Three months into a retainer, a founder pulled up the coverage list an agency had been sending in monthly reports. Eleven placements. Nine of them were the same press release republished on sites that accept anything for a fee. Two were real. That founder was paying growth-stage money for seed-stage output dressed up to look bigger than it was.
It’s a common story, and it’s rarely obvious in month one.
The Coverage Itself Tells the Story
Syndicated placements are the easiest red flag to miss because they look like wins on a report. A press release that runs identically on forty low-authority sites isn’t forty placements, it’s one press release with a distribution service attached. Real coverage reads differently on each outlet, written by a named journalist who framed the story their own way. If every “placement” in a monthly report uses the exact same headline and opening paragraph, that’s syndication wearing a media relations costume.
A related sign: coverage that never touches the outlets that actually matter to the project’s audience. A DeFi protocol getting written up by general business blogs while CoinDesk, The Block, and Decrypt stay silent for months isn’t a coincidence, it’s usually a sign the agency doesn’t have real relationships in the outlets that would move the needle, and is filling the gap with whatever will say yes.
Silence Between Invoices
A good agency over-communicates, not because founders demand it but because the work itself generates updates worth sharing. A pitch went out today. A journalist replied asking for more detail. A story got bumped a week for space. None of that requires a founder to ask. When updates only arrive because a founder chased them down, and the answers are vague, “still working on some things,” “a few irons in the fire,” that vagueness usually means there isn’t much actually happening.
Worth testing directly: ask for the name of one journalist currently being pitched, and what the pitch angle is. An agency doing real work answers in one sentence. An agency coasting stalls, or answers with a generic description that could apply to any client on their roster.
The Contract Language Nobody Reads Closely
“Guaranteed placement” anywhere in a contract is worth pausing on. No agency controls an editor’s decision, which is exactly what makes real coverage valuable, so a guarantee usually means the fallback is paid content if organic coverage doesn’t materialize, sometimes disclosed to the client, sometimes not disclosed at all until the invoice explains a “placement fee” buried in the fine print.
Exit clauses matter just as much and get skipped just as often. A retainer with no defined off-ramp, or a cancellation penalty that’s disproportionate to the notice period, tends to correlate with agencies that know their retention rate depends on making it expensive to leave rather than on results worth staying for.
Templated Pitches Are Visible From Outside
A pitch custom-built for one project reads differently than a template with the company name swapped in. Founders can usually tell the difference by asking to see three pitches the agency has sent on their behalf. If all three follow an identical structure, identical subject-line format, identical opening sentence pattern, that’s a production line, not a relationship-driven pitch. What a real pitch that lands actually looks like varies by story and by journalist, because it has to.
This connects to a mistake covered elsewhere on messaging discipline: an agency that never pushes back on a founder’s announcement idea, agreeing every story is newsworthy, is optimizing for keeping the client happy rather than for what a journalist will actually accept. The agencies worth keeping say no sometimes, and explain why.
What to Do With the List
None of these signs alone is damning. An agency between major news cycles will look quieter than usual, that’s normal. The pattern that matters is two or three of these showing up together over more than one billing cycle. At that point, the fix usually isn’t a difficult conversation, it’s pulling out the original hiring checklist a second time, this time out loud with the current agency, and watching how directly they answer. A shortlist of agencies that answer well from the start is a reasonable place to start comparing if the current answers don’t hold up.