How to Know When You've Outgrown Your TV Agency

We’ve all been there—that moment when it’s time to recycle your favorite t-shirt that’s seen better days. Or to finally let go of the remote control you haven’t touched in years but supposedly manages something around the home. It can be hard to say goodbye. 

Saying goodbye to your TV agency can be even harder. That’s a relationship forged from trust, collaboration, and above all, results. But as your brand evolves and the market shifts, a once-perfect partnership may no longer meet your needs. 

Outgrowing your agency isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it could mean your current agency’s done exactly what they need to set you up for TV's next level. But now that you’ve arrived, it’s important to know whether your agency is equipped to level up with you. Here are a few signs it might be time to move on. 

 

Campaigns aren’t grounded in brand strategy. 

A true TV partner is more than a media buyer. More than a creative shop. It’s a strategic advisor who helps you align each campaign with business goals—one who speaks your audience’s language and respects your brand as much as you do. After all, if you’re investing in a channel as visible and expensive as TV, your campaigns should make the most of everything it has to offer. 

That requires strategy support across brand positioning, messaging development, and audience insights. And while you know your brand better than anyone, a great TV partner should supplement that knowledge through brand studies and third-party audience research while helping you apply insights to a new channel. 

If your TV campaigns aren’t grounded in a research-first understanding of your target audience, you could be missing key messaging points. Or you could be targeting the wrong audience entirely. (It sounds crazy, but we’ve seen it happen!) 
 
 

Creative is overdue for a refresh. 

Video is one of the most powerful advertising formats. So if your TV creative is failing to tell your brand’s story effectively—if it starts to feel outdated, or worse, invisible in a crowded market—the missed opportunity is painful. But it’s important to note that even beautifully produced creative can fail to capitalize on TV’s potential, if it’s not optimized for the channel. 

Did you know that 60% of TV commercials are heard and not seen? It’s why a voiceover is a must for performance-driven creative. Is your spot’s call-to-action matched to your audience’s preferred response method? An older audience may want to text a number to respond, while younger audiences may look for a QR code. Have you tested the response differences between 15-second and 30-second spots? Different commercial lengths can show varying performance results depending on your offer and audience. We’ve even seen brands find success with 60-second ads.  

Clearly, there are a lot of variables that go into great TV creative. Pretesting can assess some of those variables before your campaign launches, making your ads more effective and helping you avoid the cost of testing in-market. 

The most impactful TV creative is designed for attention, memorability, and response. That’s a tall order, and it typically requires an expert team of strategists, copywriters, designers, producers, and editors to create work that checks all those boxes. If those resources aren’t available through your current agency or you don’t have a separate creative partner fulfilling those needs, it may be time to look for a new solution. 

 

You’re eager to scale, but you’ve hit a ceiling. 

Scaling your TV investment is a natural next step for any business that’s growing on the channel. But if your agency can’t buy enough media to match your monthly TV budget, that's a problem.                                                                      

Or, maybe you're continuing to scale, but you’ve maxed out the agency’s access to low-cost inventory. That means that after a certain point, you pay more for expensive placements that drive less return on each ad dollar. This is especially concerning for brands relatively new to TV, as scale issues shouldn’t be a concern until a brand has matured as a TV advertiser and is spending tens of millions on campaigns. 

Maybe you’re happy with scale and performance on linear TV, but your audience increasingly watches Connected TV, and your agency hasn't made the leap to TV’s latest format. Or they’re buying CTV, but media costs are much higher than linear, and CTV performance results have remained elusive. There’s a reason for that... the buying processes across types of TV can be very different, and making sure CTV and linear TV campaigns work together effectively requires an agency with expertise in both. 

Look for a partner who’s not only able to scale your TV efforts through media buys across the entire TV landscape, including linear and streaming, but who can find the best paths to purchase. After all, there are dozens of ways to get your ad on any given network, some more expensive than others.  

 

Performance reports don’t line up with business results. 

Let’s say you’ve advertised on TV for a while. The performance reports from your agency are glowing. You’re knocking things out of the park—on paper at least. Because while reports say TV is driving new customers and elevating your brand, you haven’t noticed much impact on the business.  

What’s the reason for this disconnect? Well, TV attribution is challenging. Anyone who tries to distill campaign measurement into just one or two metrics is going to miss important details, and over-attribution is common when any marketing channel is looked at in isolation. Your TV agency should have a comprehensive understanding of your marketing mix and be prepared to distinguish results driven by TV from those driven by other channels. This usually comes through a holistic measurement approach that uses multiple measurement models such as micro-attribution, customer lifetime value, media mix modeling (MMM), econometric modeling, brand studies, and more. 

When all these models tell the same story about results, you can feel confident the results on paper match reality. 

 

Level up your campaigns with All-Inclusive TV. 

We’ve seen TV do incredible things for businesses. Forge category leaders. Build pricing power. Create opportunities for new partnerships and investors. It's worth getting right.  

So the solution for stagnating TV results isn't to lower your ambitions. Instead, find an agency that can match your growth—and provide all the services you need to make the most of the channel. At Marketing Architects, we created All-Inclusive TV to help brands do exactly that.  

Our all-inclusive business model means no more agency fees. Our clients get one bill for media. Everything else needed for success is on us, from brand positioning and strategy development to creative pretesting and production to fully transparent campaign reporting. Best of all, media buys are recommended by our media-buying AI, Annika, based on a review of the entire media landscape to find which placements best match your unique audience criteria and performance goals.

Read more about All-Inclusive TV or connect with our team to learn how it could make your TV campaigns even more effective.