There's a conversation I have pretty regularly with founders who are considering switching agencies or just beginning to work with one. They ask me something like, "how do I know if an agency is actually being honest with me?"

The answer is rarely about the deck they showed you. What matters is what they tell you when things aren't working.

I've had my own agency for 8 years, and worked at multiple others for years before that. I've seen how the business works from different angles. And one thing has become really clear to me: the agencies that actually help DTC brands grow aren't the ones with the fanciest reports or the slickest pitch. They're the ones who will tell you things you don't want to hear, frame them honestly, and then work with you to solve the actual problem.

So here's what I think you should expect from a reliable DTC marketing partner. And more importantly, what you should be skeptical of when an agency isn't saying it.

The Honesty Problem

Most agencies are incentivized not to be straight with you. Whether that's because they're compensated on a percentage of ad spend, or because they're afraid losing you means losing revenue, or because dense technical reports create an impression of expertise and effort, the incentives are often misaligned.

I'm a big believer in not fluffing anything up. It doesn't benefit anyone. So if something isn't working, we're going to be really transparent about that, and then we're going to work collaboratively to figure it out.

That sounds obvious. But you'd be surprised how many agencies will throw more money at a problem instead of stopping to understand it and at how many will hide poor results behind 47-page reports stuffed with metrics that don't actually point toward action.

If we're working together, the worst thing I can do is come back to you and say, hey, we spent your money and we don't have a lot of sales and we don't have any insights to give you. That sucks. That's how we get fired.

And if we did that, we should get fired. Because we've wasted your time and your money and given you nothing to learn from.

So when you're talking to an agency or working with one, listen for this: Do they tell you what's not working? Do they tell you why they think it's not working? Do they tell you what they're going to try next? Or do they tell you the CTR is up and the CPC is down and hope you nod along?

Attribution Is a Liar That Sometimes Tells the Truth

Here's the uncomfortable thing about running performance marketing in 2026: attribution systems are not reliable. First-party data is harder to collect. iOS gutted everything. And yet somehow we all still act like a number on a dashboard is gospel.

One of the core beliefs at Y'all is that truth is directional, not absolute. Your platform reporting might tell you one thing. Your analytics system might suggest something else. Your first-party data model might point a third direction. Your actual sales and customer behavior might look different again.

The mistake that most agencies make is believing any one metric literally. They pick one attribution model and build their entire strategy on it. Then when that model breaks (and it will), they don't know what to do.

Strong teams do something different. We use different tools for different questions. Platform reporting is great for understanding delivery behavior. Your analytics system is great for understanding actual user behavior. First-party or modeled attribution is useful for spotting trends. Qualitative feedback from your customers or your sales team tells you about influence that numbers can't capture.

The goal isn't to make all of these things agree with each other. That's not how reality works. The goal is pattern recognition across imperfect signals.

When your agency talks about attribution, this is what you should hear them say: "Here's what the platform is reporting, here's what I think that actually means, here's what our data model is showing us separately, and here's where those things disagree and why I think that matters." If they're just reading you a dashboard, they're not actually thinking.

And here's the part that most agencies definitely won't tell you: the gap between what your paid channels report and what actually happened is one of the biggest sources of bad decisions in DTC. When your ROAS looks amazing but your revenue is flat, something's wrong. And it's probably not in the creative. It's probably downstream, in fulfillment, in product quality, in customer service, in refunds and returns.

Most advertising problems are not media problems. They are system problems downstream. Your agency should care about your whole business, not just the metrics they can control.

The Conversion of Spend Into Insight

High-performing teams separate themselves in one key way: they convert spend into insight faster than everyone else. It's not about guessing correctly more often.

There's this idea floating around that great agencies are just better at predicting what will work. That's not really true. They're better at running small tests, learning from them quickly, adjusting, and then scaling what works.

And that's a skill. But it's also something that requires actual setup and discipline.

We try to test anything that we do. Even if we see it working, we're trying to test it against something else, even from a campaign structure standpoint, because things stop working. One hundred percent. The algorithm changes, audience behavior shifts, saturation kicks in. What worked last month might be dead money this month.

So a good agency should be telling you about their testing approach. What are they splitting? How long do they give it? What's their threshold for scaling? What's their threshold for pausing?

If they're not talking about this, they're probably just hoping things work. And hope is not a strategy.

We adapt. That's the best thing our team can do. We can adapt and we can be accountable because the algorithm changes all the time. Your agency should have a point of view on how fast they can move, when they should move, and what they're learning from each decision.

Revenue Is the Output. Learning Is the Engine.

This is maybe the most important thing to understand about what your agency should be doing and how they should be framed internally.

There are two ways to think about an agency relationship. One is transactional: you give us money, we generate revenue, here's the ROAS. That model breaks all the time. Because sometimes the revenue dips. Sometimes the algorithm changes. Sometimes the market shifts.

The other way is partnership: we're collaborating to understand your business, test approaches to grow it, learn what works and what doesn't, and systematically improve over time.

When revenue is your only metric, you're vulnerable. When learning is your operating principle, you have something to build on. You have institutional knowledge about what works for your brand. You have a playbook. You have speed.

Your agency should be teaching you something every month. Not overwhelming you with technical jargon. But showing you patterns, sharing what they've tried, being clear about what worked and what didn't.

I'm not a fan of hyper technical reports. They overwhelm clients and obscure what actually matters. What we do instead is stay action oriented. Here's what we did. Here's what it meant. Here's what we're going to do next.

If your agency is making their work harder to understand instead of easier, ask yourself why. Probably because the work itself isn't that interesting or they're trying to hide something.

The System Design Matters More Than You Think

One of the things I've learned is that the way an agency structures its work, its team, and its thinking has massive downstream impact on your results.

A lot of agencies have junior account executives handling your business. Nothing against junior people, but they're still learning. Your account deserves expertise. We don't have junior account executives. The people who are experts in the area are the people doing the actual work. That's how you get consistency and knowledge.

Similarly, I've noticed that founder input matters a lot on accounts. Some founders prioritize brand, some prioritize performance. The tension between these two approaches is real and valid, but constant shifts in direction hurt momentum.

So structure matters. Consistency matters. Having one person who's accountable for your results and who actually has the expertise to deliver matters.

We generally like to have a single person in charge of an account. Other people contribute and help and give feedback, but we want one person with clear ownership and decision-making authority. That reduces confusion. It creates accountability. It makes it possible to learn over time because someone's holding the thread.

Your agency should be able to tell you clearly who's responsible for your account, what their expertise is, and how many other accounts they're managing. If they're juggling 20 accounts, they're not doing your account.

How to Find a Reliable DTC Marketing Firm

When you're looking, ask these things:

First, ask about their philosophy on pacing and intervention. One of the most common failure modes in performance marketing is over-intervention. Algorithms require time to adjust. Humans require time to decide. Data requires time to stabilize. A good agency knows when to move and when to stay still. They're not tinkering constantly. They're not being passive either. They're being responsive to what they're actually seeing.

Second, ask how they handle attribution and measurement. If they give you a simple answer, be cautious. If they give you a thoughtful answer that acknowledges complexity and describes how they use multiple signals, pay attention. That's someone who's actually thought about it.

Third, ask what happens when things don't work. Do they have a process? Do they run diagnostics? Do they go deeper or just increase spend? Do they communicate clearly about it or hide behind jargon?

Fourth, ask about incentive alignment. How are they compensated? Does the fee structure create any potential conflicts? I don't like percent of ad spend fees early on because I want growth to be profitable for you, especially in the 20K to 100K range. If the agency is incentivized by spend, there's a fundamental misalignment. They'd theoretically benefit from you spending more, even if it's not driving revenue growth. Fee structures should tie success to your actual growth, not to your spend.

Fifth, ask them about their process when creative isn't performing. Is it just a new ad, or are they thinking about message, positioning, and audience fit? Are they running creative tests? Are they learning from what doesn't work?

Sixth, ask about reporting and communication. What will you actually see? How often? Is it action oriented or is it theater?

Seventh, I wrote a blog post called "7 Questions to Ask Your Agency" that goes into some of this in more detail. It's worth reading if you're actively evaluating partners.