What to Do When Your Marketing Agencies Disagree
When your agencies disagree, ask them to define the decision, explain their assumptions and compare their recommendations against the same business objective. Appoint a client approver, set a decision deadline and record the reasoning. Use a test when it can produce useful evidence at an acceptable cost.
Download the editable worksheet (Markdown). Replace the bracketed prompts with your own details.
Disagreement can improve a plan. Specialists see different risks, and a recommendation that makes sense inside one channel may create a problem elsewhere. The client needs a way to use those differences without leaving the work suspended indefinitely.
Identify the kind of disagreement.
Ask each agency to describe the specific decision in a sentence. Then establish whether the conflict concerns facts, interpretation, priorities, responsibility or money.
A factual dispute might be whether a conversion event is firing correctly. An interpretation dispute might concern whether falling sales reflect weak demand or a measurement change. A priority dispute might be whether the next available development work should improve checkout or build campaign pages.
Commercial disputes require their own discussion. An agency objecting to unpaid additional work is raising a scope question. Asking it to be more collaborative will not settle the fee or capacity issue.
Give both recommendations the same conditions.
Require each agency to use the same objective, time period and budget constraint. Ask what its recommendation needs from other teams and what existing work would be postponed.
For example, a media agency might recommend new creative while a website agency recommends a checkout repair. Those proposals cannot be compared fairly if one assumes immediate implementation and the other assumes a development queue that lasts several weeks.
Ask each team to identify the strongest argument against its own recommendation. A specialist who can explain the limits of its advice gives the client more useful information than one who treats every objection as a challenge to its authority.
Request evidence that can change the decision.
Separate observations from explanations. A report showing lower conversion rates establishes a change in the reported metric. It does not, by itself, establish the cause.
Ask what additional evidence would distinguish the competing explanations. A tracking check, customer interview or review of rejected leads may be more useful than another presentation.
Avoid demanding certainty that the available data cannot provide. Google describes lift studies as controlled comparisons between exposed and unexposed groups, but eligibility and useful measurement depend on the circumstances. A smaller account may need a more modest investigation. Read Google's lift-study explanation.
Keep decision authority with the designated approver.
Atlassian's DACI guidance distinguishes contributors from the person who approves a decision. That separation allows specialists to disagree while keeping a clear route to action.
The approver should consider the evidence and explain the tradeoff. They should not choose whichever agency is more persuasive in a meeting or assume that the agency with the largest fee has the broadest authority.
If the issue exceeds the approver's competence, obtain appropriate specialist help. Security, regulatory and serious financial questions may need review beyond the marketing agencies. Urgent risk containment can take precedence over the ordinary decision process.
Use bounded tests when they are informative.
A test needs a hypothesis, an owner, a defined intervention and a decision rule. Agree on the costs, measurement limitations and review date before starting.
If several teams change their work at once, be careful about assigning any resulting improvement to a single intervention. Equally, refusing every other necessary change simply to preserve a test can be commercially unreasonable. Document those tradeoffs.
When testing is impractical, the client may need to make a judgment under uncertainty. Record the assumptions and the conditions that would justify revisiting the choice.
Use this resolution brief.
Ask both agencies to contribute to one document.
- We need to decide [specific question] by [date] because [business consequence].
- The agreed facts are [observations], supported by [sources].
- Agency A recommends [action] because it assumes [conditions].
- Agency B recommends [action] because it assumes [conditions].
- Each option requires [cost, capacity and changes to other work].
- The evidence that could change our decision is [evidence].
- [Approver] will choose the course of action using [criteria].
- We will review the choice when [date or condition] is reached.
After the decision, ask the agencies to explain how they will implement it together. Persistent refusal to follow an authorized decision is a relationship issue, which the underperformance guide addresses separately.