Choosing an agency is mostly an exercise in seeing past the pitch. Everyone’s deck looks good. Everyone says they’re strategic, data-driven, and passionate about your brand. The pitch is designed to be impressive — that’s its job. Your job is to find out what happens after you sign.

These are the nine questions we’d ask if we were on your side of the table. They work on us, and they work on everyone else. Ask them out loud, watch how people answer, and you’ll learn more in one meeting than in ten proposals.

1. Who actually does the work?

The person who charms you in the pitch is often not the person who touches your account. Ask directly: who is on my team, day to day, and what have they personally made? Agencies sell with their best people and deliver with whoever’s free. That’s not always a problem — juniors do great work under good direction — but you deserve to know the real org chart, not the sales one.

What a good answer sounds like: specific names, specific roles, and a straight explanation of who leads and who executes.

2. Can I see the strategy behind your favourite piece of work?

Anyone can show you a nice-looking video. Fewer can explain why it was made the way it was — the insight, the audience, the decision to do this instead of that. Ask to see one project’s thinking, not just its output. If the strategy was real, they’ll happily walk you through it. If the pretty work was pretty by accident, you’ll feel the answer get vague fast.

3. How do you measure whether it worked?

“Engagement” is not a result. Ask how they define success before a project starts and how they’ll report on it after. The answer tells you whether they think in vanity metrics or business outcomes. A serious partner ties the work to something that matters to you — leads, sales, brand recall, a launch that lands — and tells you honestly when a number is soft.

4. What does your reporting actually look like?

Ask to see a real report from an existing client (anonymised is fine). You’re checking two things: whether reporting exists at all, and whether it’s built for you or for them. Good reporting is short, honest, and includes what didn’t work. A dashboard with forty green arrows and no commentary is a screensaver, not an account update.

5. What’s the cadence — how often will we actually talk?

Silence is where agency relationships go to rot. Find out the rhythm: weekly check-ins, monthly reviews, a named person who picks up when something’s on fire. You’re not hiring a vendor to disappear for a month and reappear with an invoice. You’re hiring a partner, and partners stay in contact.

6. What do you not do?

This is one of the most revealing questions you can ask, because the honest answer is never “everything.” A studio that claims to be world-class at strategy, film, performance ads, SEO, PR, events, and web — all in-house, all excellent — is either genuinely rare or genuinely stretching. Ask where their real strength is and where they’d bring in a specialist. Confidence about limits is a sign of competence, not weakness.

7. Who owns what we make?

Get clear on rights before the work starts, not after. Do you own the footage, the files, the raw assets — or just the final export? Can you reuse a campaign next year without paying again? Can you take your accounts and creative with you if you leave? Ownership terms are boring right up until the moment they aren’t, and by then it’s too late to negotiate.

8. Can I talk to a client you’ve had for more than a year?

New clients are easy to impress. Keeping one for years is the real test. Anyone can hand you two glowing references from last quarter. Ask for someone who’s been around long enough to have seen a project go sideways and get fixed — because everything goes sideways eventually, and how an agency behaves in that moment is the whole relationship in miniature.

9. What would you change about our brand right now?

Ask this in the room and watch what happens. A good agency has already thought about your brand before the meeting — they’ll have an opinion, and they’ll share it even if it’s a little uncomfortable. A weaker one will flatter you and change the subject. You want the one with a point of view. You’re not hiring someone to agree with you; you’re hiring someone to make you better.

The red flags worth walking away from

A few patterns are worth taking seriously, regardless of how good the work looks:

Guaranteed results. Nobody can promise a specific number of leads or a viral hit. Anyone who does is either naive or selling you something. Serious partners promise effort, method, and honesty — not outcomes they don’t control.
No questions about your business. If an agency pitches without first understanding what you actually do, they’re selling a template. Good work starts with good questions about you, not a rehearsed monologue about them.
Everything is urgent and everything is a discount. Pressure to sign fast, before you’ve thought it through, usually means the relationship will run on their terms, not yours.
They can’t say no. An agency that agrees with every idea you have isn’t collaborating — it’s order-taking. You’ll get exactly what you asked for and none of what you actually needed.

The one that matters most

If you only ask one question, make it the first: who actually does the work? Almost everything else — the strategy, the reporting, the honesty, the point of view — flows from having real, capable people on your account who care about the outcome. Find those people, and the deck stops mattering.

That’s the whole guide. The pitch is theatre. The questions are how you find out what’s behind the curtain.

We built MANIFESTUM to answer every one of these the way we’d want to hear it — real people, real strategy, honest reporting, and opinions we’ll actually defend. See what we do, and ask us all nine.

Marketing Agency in Yerevan: 9 Questions to Ask