Why do most agencies make terrible decisions?
Most agencies make terrible decisions because they operate reactively instead of systematically. When something goes wrong - cost per lead spikes, show rates drop, a client gets frustrated - the instinct is to change something immediately without understanding why the problem actually occurred. That reactive approach compounds over time. You make one change that creates a new problem, then another change to fix that, and before long you've lost track of what was working in the first place.
The agencies that scale are the ones that treat every decision like a hypothesis. Something broke? Don't just change the ad. Look at the full picture first. What did the data say leading up to this? Was it the ad, the funnel, the sales team, or something external? The best media buyers I know spend more time diagnosing problems than fixing them, because getting the diagnosis right means the fix is usually obvious.
When should agencies use data decisions versus gut decisions?
There's a time for gut decisions and a time for data decisions, and most agencies mix them up. Gut is for creative direction - what angle to test, what hook might work, what offer positioning feels right. Data is for everything else. When you're deciding whether to kill or scale a campaign, that's a data decision. When you're deciding how to allocate budget across campaigns, that's a data decision. When you're diagnosing why performance dropped, that's a data decision.
The agencies that make terrible decisions are usually making data decisions with their gut. They feel like this campaign isn't working, so they kill it. They feel like this audience is right, so they scale into it. Feelings are useful for creative work. They're terrible for media buying and operations.
What feedback loop are most agencies missing?
Your sales team is one of the most valuable data sources you have, and most agencies completely ignore it. What your setters and closers hear on calls tells you whether your ads are attracting the right people, whether your funnel is setting proper expectations, and whether your messaging is actually landing. If every prospect comes in confused about what you offer, that's not a sales problem - it's a messaging problem. If they come in excited but can't afford it, that's a targeting problem. That feedback needs to flow directly back into ad creative and funnel copy. The agencies that build that loop outperform the ones that don't, every single time.
What does good decision-making look like at an agency?
Good agency decision-making is boring. It's looking at data, forming a hypothesis, making one change at a time, measuring the result, and repeating. It's resisting the urge to overhaul everything when one metric dips. It's having the patience to let a test run long enough to actually learn something. And it's being honest about what you don't know. The moment an agency starts pretending it has all the answers is the moment it starts making its worst decisions. Stay systematic, stay humble about the data, and you'll out-decide every competitor running on gut instinct.