The brands we turn down, and why saying no is the service

Most agency websites describe who they work with. Very few describe who they refuse, which is a shame, because the refusal list is more informative.

Here is ours, with the reasoning.

Brands without a working budget

Below a certain spend an account cannot gather enough conversion data to optimise against. The algorithm does not have enough signal, tests cannot reach significance, and every month is effectively a fresh start.

Taking a retainer in that situation means charging for a result we know we cannot produce. The honest answer is to say the budget is not yet at a level where paid media is the right lever, and to say it before the money is spent rather than after.

Brands treating marketing as a get-rich-quick scheme

The request is usually phrased as wanting something to go viral, or wanting a large return inside the first month.

Neither is a plan. A new account spends its first weeks buying answers — on one wellness brand we ran, the first two months returned no revenue at all before the year closed at ₹1.19 crore. A brand that cannot tolerate that period will terminate the engagement in week six, having paid for the expensive part and left before the return.

Better for both sides to establish that up front.

Brands with no long-term view

Growth compounds across quarters. Accounts that are left alone to accumulate signal outperform accounts that are rebuilt every few weeks, and that is a structural property of how the platforms work, not a preference.

A brand that needs a result by a date that does not allow for it is buying the wrong thing from the wrong people.

Brands unwilling to act on what we find

This is the one that matters most in practice.

If the audit says the product photography is not carrying a premium price, or the checkout is losing a third of its traffic, or the pricing does not survive contact with the category — the engagement only works if those get fixed. We can run the best account in the category into a site that cannot convert and the number will not move.

We do not need to be right about everything. We do need the findings to be genuinely considered rather than treated as an excuse.

Requests we decline within an engagement

Deploying a large launch budget without a structure to spend it into. Committing to an expensive lifestyle shoot before there is any evidence about what converts. Both are ways of spending money that feel like progress and produce no information.

The alternative is unexciting and works: spend in steps, against evidence, and let each step earn the next.

And how we end things

We have ended retainers over how our team was treated, and would again. It is not a commercial position, it is a condition of doing good work — an account run by people who are being worn down is not an account that gets someone’s best judgement.