Is Your PR Agency Agreeing With Everything You Say? You Might Want to Fire Them

Advice

There is a version of the client and agency relationship that feels wonderful and achieves almost nothing. You ask for something, the agency says “sure, we’ll do that,” and everyone leaves the call in a good mood. Nobody argues. Nobody raises an awkward question about whether the thing you asked for is actually going to work. Six months later (though hopefully sooner) you are wondering why the coverage never came, and the honest answer is that nobody in the room was willing to tell you the plan was wrong.

We would put it more bluntly than that: if your PR agency agrees with everything you say, fire them.

It sounds harsh. It is meant to. Because the alternative, an agency that treats agreement as a service, is quietly one of the more expensive things a startup can buy. There is no perfect world in which an agency doesn’t ask questions and sets some expectations based on their experience and expertise.

You are not paying for agreement

We understand the instinct. Agency fees are significant, particularly for an early-stage company where every line of the budget has to justify itself. You have an agenda: raising the next round, building the founder’s profile, or simply making sure the market knows you exist. When you are paying that much, being told “no” can feel like being short-changed.

But consider what you actually hired. You brought in specialists who spend all day, every day, inside the media landscape you are trying to enter. In most cases they know more about that specific subject than you do, which is precisely why you engaged them rather than doing it in-house. If those specialists then spend their time agreeing with whatever you propose, you have paid expert rates for an echo.

Results do not come from “sure, we’ll do that.” They come from someone with the standing to say “that will not work, and here is what will.” Results also don’t come from “we’ll just keep blasting and insisting until it lands.” They come from understanding what will land in the first place.

“We saw a competitor featured in that publication, we want the same”

This is one of the most common requests we hear, especially from prospective clients, and we have a lot of sympathy for it. It is a concrete, reasonable-sounding brief. You have seen proof that the outcome is possible, so why not ask for it?

The problem is that a piece of coverage is the visible end of a long chain of ingredients and actions, and you rarely get to see the rest of the chain. That competitor may have had a celebrity investor on the cap table. They may have had a founder with a previous exit behind them, which changes how a journalist reads the story before they have read a word of it. They may simply have been bigger, or further along, or operating at a scale where the impact was easier to demonstrate. Timing plays an enormous role, too. The same pitch that lands in a quiet week disappears in a busy one, and a story that fits the news agenda in March can be irrelevant by June. Geography matters too, because which desk covers you and how much appetite that desk has for your market are not things you can argue your way past.

An agency that says “yes, we’ll get you that” without walking you through any of this is not being helpful. It is setting up a disappointment and charging you for the privilege.

The job is to be the bridge, not the megaphone

Good PR agencies are not ‘yes people’. They are your voice of reason, and, at their best, the bridge between what your company needs and what a journalist actually needs.

That second half is the part most easily forgotten. A journalist’s obligation is not to you, and it is not to us. It is to their audience. Everything we do sits inside that constraint. Understanding it is what separates a pitch that gets read from one that gets deleted, and it is the reason one should treat journalist relationships as a long-term function rather than a transaction to be optimised.

Standing on that bridge means occasionally facing the wrong way from the client’s point of view. It means telling you that something is off, that the timing is not right, or that your story is not ready yet. That can sting in the moment. It also saves you a great deal of wasted time and money, and it saves you from headlines that go absolutely nowhere. Did we mention saved money and time? Oh, yeah, we did. Add to that the potential to save you from headaches, drama and disappointment.

What healthy tension looks like in practice

None of this means an agency should be difficult for the sake of it. Pushing back is not the same as obstruction, and there is nothing useful about a partner who treats every idea as a problem.

What we are describing is a working rhythm. You throw an idea at us and we throw it back sharper than it arrived. We disagree, we discuss it properly, and we get to something closer to the truth than either side started with. What you end up with are strategies that hold up under contact with real journalists, rather than strategies designed to please you in a meeting.

The best ideas tend to come out of that friction. Open debate, a bit of healthy tension, and the occasional uncomfortable conversation nobody was looking forward to. Those conversations are much easier to have when they happen continuously, as part of the ordinary working week, rather than being saved up for a quarterly review where the stakes feel higher than they need to be. Get used to the uncomfortable talks, or you will have to face the much more uncomfortable consequences later.

Blind obedience is expensive

The strongest argument against a compliant agency is actually financial. An agency that never questions the brief is not saving you anything. It is spending your retainer executing a plan it privately suspects will fail, which means it is misallocating time and resources you are paying for.

You are engaging a team to deliver meaningful results for you based on their experience and expertise. Not to ignore that experience and expertise and act blindly on what you think should be done.

And that leads to better results. The coverage that holds up is rarely the coverage that came from the path of least resistance. It comes from a story that was interrogated before it was pitched, aimed at a desk that had a reason to care, and timed to a moment when it stood a chance.

So the next time your agency tells you your story is not ready, or that the publication you have your heart set on is the wrong target, consider the possibility that you are getting exactly what you paid for. And if they never tell you anything of the kind, ask yourself what you are actually buying.