What I Used to Wish Clients Knew, Now That I’m the Client

For years I sat on the agency side, working with hundreds of clients over that time and seeing patterns in how we were briefed. There were the ones who sent a three-line brief and expected a fully formed campaign back, then seemed genuinely surprised when it missed the mark but there were also the ones that overwhelmed with information and then couldn’t understand why we had focused on the wrong part. I told myself I’d never be that client once I was on the other side of the table (oh how easy it is in theory, huh?). 

The first thing I got wrong was assuming that being a good client mainly meant being a nice one. Polite briefs, quick sign-off, a friendly working relationship. Useful, but not the same thing as being a client an agency can actually do great work for. What I didn’t appreciate until I switched sides is how much of the agency’s output depends on what you choose to tell them, and how few clients ever ask the agency directly what they actually need. Sometimes the most useful thing I can say to an agency is simply “I don’t know”, and then work it out with them, rather than pretend I’ve got a fully resolved answer I don’t actually have. I think how many meetings could have been saved if someone from the client had just asked us what we needed, or we’d been clearer in telling them. Now that I’m on the other side of that table, I try to ask it myself, what do they need from me that they’re not currently getting? It’s a simple question and it’s remarkable how rarely it gets asked in either direction. 

Most clients default to one of two extremes. I remember, agency-side, being sent well over a gigabyte of resources and materials for a single pitch. Decks, documents, research, audience segmentation on top of audience segmentation. Nobody on our team could tell what in that pile actually mattered and what was just bumf that had been swept in because someone thought more was safer than less. We ended up guessing at what the client cared about, which is a strange position to be in when the whole point of a pitch is to show you understand them. Turns out we picked the wrong segmentation and focused on entirely the wrong audience. The other extreme is just as common: give almost nothing, on the theory that a good agency should be able to work it out, as if creativity runs on instinct rather than information. The information an agency actually needs is usually a specific, short list – who the work has to convince, what’s already been tried and failed, what constraints are real versus assumed, and what “good” looks like to the people who’ll sign it off. Some answers to anticipated challenges also don’t go amiss! 

The bigger shift I’ve noticed, and this worries me more, is how agencies get talked about internally these days. Agencies should be discussed as partners with context on the business. Increasingly I hear them discussed as a line item, a cost to be scrutinised, a supplier to be managed with a slight edge of suspicion about whether they’re really earning their fee. Some of that scrutiny is fair, but treating an agency as a cost centre by default, rather than as an extension of the team that happens to sit outside the building, changes what you get back from them. 

If I could go back and tell my agency-side self-one thing, it wouldn’t be about the clients who briefed badly. It would be that the good ones were rarer than I realised, and worth noticing when they showed up. I try to be one of them now. I don’t always manage it, but I know exactly what it looks like when I don’t.