What Brands Should Look for in an Agency Partner in 2026: 5 Questions to Ask

As 2026 progresses, brands are taking a harder look at their agency relationships.

A full 85% of US B2C marketing executives plan to review their media agencies this year. That level of reevaluation reflects a broader shift in what brands want from their agency partners, and what they’re no longer willing to accept.

Agencies are feeling this pressure. Some 65.3% of agency professionals have had clients move work in-house within the last year, and 87.3% say the traditional agency model is broken or heading in that direction. This leaves brands in a difficult position. As the industry transforms, they’re evaluating agency partners against rising expectations—sharper AI judgment, leaner operations, clearer business storytelling—while agencies are still evolving to meet them. In this context, asking the right questions can separate partners built for where the industry is going from those still operating on where it’s been.

Below are five questions worth asking before signing a contract, renewing one, or kicking off a review:

1. Who Owns the Data, the Tech, and the Work If We Part Ways?

First, brands should start with the structural questions nobody wants to open a pitch with: Who owns the data? Who owns the tech stack? What gets packed up and sent with the brand if the relationship ends, and what stays behind?

This matters more in 2026 than it did even two years ago. The share of full-service and media agencies managing eight or more tools has more than doubled since 2024 (from 22.1% to 46.7%), with more than a third now juggling 10 or more tools. Every additional tool is another place where a brand’s data, historical insights, and optimization learnings can live with the agency rather than with the brand itself. When the agency changes, the brand often has to start from scratch.

The agencies worth partnering with in 2026 are comfortable with portability and clear about ownership. They can articulate exactly what a brand owns, where that data sits, and how it would transfer in a transition. Better still, they’re open to operating inside a brand’s owned media infrastructure rather than requiring the brand to operate inside theirs. When the tools, the data, and the vendor relationships belong to the brand, a roster change doesn’t mean starting over.

As a practical first step, brands can ask for a consultative audit of how an agency’s stack maps to their own. They can explore where it complements, where it duplicates, and what a brand should own directly to protect long-term flexibility, regardless of who handles execution. That distinction signals whether an agency is confident competing on the quality of its strategy and service rather than the stickiness of its tooling.

2. How Are You Using AI, and Where Are You Choosing Not To?

Asking whether an agency uses AI no longer yields much signal—it’s used at more than 99% of agencies today, with nearly 60% of professionals using it daily. The sharper questions get at how agencies are using the technology, and where they are deciding not to apply it.

Strong answers to these questions will be specific. An agency should be able to name the workflows where AI is adding real value, those where it’s being tested with clear guardrails, and the places where the team has consciously held back. Brands should also expect a clear answer on how an agency protects sensitive data inside AI tools. A vague answer—or worse, a reflexive “AI everything”—is a red flag. AI tools can produce strategies that sound authoritative but aren’t rooted in reality: predictions built on extrapolated data, synthesized “case studies” that don’t reflect actual market outcomes, audience insights the tool inferred rather than verified, etc. When an agency builds recommendations on that kind of output without pressure-testing it, the brand ends up paying the cost.

A stronger approach sounds thoughtful and curious. Take AI-powered search as an example. Some platforms are monetizing chat-based search in ways that could eventually open powerful new audience and targeting opportunities. But right now, the data is a black box and the measurement is thin. An agency that says, “We’re watching this closely. Here’s what we want to see before we recommend it, and here’s how we’ll know when it’s ready,” is showing exactly the kind of judgment a brand is paying for. An agency that says, “Let’s just run ads there and see what happens,” is not.

The same principle applies as agencies adopt agentic AI. A partner that’s using agents to streamline planning cycles or improve reporting, for example, should be able to walk through what the agent is doing, where the underlying logic is coming from, what the human is still doing, and why that split makes sense.

Similar questions apply to how AI is used for ad creation. The IAB acknowledged the industry’s concerns around this use case in early 2026 with its first AI Transparency and Disclosure Framework, citing a widening gap between how advertising executives think consumers feel about AI-generated ads and how those consumers actually feel. Brands should expect their agency partners to have a specific, current point of view on that gap, and for them to be able to explain the strategy behind their approach to using AI for creative generation. Clarity on these questions can help brands discern a meaningful AI strategy from something any agency could offer.

3. What Does Real Transparency Look Like Beyond the Dashboard?

Transparency is a word nearly every agency uses. What it actually delivers in practice is where brands often find a gap. Some 88.3% of agency professionals say the digital advertising industry needs more of it, which is both encouraging and telling: The people closest to the work know there’s a gap worth closing.

Transparency doesn’t just mean a brand gets a dashboard. Dashboards show a brand what happened—real transparency explains the “why” behind what happened. Why was budget shifted between channels last week? Why was a particular audience deprioritized? Why did the team recommend pausing a tactic that was still performing? The “why” is where trust gets built, and it’s what brands should expect from their partners.

Transparency also shows up in how agencies handle pricing. The traditional structures—commission, FTE, billable hours—were built around the time-intensive, often-manual labor AI is now compressing or automating. The agencies adapting fastest are moving toward pricing tied to outputs and outcomes rather than hours, an evolution brands evaluating partners should welcome. Brands should expect the upside of that shift: clear fee structures, visibility into what’s a pass-through cost versus a markup, and flexibility on the pricing model itself, whether that’s project-based, IO-based, a clean percentage of media, or something custom to the engagement. Agencies that treat their pricing as a black box tend to treat a lot of other things that way too.

4. Are You Reporting Activity, or Connecting It to Business Impact?

Over half of agency professionals (54.0%) say their client relationships are more strained today than they were two years ago. Much of that friction traces back to a storytelling gap. Agencies often speak in impressions, clicks, and conversion rates. Brands, on the other hand, answer to CFOs, boards, and a CMO role that has been reshaped in recent years to tie every dollar back to measurable business return.

The capability gap brands should explore with agency partners is the ability to connect campaign performance to business outcomes. In other words, they should look for agencies who can move from “We drove a 12% lift in CTR” to “We drove a 12% lift in CTR, and here’s how that shaped pipeline. Here’s what it suggests about audience intent, and here’s what we’d recommend next based on the business context you’ve shared with us.” That kind of translation and storytelling is the work agencies increasingly have to own, as connecting the dots between media activity and business impact is where real value gets created.

The agencies positioned to do this work well tend to have one thing in common: They’ve invested in connected infrastructure that pulls their work together across channels, so their teams aren’t spending the majority of their time stitching together data from disconnected tools. When the foundation is sound, human attention can shift to interpretation and strategy, which is where brands are actually trying to buy value in the first place.

5. Are You Bringing Opportunities Forward, or Waiting to Be Asked?

Though a simple question, it’s a meaningful one. The top performing agencies in 2026 are proactive partners. They bring POVs on industry shifts before the brand has to chase them down. They flag emerging channels with a clear stance on whether they’re worth testing and why. They raise risks early, even if those risks might reduce their own scope of work.

A reactive relationship is one a brand has to manage, whereas a proactive one is one a brand can lean on. The difference shows up in small moments, like whether a weekly check-in brings new ideas to the table or just rehashes last week’s performance. But those small moments add up. Over a year, they can be the difference between an agency acting as a vendor and one acting as an extension of the brand’s own team.

The strongest version of this dynamic feels less like a brand managing an agency and more like a brand working with a trusted partner who’s actively looking out for its bottom line.

The Bottom Line: Brands Want Business Impact

Brands are investing in digital advertising to drive business impact, and agencies too often deliver activity instead. Closing that gap, between what’s happening in a campaign and what it means for the business, is the real work of partnership in 2026.

The industry is in the middle of a structural reset. Revenue models are under pressure, AI is redefining what agency labor actually looks like, and brands have more options for how to get the work done. The brands that come out of this period with the strongest partnerships will be the ones asking the sharpest questions and holding out for agencies whose answers line up with how their business runs.

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Interested in a deeper look at what’s reshaping the agency business in 2026, including how agencies are thinking about AI, tech stack consolidation, and the future of their revenue models? Explore the 2026 Advertising Agency Report.