Questions to Ask a Video Agency Before Signing: The 12 That Matter

Before signing with a video agency, ask twelve questions whose answers can be checked during the meeting: who actually edits your videos (a name, not a job title), how many creatives per month and in how many variants, how long between an approved brief and the first version, what rights assignment applies (duration, territory, paid), who owns the raw footage, how much is generated by AI, how you exit at 90 days. For each one, demand immediate proof: a template contract, a real schedule, results pulled up on screen. A question without proof is just a conversation. The budgets at stake justify this rigour: according to the 35e Observatoire de l'e-pub du SRI (the SRI's 35th digital advertising observatory), published in February 2026, the French digital advertising market reached €12.4 billion in 2025 (+11%), driven in particular by social and video.

Why Won't Lists of “7 Questions” Protect You from Anything?

A question is useless if a bad agency can answer “yes, of course” without lying. That is the only test that matters before a pre-signature meeting: is your question falsifiable? Can you prove on the spot that the answer is false? If not, you have asked a question out of politeness.

Take the lists that are going around. “Will I have a dedicated project manager?” Every agency says yes. “Are you easy to work with?” Nobody has ever said no. A Vingt Deux article from 2024 admits the problem itself: there is supposedly no method for knowing how an agency will work with you, you have to “look for clues on its website”. Look for clues. For a five-figure commitment.

There is one honest exception in the landscape: Topovideo is the only first-page result that talks seriously about rights (music, voice-over, image rights). Its frame of reference remains corporate video distributed on LinkedIn. And that is probably no longer what you are buying.

That is where the gap lies. These lists were written for buying one video. A corporate film, a shoot, a single delivery. In 2026, you are buying a flow. Several market observers, including La Fabrique du Net, describe a shift of budget towards creation as ad fatigue speeds up on TikTok; we have no reliable figures on the split to cite. You are no longer billed for set-up. You are billed for renewal capacity.

Asking a supplier the questions of 2019 in 2026 is like checking the brakes of a car you are going to use as a plane. And choosing has become objectively harder: the number of agencies claiming to be “AI video” agencies in France has risen sharply since 2023. No official count exists, but the offer has visibly become denser. Sorting is no longer done by portfolio. The regulatory framework has changed too: on 10 June 2026, the European Commission published a voluntary code of practice to help providers and users of generative AI comply with the transparency obligations of the AI Act, which apply from 2 August 2026.

A word before we get into it: even before choosing an agency, the make-or-buy question deserves to be settled. What follows assumes you have already done so.

The 12 questions, the acceptable answer, and the proof to demand straight away

Who will actually produce your videos, and how do you write it into the contract?

Until the name of an editor and the name of a creative strategist appear in an appendix to the contract, you have bought a sales intention. “Dedicated project manager” is a phrase, not a commitment.

The basic question is everywhere: who will be my point of contact from brief to delivery? Good question, useless answer. Ask it differently. Who edits, first name and surname? How long have they been with you? How many accounts are they working on in parallel this month? Three questions, three verifiable answers.

The red flag is documented outside our sector, and it transposes effortlessly. Axe Capital, in an analysis dated 4 May 2026 on B2B prospecting providers, lists among contractual warning signs the refusal to tell you who your point of contact will be and the “we'll introduce you to the team after signing”. The mechanism is identical in production: the salesperson you meet will never touch your timeline.

What we see in our own pitches, when we are put in competition: the question that makes people sweat most is not the price, it is “open your portfolio, pick a video at random, tell me who edited it”. An agency that really produces answers in three seconds. An agency that resells freelancers searches for words.

Then ask for a named-team clause: if the person leaves the project, you are notified within X days and you approve their replacement. No serious agency refuses this. Those that do tell you it “lacks flexibility”. That is correct. That is the point.

And on your side, who approves?

A good agency turns the question around. If you do not define before kick-off who gives an opinion and who makes the final call, you end up with six people behind the screen, three of whom have never read the initial brief or the strategy. The edit gets diluted, the lead time doubles, and the agency takes responsibility for a delay it does not control.

Two names are enough: a creative approver, a media approver. Write them into the contract, just like theirs. The symmetry is healthy.

How many videos, in how many versions, in how many days?

The number of videos delivered means nothing until you have separated concepts from variants. Twenty videos that are twenty variations of the same angle make one concept. Five concepts, each adapted with four hooks, make a testing set-up.

So ask the question in two steps. How many new concepts per month? How many variants per concept, and what do they change: hook, visual opening, CTA, format, length? An agency that sells volume without being able to answer will deliver twenty files and zero learning.

The third figure is the most revealing: the time between an approved brief and the first version. Not the sales lead time, the real one. With us, we communicate a range in working days and give the two dates for the last client to enter production. It is verifiable, so it is usable.

Next comes the subject nobody dares to dig into in a meeting: rounds of revisions. Ask how many iterations are possible on the script, the storyboard or the graphic style before billing, and how many edit versions are planned per deliverable. “Unlimited revisions” is never a gift: it is either a price inflated upfront or a conflict scheduled for month three.

Why does pace matter so much now? Because the useful lifespan of a vertical creative has collapsed. La Fabrique du Net describes “extremely rapid” ad fatigue on TikTok and a shift of budget towards creation. In other words: your agency is not paid to make one beautiful video, it is paid to supply you with a new one before the previous one dies. An agency with no numerical answer to “how many days do you take to react to a drop in hook rate?” has not understood what it is selling.

One last sub-question, often forgotten: what happens in August and at the end of December? Production schedules are seasonal. Make them say it.

What is the rights question that 90% of buyers forget?

This one: is the duration of my rights assignment longer than the commercial lifespan of the creative? Almost everyone asks “are the rights assigned?”. Almost nobody asks “until when, on which media, and what happens to the content afterwards?”.

The typical scenario: you buy a UGC video with a six-month paid licence. In the fifth month, the creative becomes your best asset, the one that absorbs 40% of the budget. You are then in the weakest possible position to renegotiate. The creator knows it, and so does the agency.

The three blocks to have written down in black and white:

• The talent. Duration, territory, media, and explicit mention of paid social: a “web” assignment does not always cover sponsored distribution. Provide for the renewal clause and its rate before you sign, not in month five.
• Music and voice-over. A licence suited to ads, not the platform's native sound library, which is not free to use for brand advertising. For the voice, duration, territories and media, as for an actor. The TikTok for Business help centre, updated in July 2025, says it plainly: businesses cannot use the general music library for commercial purposes and must go through the Commercial Music Library for all their commercial activity on TikTok.
• Raw footage and editing project files. The most neglected point. Without the source files, changing agency means reshooting. In pitches we regularly see brands unable to say who holds the raw footage from their last twelve months of production. That uncertainty is expensive when it comes time to leave.

Add the platform side, absent from every corporate checklist: who holds the account used for Spark Ads, how the authorisation code is passed on, its duration, what happens if it expires mid-campaign. Meta whitelisting follows the same logic. These are access rights, not files, and they get lost too. According to TikTok's official guide to creating Spark Ads, the creator chooses the authorisation code's duration themselves from four options: 7, 30, 60 or 365 days.

To weigh up durations and what they are worth, we have set out elsewhere the details of usage rights and their real cost in France. One thing we cannot yet quantify properly at market level: the median duration of a UGC assignment for paid social in France. We see 3, 6 and 12 months depending on creators and agents, with no established standard. Be wary of anyone who presents you with a norm on this point.

On which figures does the agency accept being judged, and which must it refuse to promise?

A production agency commits to verifiable means; one that commits to a ROAS is lying or does not understand its own economics. Your margin, your price, your logistics, your seasonality and your media budget weigh more heavily than the creative in the final result. Nobody can guarantee a figure they only partly control.

Axe Capital, again in its 4 May 2026 analysis of B2B providers, puts “guaranteed 10x ROI” at the top of the red flags: mathematically untenable over a first cycle. The reasoning applies word for word to creative ads. When a salesperson promises you a multiple, that is not ambition, it is a failure to understand their own trade.

What can be put in a contract, on the other hand:

• The volume delivered per month, concepts and variants separated.
• The lead time from approved brief to first version, in working days.
• A three-second hook rate threshold, measured in your Ads Manager, not in an in-house report.
• The cost per creative that crosses your scale threshold, the only denominator that matters, more on that below.
• A 90-day review with an exit door, short notice, handover of source files.

Also separate media cost from creation cost, a permanent source of confusion in negotiation. TikTok's premium formats (TopView, Logo Takeover, Prime Time since 2026) cost tens of thousands of euros and have nothing to do with the production cost of your videos. An agency that mixes the two in one proposal makes it impossible for you to make an informed decision.

If the agency refuses any commitment on means, ask for a trial period. You can perfectly well test an agency on a 30-day audit before committing and a refusal of a short trial, one renewable month or 90 days, is also among the warning signs identified by Axe Capital.

What does a video agency really cost in 2026, and why are the gaps so wide?

Price gaps no longer reflect quality but the production model, and AI has widened the fault line by crashing the cost of editing without touching the cost of creative direction. According to La Fabrique du Net (17 February 2026), the automation of editing and subtitling has pushed down the price of basic video production, which explains an unprecedented fragmentation of pricing.

The published figures contradict one another, and that is information in itself. Roads.social put the UGC creator in 2026 at between €150 and €350 per video depending on experience and niche, with €1,500 to €5,000 and more for a creative agency pack. Takema Studio, the same year, gives a range of €75 to €400 for UGC in France. A ratio of 1 to 5 for the same nominal deliverable. The word “video” no longer designates anything.

We won't redo the detailed ranges by sector here: they are in the detailed pricing grids by sector. What interests us in a meeting is a question nobody asks: what share of my deliverable is generated or assisted by AI, and is that reflected in the price?

With the rapid multiplication of agencies presenting themselves as “AI video” in France since 2023, the question is no longer theoretical. Our position, and it doesn't always help the sale: AI does footage logging, subtitling, transcription, format variants and first-pass edits very well. It does neither art direction, nor storytelling, nor platform judgement. The model that holds up is hybrid. An agency that swears it uses no AI in 2026 bills you for avoidable labour; an agency that refuses to say what it automates sells you human prices for machine work. Transparency is also becoming a legal obligation: in a press release of 31 July 2026, the European Commission points out that, with the AI Act applying from 2 August 2026, deepfakes (images, videos or sounds altered or generated by AI) will have to be labelled.

A figure to handle with tongs: a source from the clipping ecosystem claims that a clip from a network of clippers can cost up to twenty times less in CPM than a standard TikTok Ads campaign. The source is an interested party, and the scope of the comparison is not spelled out. Check against your own data before making it an argument.

What video ideas are there for a business, and why should the agency propose them before you sign?

An agency that cannot name five video ideas suited to your product on the very first call will not find them after signing either. It is the quickest test of the meeting, and the most discriminating.

The ten vertical formats that really work for our e-commerce and retail clients, arranged by funnel stage:

• Discovery (TOFU) brand story with a human face, behind the scenes at the workshop or order preparation, employee advocacy (an employee talks about their job), non-promotional niche content that captures an audience before selling it anything.
• Consideration (MOFU) product demo in a real use situation, three-step tutorial, honest comparison with the alternative the prospect is considering, comment reply (you take up a real objection left under a post).
• Decision (BOFU) customer UGC testimonial, before/after, unboxing, objection killer (“yes, it's more expensive, here's why”).

Lengths follow the stage. Cliple, on 2 June 2026, gives benchmarks consistent with what we observe: 60 to 90 seconds at discovery for a brand story, 30 to 60 seconds at consideration for a use case, 15 to 30 seconds at decision for social proof and the offer. A supplier who offers you 45 seconds for everything, whatever the objective, is not thinking about the funnel.

The question to ask behind every idea: where do you place the CTA, and why there? A CTA is decided at the brief, not in post-production. And on the first shot, insist on an explanation of the hook mechanism chosen: that is where most of the media cost is decided, as we detailed in the 8 hooks that stop the scroll in 3 seconds.

An honest caveat: nobody can predict which of these ten formats will perform for you. We can't either. What a good agency can announce is the order in which it will test, and why. If it claims to know in advance what will work for your product without having seen a line of your data, it is reciting a pitch.

What are the 4 questions a good agency should ask YOU?

A first call where the agency talks 80% of the time is a bad sign, whatever the quality of what it says. What it asks you tells you more than what it shows you.

The four questions we systematically ask, and that you should expect from any serious supplier:

• “What are your three best current creatives, and why those?” Without access to your existing data, any proposal is a hunch. If the agency does not ask to see the Ads Manager, it has no intention of relying on it.
• “What is your target CAC and your margin per order?” These two numbers determine the acceptable length of a video, how aggressive the offer is, and how far the production budget can be pushed.
• “How does a shoot actually work with you?” Shop, workshop, warehouse, offices: who gives permission, what noise constraints, what time slots, who appears on screen and with what authorisation. An agency that does not ask this will discover the problem on the day, at your expense.
• “Who approves, and how fast?” Internal approval capacity is the first cause of delay on our projects. In front of us, not behind us.

If the first exchange is limited to a portfolio and a rate card, you have not met a production partner. You have met a catalogue. To know what information an agency should be extracting from you, the complete guide to the creative brief in 8 steps gives the exhaustive list.

What you keep being told about video agencies that is false

Five beliefs lose advertisers more money than any bad agency.

“The showreel proves quality.” A showreel proves the budget of previous clients. Nothing else. Ask instead for three creatives that ran in paid for more than sixty days, with the reason for their longevity.

“A dedicated project manager is enough.” Without a name in the contract, it is a sales intention. See above.

“Price per video is the right comparison.” No. The right comparison is the cost per creative that crosses your scale threshold. An agency at €400 a video, one in twenty of which passes the threshold, costs you €8,000 per usable creative. An agency at €900 with one in five passing costs you €4,500. Do this calculation with your own data before negotiating a unit price.

“Signing for twelve months gets a better rate.” Often true. But without a 90-day exit clause, the discount is a risk premium you pay on their behalf.

“AI is pushing prices down, so you may as well take the cheapest.” AI has lowered the cost of editing, not the cost of creative direction, and creative direction is precisely what has become the dominant budget item in 2026. Buying at the price of automated editing is buying the item that no longer makes the difference.

The 12 questions to copy and paste into your consultation email

Send them before the meeting, not during it. An agency that prepares its answers in writing gives you a binding document; an agency that improvises on a video call gives you an impression.

1. Who edits our videos, first name and surname, how long have they been with you, on how many accounts in parallel?
2. What share of production is subcontracted, and on exactly which tasks?
3. How many new concepts per month, and how many variants per concept?
4. What lead time in working days between an approved brief and the first version?
5. How many rounds of revisions are included per deliverable, and at what rate beyond that?
6. Who owns the raw footage and the editing project files on delivery?
7. What duration, territory and media for the talent rights assignment, paid social included?
8. What music licence do you use, and what is the contractual status of voice-overs?
9. What share of the deliverable is generated or assisted by AI, and how is that reflected in the price?
10. On what means-based indicator do you accept being judged at 90 days?
11. What is the exit notice period, and what do you hand over when leaving (source files, Spark access, whitelisting)?
12. Show us a campaign that failed, its cause and the fix applied since.

The response rate to this email is already information. Agencies that reply point by point within 48 hours are not the same as those that suggest “a call to discuss”. We reply in writing, and on question 12, we have a specific case to tell, with the figures. It is probably the only sales argument still worth anything in 2026.

Frequently asked questions

What are some video ideas for a business?

Ten vertical formats cover almost every need: brand story, behind the scenes and employee advocacy at discovery; product demo, three-step tutorial, comparison and comment reply at consideration; UGC testimonial, before/after, unboxing and objection killer at decision. Lengths follow the stage: 60 to 90 seconds at the top of the funnel, 15 to 30 seconds at the bottom, according to Cliple (June 2026).

Should you sign a per-project fee or a monthly subscription?

A fixed fee suits a launch or a one-off brand film. A subscription is justified as soon as you spend continuously and your creatives wear out within a few weeks. The question to settle is not the billing method but your renewal rhythm: below four new creatives a month, a subscription costs more than it brings in.

How long does a commitment with a video agency last?

Typical contracts run from three to twelve months. Twelve months is only acceptable with a 90-day review and exit clause, short notice, and mandatory handover of raw footage and access. A supplier that refuses any one-month renewable trial period sends a warning sign identified by Axe Capital in May 2026.

Does the agency have to give me the source files?

Nothing obliges it to by default: it depends entirely on the contract. Have it written that the raw footage and editing project files are handed over to you on delivery, or for a flat fee announced before signing. Without the source files, changing supplier means reshooting. It is the costliest point brands discover too late.

How do you test an agency without committing for 12 months?

Ask for a trial cycle of 30 to 90 days, with a defined volume of creatives, a priced brief-to-delivery lead time and a performance review at the exit. Pay a fair price for it: a free test will give you their best team once, not their real team. What you are buying is an observation under production conditions.

Vertical video specialist agency or general video agency?

The generalist excels at brand films, events, 16:9 corporate. The vertical specialist is judged on pace, the number of variants per concept and responsiveness to an ad fatigue signal. If your need is a monthly flow of creatives for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, the selection criterion becomes speed of renewal.