-market fit
Operational issues
And yet, that’s exactly what many brands expect agencies to do.
They pour more into media. More into creative. More into campaigns.
But they’re optimizing around structural issues that marketing alone can’t solve.
This is where the role of a true agency partner changes.
A vendor will keep executing, launching campaigns, optimizing performance, hitting KPIs tied to activity.
A real partner steps back and says:
“Your competitor isn’t winning because of ads, they’re winning because of experience.”
“This isn’t just a marketing problem.”
“You don’t have a demand issue, you have a retention issue.”
That’s not always comfortable to hear. But that’s where the real value is.
Because for a brand to be relevant it has to be more than just visible to their customers, it has to be valuable.
And how an agency helps you stay relevant can take many forms:
Refining or redefining your positioning
Identifying gaps in your customer experience
Spotting shifts in consumer behavior before they hit your numbers
Challenging assumptions that are holding the business back
Connecting what’s happening in the market to what you’re doing internally
Sometimes that leads to better marketing. Sometimes it leads to changes far beyond marketing.
That’s the difference. A vendor improves your marketing. A partner helps you improve your business, using marketing as one of many levers.
Interested in a partner that can create meaningful change and growth for your business? Get in touch and see how Leap Group can help.