A company’s team filmed 30 TikTok videos in the last quarter, and only three of them produced any results.
This is when most established brands start looking for outside help. The reason is rarely down to the difficulty of understanding TikTok, but far more often to inconsistent results, which take up time that nobody has.
For those already considering external help, the practical route is a TikTok marketing agency that manages content, creators and paid adverts as a single integrated system, rather than three unconnected freelancers. The text below explains when it makes sense to hire an agency, what an agency actually does for an established brand, and what exactly is worth checking before signing any contract.
The less popular truth needs to be stated from the outset: most brands hire an agency too early, and the reason becomes clear straight away.
Signs that it’s time to seek external help
Agencies aren’t cheap, and a bad one costs more than the monthly fee, so the decision warrants a proper test rather than just a gut feeling.
A useful tool is what might be called the ‘three-signal test’. Before the first discussions with agencies, at least two of these signals should be present.
The first signal is organic traction that is impossible to scale. A few videos are successful, the result cannot be replicated, and no one on the team can explain why one of them worked.
The second sign is spending on adverts without a creative production pipeline. The budget is active, yet whatever the intern filmed on their mobile on a Tuesday afternoon is being promoted.
The third warning sign is a hiring freeze. The company needs a cameraman, an editor, a creative coordinator and a media buying specialist – in other words, four salaries for a channel that has yet to prove its worth.
The argument ‘everyone says we have to be on TikTok’ is deliberately missing from the list. This is a reason to post, but not a reason to sign a contract. If the company hasn’t tested the channel at all, it’s worth posting independently for 60 days, as it will learn more than from any sales pitch and will go into discussions with agencies knowing which questions matter.
The other side of the issue is timing. Committing to a fourth-quarter campaign for the festive season is too late, as creative assets take weeks to be developed, tested and refined before the budget can deliver results. For a seasonal campaign, discussions need to begin a full quarter in advance.
How an agency actually helps an established brand
Established brands face a problem that start-ups do not: brand constraints. They work within identity standards, legal scrutiny, a product catalogue where profit margins cannot be ignored, and an audience that already knows them. An agency that merely follows trends will produce content that is rejected by the brand team during review, whilst good partners work in three directions.
Content built for the platform, without recycling
The first task is volume combined with a point of view. This requires a content system with introductions tailored to the category, a sustainable posting schedule and a feedback loop in which performance data shapes the next set of videos, rather than the intuition of a creative director. For an e-commerce brand, every video needs a reason to exist beyond view counts, whether it’s a product demonstration, a response to a customer objection, or a comparison with the product the customer is already using. It is worth asking the agency, right from the pitch, what decision-making criteria they apply when a video underperforms; a response such as ‘we’ll try something else’ indicates a lack of a systematic approach.
Partnerships with creators that don’t feel like hired help
Collaboration with creators is the area where most brands get it wrong. The aim is to find creators whose audience overlaps with the brand’s customers, who can talk about the product without sounding like they’re reading from a script, and who agree to transfer the rights to their content so that it can be used in adverts; yet even the best-known names in the field rarely meet all these criteria.
Any brand running paid content created by creators in the United States should be aware of the transparency rules regarding recommendations and endorsements applied by the Federal Trade Commission, whose guidelines were revised in 2023. The agency should be asked how it handles these requirements by default, before the legal department raises them.
Advertising that links spending to orders
The advertising side may lack glamour, but this is where agencies earn their fees – by testing creative assets at scale, making decisions on target audiences and placements, and providing honest, revenue-based measurement rather than vanity metrics. Setting up TikTok Shop and the product catalogue also falls within this remit. A partner who cannot clearly explain how they attribute a sale is not the right partner.
What agency theory says about this relationship
The difficulties described above have a formal explanation, developed in economics almost five decades ago. In 1976, Michael Jensen and William Meckling published an analysis in the Journal of Financial Economics of the relationship between a principal, who delegates a task, and an agent, who carries it out on the principal’s behalf. The problem arises when the two parties have partially divergent interests, and the principal cannot fully observe what the agent is doing. Jensen and Meckling termed ‘agency costs’ the sum of the principal’s monitoring costs, the agent’s costs of proving their good faith, and the residual loss that remains no matter how well the contract is drafted.
The relationship between a brand and a TikTok marketing agency is almost a textbook case. The agency has an interest in retaining the account, justifying its fee and presenting the results in the most favourable light, whilst the brand wants profitable sales. The brand sees the published videos, but does not see how many variants were tested, how carefully the audience was selected, or whether the budget was channelled towards the placements that are easiest to report on. The checklist in this article—ranging from the appointed team to the services set out in writing—is, in the words of Jensen and Meckling, a collection of tools for reducing agency costs.
In 1989, in the *Academy of Management Review*, Kathleen Eisenhardt summarised the conditions under which each type of contract works best. A behaviour-based contract, which pays for work performed, is preferable when the principal has an information system that allows them to verify what the agent is doing. A performance-based contract, which pays for sales or targets achieved, shifts the risk onto the agent, who will demand a premium for the risk assumed – the higher the premium, the more the outcome depends on factors beyond their control. On TikTok, where the algorithm, the season and the competition influence every campaign, a payment based solely on revenue becomes costly or pushes the agency towards attribution methods that favour its reporting.
This highlights a nuance in the otherwise sound advice to set a single success metric from the outset. Bengt Holmström demonstrated in 1979, in an article on moral hazard and observability, that a good contract includes any signal that provides additional information about the agent’s effort, as a single metric conflates their work with luck. For a collaboration on TikTok, the main figure should be accompanied by a log of creative tests, the agreed production schedule and the rate at which creators’ content is reused – in other words, signals that demonstrate effort independently of the outcome of a single month.
In practice, these theoretical propositions lead to hybrid contracts. A common structure combines a fixed fee—which covers campaign production and management and can be verified through monthly deliverables—with a variable component calculated based on metrics over which the agency has real influence, such as the customer acquisition cost or the conversion rate of the tested content. The proportion between the two components depends on how much control the agency has over the outcome. A brand with a stable product range, competitive prices and a website that converts well can tie a larger portion of the payment to sales, as variations in results depend more on the quality of the campaigns. A brand testing its products on TikTok for the first time will, by contrast, secure better terms for a predominantly fixed fee, accompanied by detailed reporting, as a rational agency will not accept the risk of an unproven product without factoring this into the price.
The framework has limitations that must be acknowledged. Agency theory is based on the assumption of an agent who is self-interested and prone to opportunistic behaviour, whilst James Davis, David Schoorman and Lex Donaldson proposed the theory of stewardship in 1997, according to which many professionals act in the interests of the organisation they work for when the relationship is based on trust and shared objectives. Excessive control can erode precisely this motivation, and a brand that treats its agency solely as a suspect risks obtaining only the minimum compliance required by the contract. Formal models also assume that the outcome can be measured, although the attribution of sales on social media remains imperfect, however good the reporting system may be. The theory therefore describes this tension, without prescribing the appropriate level of control for a particular relationship.
What to look for when choosing a partner
This is the stage that many rush through, even though it deserves the most time.
First and foremost, experience with similar brands matters. A random TikTok client is not enough; what is relevant are brands at the same stage, in the same category and facing the same constraints.
A cosmetics brand and a power tools brand require different creative approaches, and the agency can be asked what has changed over the last 12 months for a similar client.
What matters next is the visible work. Videos must be watched and comments read, after which the question remains that separates genuine partners from mere presenters: which of these videos delivered results, and what has changed as a result? A good answer contains concrete details, rather than a selection of highlights.
Reports should be readable in five minutes. A good dashboard covers expenditure, the performance of creative assets, creators’ output and revenue, with an update frequency established from the outset. Market research literature (market research literature) on marketing measurement consistently recommends establishing metrics before work begins, as pre-agreed criteria reduce disputes over interpretation later on.
Services must be set out in writing, as agencies’ monthly fees often have unclear margins. A detailed list specifies how many videos are included each month, who is responsible for selecting creators and managing contracts, whether media buying is charged as a separate fee or as a percentage of the budget, how many rounds of revisions are provided for, and who owns the filmed material. You should then ask what is charged as an extra, as every agency has such a list, and good agencies present it straight away.
The team must be named, rather than a general promise being made. The client has the right to know who is working on the account on a day-to-day basis and how many other brands the same person manages; the senior name that appears at the presentation and disappears after onboarding is the oldest trick in the trade.
Questions to ask before signing
These questions are worth raising during the final discussion, as the answers reveal more than the presentation.
| Question | What a solid answer sounds like |
|---|---|
| Who owns the content produced? | The client, in writing, including raw materials and content created by the creators. |
| What happens in the first month? | A concrete integration plan, with precise dates, rather than a vague period of onboarding. |
| How do you report revenue? | A precise allocation model, along with its known limits. |
| What are the contract termination terms? | Clear notice periods and the handover of accounts and materials. |
It is also worth checking whether the channel itself justifies the budget. According to the IAB and PwC report published in April 2026, online advertising revenue in the United States reached $294.6 billion in 2025, up 13.9 per cent, whilst social media advertising grew by 32.6 per cent to $117.7 billion. The labour market is heading in the same direction, as the Bureau of Labour Statistics forecasts a 7 per cent increase in the number of marketing managers between 2025 and 2035, whilst competition for attention in social video is becoming increasingly fierce. This is an argument for specialisation, though not one for hiring the first agency to reply to an email.
Where to find the right candidates
All the considerations above are based on the assumption that there are already several agencies on the table to choose from, and this stage – shortlisting – is usually the one given the least attention. The agencies that make it onto the shortlist are often those that have reached out to the client – through adverts, unsolicited messages or search-optimised content – which means the list reflects the agencies’ marketing budgets rather than their suitability for the brand. The rapid growth of social media advertising has brought many new agencies onto the market, and the differences between them are hard to discern from their websites, which use almost identical wording.
Compiling a shortlist is therefore best done by combining independent sources. Recommendations from brands in related categories remain the most informative, as they are based on direct experience, but they only cover the enquirer’s own circle of knowledge. The TikTok Marketing Partners programme includes a category of agencies recognised by the platform, and this recognition indicates a certain familiarity with TikTok’s tools, without saying anything about their suitability for a particular brand. Editorial directories provide a third source, organised by sector: the online marketing category in the Jasmine Directory groups agencies, consultants and software providers according to what they actually do, and the listings are reviewed before publication.</ p>
The limitations of such a listing must be made clear. It confirms that the agency exists, that it operates in the stated field and that it can be contacted, but it does not guarantee the quality of campaigns, does not constitute a recommendation and does not replace checking the company in its country’s commercial register.
The director’s role is to expand and diversify the initial list, so that the choice does not depend solely on the agencies that have spent the most to be seen, whilst the actual assessment remains the responsibility of the questions in the previous sections.
The budget is another source of misunderstanding, which can be clarified before the first discussion. Typical advertising costs across various social media platforms, ranging from cost per click to the monthly budgets of small and medium-sized enterprises, are discussed in the analysis on how social media advertising budgets shape digital marketing, and a client who knows the approximate size of their budget can rule out from the outset any agencies whose minimum collaboration threshold exceeds their means. The distinction between the agency’s fee and the media budget, discussed above, thus becomes a concrete figure that can be compared across different quotes.
A final check concerns references. A reputable agency can put the client in touch with two or three current or recent clients, and it is worth speaking to them without the agency present, asking specific questions about the pace of delivery, the stability of the team and how they dealt with slow periods. The answers to these questions reveal the agency’s behaviour under conditions that no contract can fully describe – precisely the area that agency theory refers to as ‘residual loss’.
When the shortlist is narrowed down to two agencies that are difficult to distinguish, a time-limited pilot project can replace some of the assumptions with direct observations. A period of 60 to 90 days, with a capped media budget, an agreed number of videos and evaluation criteria set out before the start, allows the brand to see how the agency operates in real-world conditions, from the pace of delivery to the way it reacts to initial poor results. The pilot also has its limitations, as an agency may temporarily allocate its best staff to a new client, and three months are rarely enough to reach a firm conclusion about the channel’s profitability. Its value lies primarily in observing the process, which reveals more about long-term collaboration than the sales figures from the first few weeks. The pilot’s contract should specify from the outset who owns the materials produced if the relationship does not continue, so that the trial does not leave the brand without the content it has paid for.
In short
Hiring makes sense when there is traction that cannot be replicated, an expense that cannot be sustained with creative assets, or a team whose expansion cannot be justified. What matters is experience in the category, visible work, reports that are actually read, and a written contract on the basis of which the agency can be held to account. The agency doesn’t need to be famous, but it must explain precisely how it works. Before the next pitch, it’s worth noting the figure that would make this partnership a success, and if no one in the room can name their own figure, the answer to the question of whether to sign is already clear.
Thus, the decision to hire a TikTok marketing agency turns out, upon closer inspection, to be a matter of delegation under conditions of incomplete information, in which the brand is purchasing a service that it cannot fully observe. It can be concluded that a successful collaboration is built in three successive stages: from drawing up a shortlist from independent sources, through the contract which combines payment for work with payment for results, to reporting that makes the agency’s efforts visible beyond a single month’s figures. Where these stages are handled with care, trust between the client and the agency can grow on the basis of accumulated evidence, without relying on the impression left by a successful presentation.
