“Full service growth” can mean strategy, or it can mean slide decks and a junior in your ad account. Ask which.
Common line items
- Account management time (meetings, updates, coordination)
- Media buying and platform craft
- Creative production or creative direction
- Email / lifecycle
- Reporting
The valuable ones ship decisions and assets. The weak ones ship commentary.
Questions worth asking
- Who touches the account week to week?
- What do you need from us to avoid waiting?
- How do you handle stock and offer changes mid-flight?
- What does a kill decision look like when performance dips?
If answers are fog, the retainer will feel foggy at month three.
Software versus humans
Humans still win at messy strategy and taste. Software wins at overnight monitoring, packaging work, and not forgetting cover days. Many brands want both. Few want to pay agency rates for work a sharper system could stage for approval. That comparison is the whole point of Ralph vs agency.
Red flags in pitches
Guaranteed ROAS. Vague “full funnel”. No named operator. Reporting that only celebrates. If you cannot get a clear kill-switch story, keep walking.
Questions people actually ask
Retainer for a small brand?
When spend is high enough and creative supply exists. Not as a substitute for a clear offer.
How to brief an agency without getting played
Give margin floors, stock constraints, and non-negotiables in writing. Ask for a sample weekly plan before you sign. If they cannot show how they handle a stockout mid-campaign, they have not lived your life yet.
Hybrid models that work
Agency on creative strategy and brand, in-house or software on day-to-day ops and monitoring. Or agency on paid craft, you keep offer and stock policy. The broken hybrid is “everyone owns everything” — which means nobody owns the stockout.
If you want stock, ads and the morning list in one place: that is what we built Ralph for — a growth operator for Shopify, with review before anything ships. Not magic. Fewer tabs. See Ralph · Docs