Halloween may be over, but the feeling of fear lives on in every agency whenever they think about their clients.
To be fair, though, clients can be equally “scared of ghosts” whenever they deal with agencies. They just don’t always know how—or want—to say what the real problem is. So instead, what comes out is often some highly lethal feedback.
So what exactly are clients afraid of when it comes to agencies?
This article is based on conversations with friends and colleagues on the client side, combined with my own experience. I’ve tried to generalize those conversations into a few recurring fears below.
Fear #1: We Don’t Have the Same End Goal
This isn’t exactly a “fear,” but it is something clients often find frustrating when working with agencies. In my course, I often tell students this: if the brand has a great sales year, it’s a success for the entire company. But if sales collapse, somehow it becomes the fault of… the Marketing team.
That’s obviously an oversimplification, but broadly speaking, Marketing is the team that spends money, while Sales is the team that makes money. One of Marketing’s main roles is to help Sales sell more and ultimately achieve the brand’s business objectives. So yes, the pressure to deliver actual business results is very real.
From those business objectives, a good Marketing team should be able to translate them into clear and tightly defined marketing objectives and communication objectives before briefing the agency—so the agency doesn’t walk away complaining, “What kind of brief is this? Nothing is clear.”
You would think that once the brief is clear, the agency could simply develop creative ideas that solve the problem. But sometimes the agency pushes the creativity too far. So far that the work might win a Cannes Lion if it were submitted as a case study, while the Sales team looks at it and has absolutely no idea what they’re supposed to say to customers or consumers to actually sell the product.
The agency’s goal is often to make something incredibly creative and exciting. The client’s goal is to achieve a business objective. Clients hire agencies to provide creative services that solve a problem, not to be creative for creativity’s sake.
Fear #2: When Process Beats Common Sense
A client friend of mine who works for an F&B brand once told me about a customer who had a problem with one of their products and sent a very angry message to the brand’s Facebook page.
Because the issue was urgent, the moment P. and her brand team saw the message, they immediately sat down, agreed on how to resolve the situation, drafted an outline for the response, and contacted the agency to turn it into proper copy. When the agency account person received the request, their response was that TOMORROW, they would first arrange a meeting with the Planning and Account teams to align internally. Then they would brief the Creative team. Then the content writer could write the response. Meanwhile, the furious customer looked about one hour away from showing up and setting the office on fire.
The client was basically: ⁉️😃 ⁉️
Technically, that was the agency’s process. So from a procedural standpoint, the client couldn’t really accuse them of doing anything wrong. But in terms of trust? Straight down the drain.
Professionalism isn’t always about following the process. Sometimes professionalism is just having common sense.
Fear #3: Doing More Just to Prove You Can
This fear is somewhat related to the first one. Agencies often have this urge to prove to clients that they can do more than what was asked of them, hoping the client will be impressed and reward them with more work. In reality, most of those extra ideas end up in the idea graveyard.
Once, I worked with Agency X on the launch campaign for Brand Y. Agency X had been directly appointed, so there wasn’t even a pitch involved. Until then, Brand Y had only been available in Vietnam through unofficial imports, but consumers already loved it. Seeing the opportunity, the brand decided to officially enter the Vietnamese market. The brief to the agency was straightforward: localize an existing APAC creative idea for Vietnam and develop the IMC plan.
As the planner, I thought the brief was perfectly clear. The regional creative idea also worked very well for Vietnam. The important thing was to focus on the IMC plan. The Managing Director, who was a foreigner, did not agree.
They said we needed to go back and review the brand’s… brand equity pyramid and propose a Vietnam-specific version. Why? “To demonstrate our capabilities.”
My reaction: ⁉️😃 ⁉️
This was a brand equity framework that the company had spent years, possibly decades, building at the global level. And now we wanted to walk in and suggest changing it. A proper brand equity project can take anywhere from three months to a year. It is not something you casually reinvent in two weeks. Worse, it wasn’t even in the brief. And the client was already under enormous time pressure.
I pushed back because it simply wasn’t realistic. I wanted us to focus on what the client had actually briefed us to do. The Managing Director eventually decided to handle the brand equity section personally.
And what happened? Exactly what you’d expect.
During the very first presentation, the client—also a foreigner—did an admirable job of suppressing their rage and politely said: “Thank you for thinking this through so thoroughly, but could you please focus on the brief?”
And just like that, Agency X successfully demonstrated its capabilities.
Its ability to understand the client. Poorly.
What surprised me later was that every single client I spoke to had experienced some version of this. And they all agreed on something: They’re not afraid that an agency’s work might not be brilliant.They’re afraid of agencies that think they understand the client better than the client understands themselves.
Fear #4: Performative Agency Behavior
Proposal quality aside, experienced clients can usually tell pretty quickly whether an agency genuinely has the capabilities it claims to have, or whether it’s performing. Here are a few roles agencies like to play that can unintentionally irritate clients.
The first is bringing a huge crowd to meetings just to show off the size of the team. You’ve probably seen this before: there aren’t enough seats in the meeting room, so people start dragging extra chairs in from outside. The clients I spoke to said they had absolutely no problem with agencies bringing junior team members along so they could learn. But there is a difference between coming to learn and coming to perform. After enough experiences with giant agency teams that looked impressive in the meeting room but delivered weak work afterwards, clients naturally start becoming skeptical. A large team creates high expectations. If the outcome is poor, the disappointment becomes even bigger.
The next one is flexing capabilities you don’t actually have. A recent example is AI. There are already countless tools in the creative world that help Creative teams produce better work. An agency can simply say that its team is highly proficient in using AI. That’s perfectly fine. So why insist on saying things like: “We own proprietary AI technology.” I know that some network agencies and independent agencies genuinely do own proprietary technology. But in many other cases, it’s mostly performative.
After finishing this article, I’m feeling a little “scared of ghosts” myself, scared I might offend a few agencies. After all, I came from the agency world too, and here I am writing all of this. But then I thought: whatever, I’ll just publish it. Those who find it relevant can read it. I’m just an unclaimed flower anyway. I don’t represent anyone. 🌺
Hopefully this article can help make sure that, for both clients and agencies, not every day feels like Halloween.
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