TLDR;
- Most London ad agencies are a bad fit for new businesses. You need a specialist consultancy, not a massive firm where you'll be a tiny, forgotten client.
- Don't look at their slick pitches or fancy Shoreditch offices. Judge them purely on their detailed case studies. If they can't show you relevant results (in £) for a business like yours, walk away.
- The "free audit" or "strategy session" isn't for them to sell to you; it's for you to interview them. If you don't walk away with genuinely useful advice you could implement yourself, they're not the one.
- Stop obsessing over cheap leads (CPL). The only metric that matters is what you can afford to pay to acquire a customer. Use the interactive LTV calculator in this guide to figure that out.
- Anyone who 'guarantees' results in paid advertising is a chancer. It's impossible. Look for transparency and a partnership approach instead.
Right then. You're a new founder in London, you've got a business to build, and you've decided you need to throw some money at paid ads to get things moving. The problem is, a quick search for "paid ad agency London" throws up a hundred agencies, all with slick websites, promising the world. Some have offices in The City that cost more per month than your entire seed round, and others look like a one-man-band operating from a bedroom in Zone 6.
How do you sort the experts from the chancers? Especially when you're just starting out and every pound counts. Most new business owners get this wrong. They either get taken for a ride by a smooth-talking sales rep or try to do it themselves, burn through thousands in ad spend with nothing to show for it, and conclude "ads don't work".
Ads do work. You're just buying the service wrong. This isn't about picking the agency with the best-looking logo. It's about finding a genuine partner with proven expertise who can actually make you money. It's a minefield, but with the right approach, you can find a team that will be a massive asset to your growth. Let's get into it.
So, why do you actually need an agency?
Before you even start looking, you need a brutally honest chat with yourself. Why are you looking for an agency? If the answer is "to magically find customers for a product that nobody is buying," then stop right now. No agency, no matter how good, can fix a broken offer.
I see this all the time. Founders spend ages building something, it launches to the sound of crickets, and they think marketing is the cure. They believe an agency can sprinkle some Facebook ad magic and the sales will start rolling in. That’s not how it works. A great agency will be the first to tell you this. Their job is to amplify what's already working. If you don't have a clear idea of who your customer is and why they should care, all an agency will do is help you waste money faster.
You need to have some proof, even if it's small, that you're solving an urgent, expensive problem for a specific group of people. Have you sold it to anyone yet? Even a handful of customers who paid real money? That's the validation you need. Without it, you're not ready for paid ads. A good agency will probe this in the first call. If
