Agencies and Clients Need to Find a Balance of Mutual Respect to See Long-Term Growth

One shouldn’t be held on a pedestal

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The agency/client relationship: The pinnacle of business relationships. Partnership centric. Transactional at its core. Often misunderstood. Too often one-sided.

Whatever your view, it is a relationship with a great deal at stake on both sides. And depending on how it is approached and managed, it can be very rewarding—or very frustrating.

About five years ago, I began hearing whispers in the hallowed halls of Madison Avenue, in corridors at conferences, in elevators, at bars. People complaining that clients are not fully aware of what agencies do and what agency life is truly like.

As a former client, I can understand this feeling. Too often, my client-side colleagues behaved like royalty, treating agency partners like servants.

An agency/client relationship must be nurtured, protected, championed, cherished and refreshed when it gets stale.

Now to be honest, this was happening mostly at the junior and mid-manager levels. These folks usually have very little training in agency relationship management, and for many this is their first foray into the corporate work environment. Ergo, they had no basis to build on. The real crime here was their senior-level colleagues rarely correcting them or providing proper tutelage that this behavior was wrong and detrimental. The long-term effect, if not addressed early, is that these attitudes take root, fester and become de rigueur as these managers rise in the ranks.

So, what is the secret sauce that makes a client/agency relationship really work?

The best clients know the recipe: It’s a deep, insightful understanding of what drives the people who are responsible for delivering your creative product. They are passionate, curious, adventurous and visionary folks, regardless of if they are a creative director or a project manager. They can be workaholics to a fault. They strive for perfection in their business lives, often to the detriment of their personal lives. But what they are not are beck and call servants with no thoughts of their own who are wrong if they challenge a client’s POV and push the envelope against the norm.

Agencies can easily become bastions of second guessing if they are afraid to ask tough question, for fear of seeming insubordinate to their clients, ergo jeopardizing the fee. And unfortunately, some clients foster this behavior as opposed to driving for a cultural of transparency and candor to drive solutions to business problems.

I distinctly remember a senior-level colleague once stating to a group of senior client leaders that “we are going right, but we are telling the agency that we are going left.” And collusion on my part, yes—guilty as charged! But I learned what not to be as a client from that experience.

An agency/client relationship must be nurtured, protected, championed, cherished and refreshed when it gets stale. How do you think certain relationships lasted 25-plus years back in the day? My best agency relationships and some of the best work delivered were the results of candid, straightforward conversations, sprinkled with a dash of clear but challenging direction and collaboration.

And don’t forget to get out of the way. Encourage them to make your palms sweaty. You’ll be surprised at the results of being partners versus vendors.