You inherited an agency relationship with a contract, a set of established reporting rhythms, and a history with your predecessor that shapes every conversation you have with them whether you know it or not.
The agency is not performing at the level you need. You know this because you can see the gap between what the work is producing and what the budget should be producing at current market rates with the targeting access and creative resource they have. But unwinding the relationship has a cost. The internal dependencies that have built up around it. The time and distraction of a pitch process. The political capital required to make the case that the incumbent is the problem when the incumbent has been producing reports that show everything is working.
Those reports are the mechanism. A reporting framework built by the agency, measured by the agency, and presented by the agency has a structural limitation that has nothing to do with the honesty of the people producing it. It was built to show the value of the agency. It was not built to show whether the agency is the right solution to the commercial problem the business actually has.
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