Thirteen questions to ask before you sign
The thirteen questions that would hurt us most to answer badly, each one answered for Drifted, including the two answers that should end the call.
Most agency calls are structured so that you never get to the difficult part. Forty minutes of discovery, ten minutes of case studies, five minutes of pricing, and the questions that would have told you something get pushed into an email you never send. So here is the list, written by an agency, with our own answers attached to each one.
The reason this matters more than the pitch deck is that the relationship is long by default. Focus Digital’s 2025 study of agency churn put the average client lifespan on retainer contracts at fifty-six months, against twenty-four months for project work, and the 2025 ANA and 4As tenure study found average client-agency tenure now sits at roughly seven years, up from 3.2 years in 2016. You are not buying a quarter. You are choosing who is inside your advertising account for years.
Who actually does the work?
One. Name the person who will open the design file and write the ads. Not the team. The person. If the answer is a role rather than a name, the name exists and you are not being given it.
Two. Who is on this call who will not be on any other call? Pitch teams and delivery teams are frequently different people, and nobody will tell you that unless you ask it directly.
Three. How many other accounts does that person carry? A media buyer holding a dozen accounts is a person who checks yours on a schedule, not a person who notices it.
Our answers. Drifted is founder-led, not founder-fronted, which in practice means the person who sells the work is in the work. We are a small Gen-Z team led by a Gen-Z founder, and small is the product rather than a stage we are trying to grow out of. The honest cost of that is the next section.
What happens when you are the small agency?
Four. What is your capacity limit, and what happens when you hit it? Every agency has one. The ones that pretend otherwise are the ones that quietly thin your account when a bigger client signs.
Five. What is your holiday, illness and single-point-of-failure plan? A studio built around a handful of people is faster and more accountable, and it is also more exposed when one of them is unavailable for a fortnight.
Our answer, against our own interest: a small studio genuinely has less redundancy than a large one. If you need round-the-clock cover across many markets and a named backup for every role, a bigger shop is a better fit and you should hire one. What we trade for that is that nothing is handed to a junior you never met.
How is the money actually structured?
Six. Is the fee a flat retainer, a percentage of advertising spend, or a mix? A percentage of spend pays the agency more for spending more, whether or not spending more is the right call. That is not automatically disqualifying, but you should know it is the incentive you are buying.
Seven. What is billed separately? Creative production, editing, landing pages, tooling, and reporting software are the usual four. Ask for the list in writing before signing, not after the first invoice.
Eight. Do you take commission, rebates or kickbacks from any platform or vendor on our account? The answer should be a flat no, and it should be in the contract.
Our answer: retainers should be losable, so ours are flat and cancellable at thirty days’ notice. We are not the cheap option and we do not pretend to be.
Who owns what when it ends?
Nine. Whose business portfolio holds the advertising account, and whose name is on the page? Meta’s own documentation offers no self-serve way to hand an advertising account from one business portfolio to another. The workable route is partner access, where the account stays yours and the agency is granted permissions on it. If an agency creates the account inside its own portfolio, getting it back later is a negotiation rather than a setting.
Ten. Who owns the creative after we part? In the United States, the Copyright Office’s Circular 30 is unambiguous that a commissioned work only becomes a work made for hire when there is a signed written agreement and the work falls inside one of nine listed categories. Advertising creative frequently does not. Without an explicit assignment clause, the agency may still own the files you paid for.
Eleven. What do we get on the last day? Ask for the specific list: raw video files, layered design sources, ad account admin, pixel and conversion setup, audience definitions, the reporting sheet.
How will we know whether it is working?
Twelve. What number are we being held to, and what happens if we miss it? This is the single most revealing question on the list. Watch whether the answer contains a consequence or a paragraph.
Thirteen. Which client does each figure in your deck belong to, and will they take a phone call about it? Any number an agency shows you should name its owner and survive that call.
Our answer: every published Drifted figure names its client. Between $5.20 and $6 back for every $1 spent belongs to The Gallery. 400+ hours saved belongs to Adam Lewis’s auction operation. Where we do not have a measured number yet, the page says so rather than rounding one into existence. We also do not guarantee a result, because nobody who guarantees a result is telling you the truth.
What do bad answers sound like?
| The question | The answer that should worry you | What you are owed instead |
|---|---|---|
| Who opens the file? | “Our team handles it end to end.” | A name, and that person on the next call |
| Whose advertising account is it? | “We set all that up for you.” | Your portfolio, agency on partner access |
| Who owns the creative? | “You own everything, obviously.” | A written assignment clause you can read |
| How do we leave? | “Nobody has ever wanted to.” | A notice period measured in days |
| What if we miss the number? | “Marketing takes time to compound.” | A stated review point and a stated consequence |
| Which client is that figure? | “We can’t say, it’s confidential.” | A named client, or the figure withdrawn |
Which two answers should end the call?
The first is any refusal to put the advertising account and the page in your own business portfolio. There is no legitimate operational reason for an agency to hold the asset rather than hold access to it. When ownership sits on the agency side, every later disagreement is negotiated with your own advertising history as the hostage.
The second is a minimum term with no exit for cause. A twelve-month lock with no performance break means the agency is paid the same whether the work is good, and you have no lever until the renewal date. If an agency will not put a notice period in writing, it has told you what it expects the work to be worth.
Everything else on this list is a conversation. Those two are structural, and no amount of chemistry on a call fixes a structure that is built to make leaving expensive.
Tell us the number. We’ll tell you if we can.
If we squirm at any of these thirteen, hold us to it in the same way. The list is only useful if it points at everyone, including the people who wrote it.