Who works on your account matters more than whose name is on the invoice. Two agencies quoting the same fee can be selling completely different things. One is putting a senior buyer on your account for a meaningful share of their week. The other is putting a junior on it alongside eleven other accounts, with a senior reviewing it monthly. The pitch sounds identical. The outcome does not.
How agency teams are usually built
Most agencies above a certain size run some version of a pyramid: a founder or director who sells, a strategist or account director who owns the relationship, and one or more buyers or executives who do the work in the platforms. There is nothing wrong with this. It is how an agency affords senior people at all, and juniors supervised properly become good quickly.
The question is not whether juniors touch your account. It is the ratio — how much senior time your fee actually buys, and whether the senior sees the account weekly or hears about it in a meeting.
The two numbers that decide who works on your account
Ask two things and the picture resolves quickly.
How many accounts does the person running mine carry? There is no magic number, because a simple single-channel account and a multi-market ecommerce build are not comparable. But the answer moves everything else. A buyer with four accounts can be in yours several times a week. A buyer with fifteen is doing a round of checks and firefighting whatever is loudest.
What proportion of the fee is people time, and whose? You will not get a cost breakdown, and you should not expect one. But an agency should be able to say, roughly, how many hours a month the account is scoped for and at what seniority. If they cannot, the account is not resourced; it is absorbed.
The most reliable predictor of whether an account gets attention is how many other accounts compete for the same person's Tuesday.
The pitch-team problem
The most common gap between expectation and delivery is that the people in the pitch are the people who sell, and the people in the account are the people who were free. This is not deception so much as structure — selling and buying are different jobs — but it is worth closing explicitly. Get the named lead written into the scope schedule, as covered in what to check in the contract, and ask to meet them before signing rather than at the kick-off call.
What seniority actually buys
Not speed in the interface. Juniors are often faster in the platforms than their managers. What experience buys is diagnosis: knowing which of nine possible explanations for a drop is the likely one, recognising when a metric is noise, and knowing which of the platform's recommendations to decline. It also buys the willingness to say something unwelcome, which is partly experience and partly standing.
That is why the useful interview question is diagnostic rather than factual. Describe a symptom from your own account — leads up, quality down; ROAS fine but revenue flat — and listen to how they reason toward a cause. Reading a report properly is the same skill, applied to a document.
Smaller agency, bigger agency
Small teams usually mean the person who sold it is the person who runs it, which removes the gap entirely. The trade-off is bench depth — holidays, illness and a sudden new client all show up faster. Larger agencies have resilience, process and specialists, at the cost of distance between you and whoever is actually in the account.
Neither is better in general. What matters is that you know which one you bought. We are a single team in Noida, which is stated on the main services page rather than left to inference, and the people on a call are the people in the account. If you want senior platform time without the rest of an agency arrangement, hiring a media buyer directly is a different shape of the same purchase.
One last check
Ask who covers your account when the named person is away for two weeks. An agency with a real answer has thought about continuity. An agency without one has told you how thin the staffing is, without meaning to.
Questions people ask before hiring
How many accounts should one media buyer manage?
It depends entirely on complexity, but the number itself is diagnostic. A buyer carrying a handful of accounts can work in each one regularly; one carrying fifteen is checking and firefighting rather than developing anything.
Is it bad if a junior works on my account?
No, provided the supervision is real and the senior sees the account weekly rather than monthly. Juniors do excellent execution. What they lack is the pattern recognition to diagnose an unusual problem quickly.
What does an agency account team usually look like?
Typically a director who sells, an account lead who owns the relationship, and one or more buyers working in the platforms. That is a reasonable structure; what matters is how much senior time your fee buys and whether the lead sees the account weekly.
Is a small agency riskier than a large one?
Small teams give you direct access to senior people and less distance between the pitch and the work. The trade-off is cover — holidays, illness and new clients are felt sooner. Ask who covers your account for a fortnight.
How do I test an agency’s seniority in an interview?
Give them a symptom from your own account and ask them to reason out loud toward a cause. Experience shows up as a short list of likely explanations in a sensible order, not as a longer vocabulary.