When eCommerce founders are vetting an agency, the most common question they ask is "how many years of experience does the team have?" It is a useful question if you are buying tenure. It is the wrong question if you are buying outcomes. What predicts whether the strategist on your account will make you money is not how long they have been in the seat.

Most agencies filter clients by industry vertical and budget size. We filter by something different: whether the brand is solving a real problem for its customers. We call them deserving brands. Overpriced luxury knockoffs, supplement companies selling hope, Medicare middlemen riding a regulatory loophole, those are passes for us, regardless of budget. Not because the categories are bad, but because the value proposition is fragile.

Most performance agencies have a favorite channel. They sell themselves as "the Meta agency" or "the Google partner" or "the TikTok shop," and then they spend the engagement defending that channel against the P&L. Channel ambivalence is the opposite stance: the agency has no loyalty to any platform and only one loyalty to the client's profit.