The decks are polished. The numbers trend up and to the right. The recommendations feel confident. And yet, somewhere in the back of your mind, a small voice asks: is this actually working?
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!That instinct is worth listening to.
Media agencies have structural incentives that don’t always align with yours. They’re measured on delivery, on hitting targets, on keeping clients happy quarter to quarter. What gets lost in that arrangement is candor. And candor, it turns out, is one of the most valuable things a media partner can offer.
Here are five things your agency should be saying in your next planning meeting, but probably isn’t.
1. “Your CPM is low. That’s not necessarily a good thing.”
Cost-per-thousand impressions is one of the most reported metrics in media buying. It’s also one of the most misleading.
A low CPM tells you what you paid to reach a thousand people. It tells you nothing about whether those people actually saw your ad, whether they were the right people, or whether the environment your ad appeared in helped or hurt your brand.
Agencies report CPM because it’s easy to benchmark and easy to make look favorable. What’s harder, and more important, is reporting on attention-weighted impressions, viewability rates, and brand safety scores. An impression that runs in a low-quality content environment, plays with the sound off, or appears below the fold isn’t worth the fraction of a cent you paid for it.
The question to ask your agency: “Of the impressions we bought last quarter, what percentage were actually seen?
If they can’t answer that immediately, you have a reporting problem.
2. “We think the media plan is solid. We’re less sure about the creative.”
The people planning your media are rarely the same people thinking hard about your creative. And when a campaign underperforms, both sides can point at the other.
The problem is that creative and media are not separable. The best media plan in the world can’t save an ad that fails to stop the scroll. And a brilliant piece of creative buried in the wrong context, wrong platform, wrong daypart, wrong audience will underperform too.
Your agency should be proactively stress-testing your creative against your placements. Are your pre-rolls actually designed to work without sound? Is your CTV spot built for a lean-back environment or is it a repurposed digital banner?
The question to ask: “Can you show me how our creative is performing across different placements, and what you’d recommend changing?”
3. “Your budget has more flexibility than we’ve suggested.”
Committing to TV and streaming inventory months in advance is presented as a way to secure better rates and premium inventory. And it can be. But it’s worth understanding that the upfront market also benefits broadcasters and, to some degree, agencies. Committed dollars are easier to manage than fluid ones.
The scatter market, programmatic channels, and direct deals can all offer competitive value depending on the quarter, the category, and the competitive landscape. A fully committed upfront plan isn’t always the most strategic one.
This doesn’t mean you should abandon upfront buying. It means your agency should be actively considering the tradeoffs for your specific situation every planning cycle not defaulting to last year’s approach with minor adjustments.
The question to ask: “What would a more flexible allocation look like, and what would we gain or give up?”
4. “We’re optimizing for what we can measure. That’s not the same as what matters.”
Performance reporting has gotten very sophisticated. Click-through rates, view-through conversions, cost-per-acquisition… The dashboards are impressive. The problem is that these metrics only capture a slice of what advertising actually does.
Most of what media does for a brand is slow and cumulative. It builds familiarity. It shifts consideration. It makes your brand the one that comes to mind when someone is finally ready to buy. None of that shows up in a last-click attribution model.
When agencies optimize exclusively toward measurable performance metrics, they often inadvertently defund the brand-building work that drives long-term growth. And because the effects of brand advertising take months or years to manifest, it’s easy to cut without feeling the consequence… until you do.
Your agency should be tracking brand health metrics alongside performance metrics: aided and unaided awareness, consideration, purchase intent, share of voice. If those aren’t part of your regular reporting, you’re flying partially blind.
The question to ask: “What’s happening to our brand health metrics, not just our direct response numbers, and how are we accounting for them in optimization decisions?”
5. “Honestly, this plan looks a lot like last year’s.”
Media plans have inertia. Once a budget is allocated across channels, it tends to stay that way. Linear TV gets its share. Digital gets its share. Everyone’s comfortable. The plan gets presented as a thoughtful recommendation, but underneath it, it’s often last year’s plan with updated rate cards.
The media landscape has shifted enough in the last three years that this kind of inertia is genuinely costly. Connected TV audiences have grown dramatically. Streaming audio has matured. Digital out-of-home has become more targetable and measurable. The way people in automotive, legal, sports, and CPG categories consume media in 2025 is meaningfully different from how they consumed it in 2022.
A good planning process should include a zero-based review of channel allocation, starting from your audience, your objectives, and the current media environment, not from historical spend patterns.
The question to ask: “When did we last start this plan from scratch rather than adjusting from the prior year?”
The Bottom Line
None of this means your agency is acting in bad faith. Most of these gaps aren’t about dishonesty they’re about incentives, organizational structure, and the path of least resistance. Agencies do their best work when clients push them hardest.
The best media partnerships are ones where both sides are willing to have uncomfortable conversations. Where the agency doesn’t just report what happened, but explains what it means. Where the client doesn’t just approve the plan, but interrogates it.
If your current agency relationship doesn’t feel that way, it might be time to change the dynamic. Or the agency.
Hurley Media Group specializes in media planning and buying for brands that want strategy, not just execution. If you’d like a second opinion on your current plan, we’d be glad to take a look.
