How the standard agency structure works
Agency economics push execution downward. Senior people are expensive, so they sell and supervise; juniors are affordable, so they execute. The salesperson wins the deal, the account manager owns the relationship, and the day-to-day campaign work lands with the least experienced person in the chain, who is often handling fifteen to thirty accounts at once.
None of this is hidden exactly, but it is rarely volunteered. The pitch features the agency's best thinkers, and the gap between who sells and who delivers is the most consistent disappointment in agency relationships. Ad spend wasted by an overloaded junior rarely shows up in any report, but it is paid out of your budget all the same.
The questions to ask before signing
Four questions expose the delivery structure before you commit:
- Who exactly will be inside the account each week, by name?
- What is their experience, in years and in accounts like mine?
- How many accounts do they handle at the same time?
- Will I speak to them directly, or only through an account manager?
A good agency answers all four without flinching. Vague answers, or a pivot back to the senior team's credentials, tell you the real answer: the people in the pitch are not the people in the account.
The Etari Digitals answer is structural
At Etari Digitals the answer to all four questions is the same person. The founder, Igor Schoofs, runs every account personally: he does the audit, builds the campaigns, manages the budget, and writes the reports. There are no juniors, no account managers, and no handoffs where quality can leak.
The trade-off is honest. One operator means a deliberately limited client roster instead of a scaled team, with a proprietary AI operating system handling the volume work that headcount would normally absorb. You give up the size of an agency and get the certainty of knowing exactly who is in your account.