Did they improve, or are they the best option today?

"Better the devil you know than the devil you don't." It's a well-known saying in general and especially in management, and for me one of the most harmful, for obvious reasons: lack of time and kicking big decisions down the road.

In one role I inherited the relationship with the paid media agency that was already working on the account, and the results weren't convincing against the budget, let alone against the market average. Arkes and Blumer gave these cases a name, the "sunk cost fallacy": you keep something going because of what you've "already" invested, and that inertia weighs even more when the investment was inherited.

I had a very easy path. I could have defended my slice and carried on, but basically no. I asked them directly to improve the media mix, with my own suggestions (see the orange tree post), and especially by adjusting the monthly budget, giving them a real chance to prove it was worth staying.

They did it... halfway, I'd say. They achieved a 21% reduction in investment while keeping the same volume of results. They improved efficiency, but they didn't move the underlying result that was needed.

A 21% improvement sounds good, right? Compared with their own history. It stops sounding so good against the market, which is why I launched a formal tender, with weighted scoring, evaluating the current agency on equal terms against the whole market.

The result showed more than ten points of difference between the first option and the second.

The underlying lesson is that there are two different questions it's best not to confuse: "Did they improve?" and "Are they the best option today?". The first is easy to answer with a yes and stay calm, proving the saying right. The second demands comparing against everything else and opens a final question: is the change worth it, with the sacrifices a transition involves? In this case, triple the digital conversions made it worthwhile.