Your Agency Probably Isn't the Problem

Most people spend more time choosing an agency than telling it what to do. Several weeks on the search, a few conversations, a look at the work, a chat with someone they worked with before, a rate discussed and a contract signed. Then, having taken a month over the decision, the same person briefs the winner in a 40 minute call and a paragraph of email.

All the care goes into the choosing. Almost none goes into the direction. And 6 months later, when the work is not landing, the conclusion drawn is that the wrong agency was picked, which starts the search again, and the whole cycle repeats with a different logo on the invoice.

It is worth being clear about the sums involved, because they get discussed in monthly instalments and monthly instalments are how expensive things get bought without anybody quite noticing. An agency retainer of £5,000 a month is £60,000 a year. That is more than the marketing manager you decided you could not afford to hire, and it is being spent on the basis of a brief that in most cases could fit on a beer mat.

There is a line that circulates in the advertising industry, usually credited to Sir John Hegarty of BBH though David Ogilvy is sometimes given the honour instead. Give me the freedom of a tight brief.

It sounds backwards. You would assume the people paid to be creative want as much room as they can get and that a tight brief is a cage. What they actually want is a clear problem. A tight brief does not tell an agency what to make. It tells them what has to be true once they have made it, which is the only thing that lets them commit, argue for the braver idea and know whether they have succeeded. Give a good team a vague brief and they will not produce something wilder and better. They will produce something safe, because when nobody has said what winning looks like, the sensible commercial move is to avoid losing.

I learned this in a meeting I would rather not describe, so I will.

Years ago, running marketing inside a large technology business, I sat in a quarterly review with an agency I had chosen and a retainer I had personally signed off. They had done a lot. The deck ran to something like 60 slides and every one of them was accurate. Campaigns delivered, content produced, impressions up, engagement up, a nice chart with a line going the right way. About 40 minutes in, someone from the commercial side of the business, who had said nothing until that point, asked which part of this had made us any money.

Nobody answered. Not the agency, who could hardly be expected to, and not me, who should have been able to. I had approved a year of work without ever telling anyone what the work was supposed to change. The agency had given me precisely what I asked for, which was activity, and I had been in the job long enough to know that was not the same as results.

That is the part worth sitting with. Those meetings are not usually the agency's failure. They are the client's, and they are almost always a decision problem rather than a delivery problem.

A thin brief is rarely a sign of a lazy client. It is a sign of an undecided one. Writing a real brief forces you to say who this is for, what you want them to do, why they would pick you over the obvious alternative and what would have to be true in 6 months for the money to have been well spent. Those are hard questions and they belong to you rather than the agency. A vague brief is often those decisions being quietly handed over, in the hope that somebody else will make them and that they will happen to be right.

Which brings me to something worth knowing about how better agencies work internally. They employ people whose entire job is to take what the client asked for and turn it into something a creative team can act on. In advertising they are called planners. Their existence is a polite institutional admission that client briefs routinely arrive incomplete and that somebody has to reconstruct the missing decisions before any work can begin. If you are paying a retainer, some slice of it is funding that reconstruction. You are paying skilled strangers to guess at things only you know.

When the brief is thin, three things follow with some reliability.

The agency defaults to what it is best at, or to what it sells most of. This is not cynicism on their part, it is what any reasonable supplier does when direction is missing. A performance agency will propose performance. A content studio will propose content. A brand agency will find that what you really need is a rebrand. Each is being entirely sincere and each is answering the question they know how to answer, which may not be your question.

Second, the work starts being judged on taste. With no agreed measure the only available yardstick is whether the people in the room like it, so the loudest opinion wins and the agency spends its energy managing your preferences instead of solving your problem. This is where the months go.

Third, and most expensively, nobody can be held to account, including you. An agency cannot fail against a target that was never set. Neither can you. Everyone stays busy, the invoices clear and the only thing anybody can state with confidence at the end of the year is what it cost.

None of this needs a long document. Two sides is plenty and the work is an afternoon of honest thinking rather than a week of writing. Six things have to be in it.

Most agency reviews are a presentation. They should be an interrogation conducted politely, and four questions do nearly all of the work.