Seven ways to run video marketing agencies reviews properly

What to take away

The rest of this article expands on seven ways:

Why most agency reviews go wrong

The common mistake is treating a review as a beauty parade. Three agencies present, the room prefers one showreel, and the decision is made before anyone has checked whether the winning agency can evidence where its media spend goes.

That approach fails quietly. The agency may be perfectly competent and still be wrong for you: too small for a monthly retainer you have in mind, too dependent on one platform, or unfamiliar with the sector rules that apply to your advertising.

A review is a comparison against criteria you set in advance. The criteria are the work. Once they exist, the pitch becomes a data-collection exercise rather than a persuasion contest.

It also helps to decide who is in the room. Marketing, finance and whoever owns data protection should each have a scoring sheet. A single reviewer produces a single point of view, and suppliers learn quickly whose preferences to play to.

Start with the mistake you are trying to avoid

Way 1. Start with the failure you fear most and map it to evidence. Example risks include production waste, opaque media supply chain and unsubstantiated claims. Keep a risk register with columns for risk, evidence, source and owner. Typical time: 20 to 30 minutes.

Write down the failure you are most worried about before you write anything else. Typical answers include: paying for production that never gets used, buying media through an opaque supply chain, or inheriting a creative idea that cannot be substantiated if a complaint is made.

Each worry maps to a different piece of evidence. Production waste maps to usage rights and asset handover. Supply chain opacity maps to the standards the buyer signs up to. Substantiation maps to the claims process behind the campaign.

This step takes twenty minutes and saves weeks. It stops the review drifting into a general chat about creativity and keeps every question tied to a risk you actually carry.

If you want a worked structure for turning those worries into weighted scores, the review methodology walkthrough sets out how to weight criteria before you see any submissions.

Set your criteria and weights first

Way 2. Set six to ten weighted criteria and publish them before shortlisting. Weights must total 100. Use a spreadsheet such as Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to hold criteria, weights, scores and evidence.

Choose between six and ten criteria. Fewer than six and you will fall back on gut feel. More than ten and the scoring becomes noise that nobody can defend in a post-decision review.

Give compliance a real weight even if it feels administrative. A campaign that breaches the advertising rules can be pulled, and the cost of that is not confined to the media budget.

Publish the weights to your own team before shortlisting. If two reviewers disagree about whether creative should outweigh measurement, that argument is much cheaper to have now than after the pitch.

Gather evidence that is independent of the pitch

Way 3. Check free public registers: Companies House accounts, the ICO enforcement action register, ASA rulings and IAB UK Gold Standard status. Each answers a different question about finances, data protection, advertising claims and media supply chain.

Pitches are designed to be persuasive. Independent evidence is not. Company accounts filed at Companies House tell you size, trading history and whether filings are up to date. Sector statistics from the Office for National Statistics business data help you sanity-check whether a quoted day rate or retainer sits in a plausible range for a business of that scale.

Regulatory records matter just as much. The ICO enforcement action register lists organisations that have been subject to action over data protection failures, which is directly relevant if an agency will handle your customer data or run lead generation.

On the advertising side, the independent review process for ASA rulings shows how contested decisions are handled. It is useful context when an agency claims a past complaint was simply a misunderstanding.

Media buying deserves its own check. The IAB UK Gold Standard letter covers supply chain standards, and asking whether an agency holds that certification is a quick way to test how seriously it treats where your money ends up.

Finally, credentials. Platform certifications are not a substitute for experience, but they are verifiable. LinkedIn's marketing training and certification programme is one example you can ask named practitioners to evidence rather than trusting a slide.

Compare like with like

Way 4. Convert every quote to a twelve-month total cost of ownership, including media, licensing, stock footage, talent renewals and platform fees. Example: £400 a month editing plus £2,000 a month media equals a £28,800 annual run rate.

Quotes arrive in different shapes. One agency prices a project, another a monthly retainer, a third a day rate plus media commission. Put them into a single normalised table before you score anything.

Convert everything to a twelve-month total cost of ownership. Include production, media, licensing, stock footage, talent renewals, platform fees and any minimum spend commitments. Label every assumption.

For example, a team paying £400 a month for editing support and £2,000 a month in media would be comparing a £28,800 annual run rate against a project quote of £19,000 plus media. Those are not the same purchase, and the table should say so.

Once the table exists, the product and service comparison guide explains how to line up deliverables that agencies describe in different language, such as a content pillar versus a campaign.

Score, then challenge the score

Way 5. Score each criterion from one to five, multiply by the weight, then challenge the score you are least confident about. Keep evidence next to the number.

Score each criterion from one to five and multiply by the weight. Keep the evidence next to the number: a link, a document name, or a note of who said what and when.

Then run a challenge round. Ask each reviewer to name the score they are least confident about and what would change it. This surfaces the assumptions that would otherwise sit unexamined until contract stage.

A useful discipline is to score compliance and data protection blind to the creative score. Reviewers who have just watched a strong showreel tend to rate everything else generously.

If two agencies finish within a few points of each other, the tie-break should be the risk you wrote down at the start, not the quality of the final presentation.

Check credentials and references properly

Way 6. Verify named credentials and speak to at least two referees per agency, including one former client where possible. Ask which named people hold the certification and how it was used.

Ask for named people, not logos. Then verify. Certification records, company filings and published case studies are all checkable in an afternoon.

References are more useful when you choose the questions. Ask referees what went wrong, how change requests were handled, and who actually did the work day to day. Ask whether the agency hit deadlines without a scramble.

Speak to at least two referees per shortlisted agency, and at least one who is no longer a client if you can find one. Current clients have an incentive to be polite.

Where a referee describes a problem, ask the agency about it directly and record the answer. How a supplier handles an awkward question tells you more than the answer itself.

Run the compliance and contract checks

Way 7. Run ownership, data protection, media supply chain and sector rule checks before appointment, then record the result in a two-page decision note. The later sections on sector rules and documentation expand these checks.

Before appointment, confirm who owns the footage, how long the licence lasts, and what happens to raw files if the relationship ends. Ambiguity here is expensive later.

Check data protection arrangements if personal data will move between you and the agency. Confirm the lawful basis, retention periods and who is the controller for each activity.

On the media side, ask for a written description of the supply chain and any fees taken at each stage. If an agency cannot describe it, that is a finding, not a gap to fill in later.

The selection checklist turns these checks into a pass or fail list you can take into the final meeting, so nothing is agreed verbally and forgotten.

Sector rules that change the review

If your advertising runs in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, the same UK-wide rules generally apply, but some sectors add their own requirements on top. Health, financial promotions, children's products and gambling all attract extra scrutiny.

That means the compliance section of your review is not generic. Ask agencies to describe campaigns they have run in your sector and how claims were substantiated.

Where a sector regulator is involved, ask which approvals were needed and who held them. An agency that has never worked under those constraints will need a longer onboarding period, and your timeline should reflect that.

The UK rules and compliance guide sets out which regimes commonly apply to video campaigns and what evidence an agency should be able to produce.

How to document the decision

Write a short decision note: the criteria and weights, the scores, the evidence, the two or three findings that mattered, and the reasons the runner-up lost. Keep it to two pages.

This note protects you in three ways. It makes the decision explainable to finance, it gives you a baseline for reviewing the agency after six months, and it saves you repeating the whole exercise if the relationship ends early.

Store the submissions alongside it. Contract renewals are much easier when the original comparison is still on file rather than reconstructed from memory.

If you publish anything about the outcome, keep it factual. A short internal summary is usually enough, and it avoids creating advertising claims of your own that would need substantiating.

How long a proper review takes

For a single market and a modest budget, allow two to three weeks from shortlist to appointment. That covers written questions, one presentation round, reference calls and contract review.

Add a week if procurement, legal or a parent company must approve the spend. Add longer if personal data will be transferred or if your sector requires regulatory sign-off.

Compressing the timetable is possible but it usually means skipping reference calls or contract checks. Those are the two steps that most often prevent an expensive mistake.

If you publish your own agency reviews, whether on a blog or in a trade title, the same discipline applies. Say what you assessed, how you scored it and when. Readers can then judge the conclusion for themselves.

A short glossary helps if your review panel includes people from outside marketing.

Common questions

How many agencies should we shortlist?

Three to five is workable. Fewer than three gives you no real comparison, and more than five multiplies the reference checking without improving the decision.

Should we score agencies before or after the pitch?

Agree criteria and weights before you invite anyone. Score evidence first, then use the pitch to test the parts you could not verify in writing.

Do we need to check regulators for a small campaign?

Yes, if personal data is involved or if claims will be made publicly. The checks are free and take minutes, and the findings are hard to argue with later.

Can we rely on awards and certifications alone?

No. Treat them as one input. Ask which named people hold the certification and how it was used on comparable work.