1. Lack of passion
Your agency needs to live your brand. If they don't live your brand, they don't care about your product-- they just care about your money.
As you walk into the agency you see your competitor's product lying around. You open the fridge, it's there too. You overhear someone say how they used "your competitor's product" to get "x" done.
An understanding of your business, your products, your competitive advantages and disadvantages are essential to do great work. They must "immerse" themselves in your brand. There have been stories for years in the traditional agency world of an agency getting fired for the client seeing a soft drink competitor in the fridge, or seeing the employees when out at dinner order a beer from a competitor. People often chuckle and say, "How harsh!" I say not harsh enough.
The agency should be forced to pay money back to you before you leave. It comes down to this-- in order to get the most value out of your agency they need to live your brand. Great ideas can happen when an employee is at home using your product, in the shower, out with their friends and they encounter something that triggers that synaptic connection. In order for that to happen, they must breathe-in your brand.
Why? Idea generation. The bonus? You don't get charged for it when ideas really hit them.
It is purely a financial business decision to get the best work. Brainstorming groups are a necessity in agencies, but I expect more. More than just the ideas that come from these sessions, I want a 24/7 idea-generation opportunity. Germinating ideas that fester, bother them, coagulate, congeal and give birth to great concepts because the ruminations in the brain are based on real world situations of experience, not artificial constructs.
Example
Agency.com has eBay as a client. For the leads on the eBay account, the agency sends them a list of the people's "star" ratings on eBay. And the ratings better be moving up. Everybody should require the same level of dedication from their agency to work on their account.
Now, the agency may be doing competitive analysis, and therefore have many of your competitors' products around, however, get them to confine those products to a "war room."
Why consider making a switch?
If they don't live your brand, they don't care about your product-- they just care about your money.
Things to consider
Most decent interactive agencies have 13 to 20 active clients. Several of the smaller clients get service at a bigger interactive agency that they would never get from a smaller agency, but they also do not have enough money to pay the account leads, much less an entire team that services the account, to totally immerse themselves in the product. Weigh that fact if you are a smaller client at a bigger shop.
Small clients can benefit from input from resources that small agencies would never be able to bring to bare. The fit just has to be right. The small client has to be vigilant for passion from their agency. If the small client is willing to follow the advice of their agency, the agency should remain passionate about the account because the account lets them prove their value. If a small client has to consistently edit or manage their agency's work, then the passion is most likely gone and a new agency is needed. But I have seen teams get very passionate about small clients that trust the agency enough to let them do what they know is right
Next: They don't know your business
