Choosing a communication agency: seven questions, and one that only applies abroad
An agency is chosen on three verifiable things: who physically does the work, how results are measured, and who owns the data and the accounts. Everything else — the portfolio, the creativity of the pitch, the chemistry in the room — matters, but comes after. These are the three points on which relationships break a year later, and the three almost nobody raises during selection.
If your supplier is in another country, they matter more, because the informal checks disappear. You cannot drop by. You will not meet the team by accident. Whatever you do not establish in writing, you will not establish at all.
We write this from the other side of that table: we are a communication and digital marketing agency in Italy, with offices in Rome and Milan, so for most readers of this page we are the foreign supplier. Publishing the questions we would want to be asked — including the two we find least comfortable — seemed fairer than waiting to be asked them.
Table of Contents
First: what kind of supplier do you actually need
The signs look alike; the crafts do not.
A web agency builds and maintains sites and platforms. Good when your problem is technical and bounded.
A media agency buys advertising space and optimises budget. Right when ad spend is already substantial and the question is cost per acquisition.
A creative agency produces concepts, campaigns, visual identity. Right when the problem is positioning and story.
A communication agency holds these together and makes them talk to the data. The right choice when the problem is not isolable: the site converts poorly and nobody can say whether it is the traffic, the pages or the offer.
The practical test: if you know exactly what you need, hire the specialist. If your problem is “I do not understand why this is not working”, you need someone who can look in several places at once — otherwise you will spend a year making three suppliers talk to each other while they pass responsibility back and forth.
The seven questions
1. Who physically works on my project?
Ask for roles, skills and hours. This is not about personal names — in a healthy structure people are replaceable and the work continues — but about establishing whether the people delivering are in-house. Subcontracting is the industry norm and usually invisible: you sign with the agency, and the writing is done by a freelancer who changes every quarter.
Warning answer: no answer on that point — who delivers stays undefined even after you have asked twice.
2. Who proposed this strategy, and will they attend the working sessions?
The gap between who sells and who delivers is the single most common source of disappointment. Not dishonesty — organisation. But you need to know beforehand.
Warning answer: the senior appears at the pitch and disappears the following month.
3. How do you measure the result — and what happens if it does not arrive?
A serious agency tells you which number it will watch, from which tool, and how often you will see it. And what it will do if that number does not move.
Warning answer: the proposed KPIs are impressions, reach, “engagement”. Numbers that always go up and have never sold anything.
4. Can the accounts be registered to me?
Ads, analytics, search console, business profile, social profiles, domain, hosting. The question is not who administers them day to day — an agency doing that is normal, and often convenient — but whether you can hold the registration when you ask for it, taking the history with you.
Warning answer: registration is not negotiable under any circumstance. An agency offering to keep them on its own manager account is offering you convenience; one that will never hand them over is tying you to itself, which is a different thing.
5. Does the data you collect stay mine?
Contacts generated, lists, tracking. Ask for it in the contract, and for export to be possible from day one, in an open format.
Warning answer: export “can be done” but is not contractually provided for.
6. What do you not do?
The most informative question on the list. Anyone answering “everything” has either missed the question or has no craft. Every organisation has a centre of gravity: ask what theirs is, and how they cover the rest.
Warning answer: no declared limits.
7. Tell me about a project that did not work, and what you did next.
Positive references are easy, and active clients almost always say things are going well. Far more informative is hearing a project that went wrong described out loud: anyone who has worked long enough has at least one, and the way they tell it is how they will behave when it happens to you. We have ours, and we tell it in person: it is a question you answer looking at whoever asked it.
Warning answer: nothing has ever gone wrong. Either that is untrue, or there has not been enough work yet.
The eighth question, for cross-border work
In which language, and in which time zone, will the work actually be reviewed?
This is the one that catches people out, and it has nothing to do with anyone’s English. A campaign is written in one language, approved in another, and read by a market that speaks a third. Every one of those handovers loses something, and the losses are invisible until a native speaker sees the result.
Ask specifically: who reads the final copy before it goes live, and are they a native speaker of the market it addresses? If the answer is vague, budget for a reviewer on your side. It costs less than the alternative.
Our own answer, since we are asking you to ask it: we are in Rome. The city hosts every diplomatic mission accredited to Italy and to the Holy See, and the headquarters of the FAO — which means native speakers are abundant here, including in languages that are hard to source elsewhere. For twenty years we have had native speakers review copy and creative work before it went live, in the major languages as a matter of routine.
It is not a claim we make to sound international. It is the reason we are comfortable putting this question on the list.
The point nobody puts in the quote
A communication project touches the site, the data, the advertising, the content and — increasingly — security. Every handover between separate suppliers is a point where information is lost and responsibility dilutes.
This is not an argument for a single supplier at all costs. It is an argument for a short chain. Fewer hands on the work, fewer meetings to align, and above all one person to ask why a number went down.
We work this way: whoever designs is whoever delivers, and whoever delivers answers. It is not a positioning choice — with a different organisation we could not answer question three.
Where the price differences come from
Quotes for the same brief can differ fivefold, and the reason is rarely quality.
What genuinely widens the price: the seniority of the people delivering, the frequency of the conversation, how measured the work is. An editorial plan written by a senior with monthly review and one generated at volume cost differently because they are different things.
What narrows it artificially: the activity exists on paper but is reduced to a minimum. The classic case is “monthly reporting included”: a PDF of exported numbers, with not one line explaining what to do next week.
The honest way to compare two quotes is not the total. It is asking both how many senior hours are inside and who does them.
The questions they should ask you
A supplier who knows the work asks: what is the margin on your products, what is a customer worth over time, how many leads can your sales team actually handle, what has been tried before and how did it go.
If nobody asks about your numbers and the conversation moves straight to creative, you are buying a campaign, not a strategy. Two different products at two different prices. Buying a campaign is fine — as long as you know that is what you are doing.
Frequently asked questions
Is a local communication agency better than a remote one?
Frequency of contact matters more than distance. Proximity helps early on, while someone is learning your business; after that, what weighs is who replies within the day.
How long is a typical contract with a communication agency?
It depends on the type of work. Continuous work — search, social, advertising — is assessed over at least six months, because before that the data cannot be read. Fixed-scope projects, like a website or a visual identity, have a declared end. In both cases, be wary of long commitments with no written objectives inside them.
Can I work with more than one communication agency at the same time?
Yes, and it is common. But it must be clear who holds direction and who owns the data, or the time saved in specialisation is lost again in coordination.
How do I know an agency’s work is paying off, before six months are up?
It depends on what they were hired to do, so the signal changes: on lead generation, look at the quality of leads and not only the count; on website work, traffic to the pages that sell rather than the total; on search work, positions for the keywords that matter. The general rule is that the intermediate signal should be agreed at the start, together with what happens if it does not move.
We are a communication and digital marketing agency based in Rome, with a strong presence in Milan. The company has worked since 2006; our founder has been in search since 2004.
We publish these questions knowing they will be asked of us — including by readers for whom we are the foreign supplier. That is the intended effect. A supplier who cannot answer question one in a sentence is not worth the meeting, wherever they are based.
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