Building agency relationships that unlock media investment
Agencies control a brand’s media budget. They decide which partners are tested, approved, and added to their Preferred Supplier Lists (PSLs). For AdTech companies, inclusion on agency PSLs is the difference between isolated tests and recurring spend.
Agencies select partners they can rely on, prioritising predictability, ease of activation, and confidence at scale over novelty. Trust is earned over time through consistency, clarity, and delivery.
Key principles
Respect the agency operating model: understand how planning cycles, trading commitments, and investment teams shape decisions.
Earn credibility through execution: prove value in live campaigns before seeking scale.
Be commercially coherent: pricing and incentives must be simple, defensible, and aligned with agency economics.
Reduce friction: make activation, reporting, and troubleshooting easy for planners and traders.
Most AdTech companies do not fail because their technology is weak. They fail because they misunderstand how agency relationships form, progress, and scale.
Common mistakes include:
Confusing access with progress. Meetings, introductions, and positive feedback are mistaken for momentum. Nothing has moved until commercial approval and activation are secured. Pilots are often treated as validation, when in practice they are low-risk experiments with limited internal commitment.
Selling innovation instead of reliability. Agencies rarely reject innovation. They reject uncertainty. Partners who cannot demonstrate predictability, ease of activation, and operational discipline struggle to earn long-term trust and internal endorsement.
Scaling before foundations are in place. Spend is pushed before commercial frameworks, incentives, and governance are properly aligned. As volume increases, margin erodes and relationships weaken rather than scale.
These issues are rarely visible at the outset, but they compound over time — limiting growth, delaying scale, and quietly destroying value.
Successful agency partnerships tend to evolve through three stages:
Access. Securing meaningful engagement with the people who influence partner approval and budget allocation. At this stage, most companies struggle to move beyond surface-level conversations.
Activation. Converting interest into formal agreements, live campaigns, and repeatable activity. This is where many partnerships stall due to unclear ownership, weak commercial frameworks, or misaligned incentives.
Scale. Growing spend across teams, clients, or markets without eroding margin or trust. Without the right commercial and operational foundations, scale exposes weaknesses rather than creating value.
Each stage requires a different focus, a different set of stakeholders, and a different definition of success. Agency partnerships fail when companies apply the same behaviour, messaging, and expectations at every point in the relationship.
What wins attention is not what wins commitment, and what wins commitment is not what sustains scale.
If agency traction feels slow, stalled, or inconsistent, this is where we can help. Back to Black works at the points where agency partnerships either gain momentum or quietly lose it. Our role is not to replace internal teams or impose a generic methodology, but to apply experience where it has the greatest commercial impact.
We support AdTech companies differently at each stage of the agency relationship.
At the access stage, we help companies secure meaningful engagement with the right agency stakeholders and position their proposition in a way that aligns with agency priorities and evaluation criteria.
At the activation stage, we focus on converting interest into formal agreements, live campaigns, and repeatable commercial activity, ensuring ownership, incentives, and expectations are clearly defined.
At the scale stage, we support the growth of spend across teams, clients, and markets while protecting margin, maintaining commercial discipline, and reinforcing long-term partnership value.
The objective is simple: to help AdTech companies build agency partnerships that convert into sustainable, profitable growth.
We work with AdTech companies at different stages of growth, from platforms entering their first agency relationships to established businesses looking to scale spend profitably across markets.
Our work is typically led by founders, CROs, or commercial leaders where agency partnerships are central to growth and margin matters.
Typical platforms we support include
Demand side platforms and ad servers
Contextual and attention platforms
Identity, data, and clean room providers
Measurement, verification, and analytics platforms
Retail media and commerce AdTech
Video and CTV platforms
Sell side marketplaces and sales houses
Back to Black is independent. We do not resell technology, take referral fees, or benefit from vendor selection outcomes. Our incentives are aligned with long-term partnership success, not short-term deals
If you are struggling to gain traction with agencies, we should talk.
We will work closely with you, take the time to understand your business and goals, and help move things forward.
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