Nine months ago, I moved from the Client side of the table to the Agency side.
Since then, I’ve spent time getting under the skin of our Agencies. I’ve seen teams producing smart, effective work that Clients value and people can be proud of.
I also know the conversations we’re having are changing across the industry. Clients are under pressure to show what marketing is doing for the business. Agencies are under pressure to prove the value they create.
That conversation can easily become fixated on delivery: what has been made, how it performed and whether it was worth the money. All of that matters. But there is a harder question underneath it: was this the right thing to do in the first place?
Because good work isn’t always the right work.
The real opportunity is to collaborate to make sure strong work is focused on the right business challenge.
We need to start with the real problem
The question I’ve always asked the businesses I’ve led is still the same: what problem are we trying to solve?
The question sounds simple. In practice, action often overtakes diagnosis. It is easier to plan what we want to do than to identify the issue we need to solve.
I’ve seen this across businesses. Not through a lack of ambition or intelligence, but because markets are complex, teams are stretched and priorities move quickly. A brief is often the first visible expression of a wider business challenge, not the whole of it.
This is where Agencies add strategic and consultative value: helping Clients look beyond the immediate ask, identify the issue beneath it and bring the right capabilities around the real problem.
What arrives as a marketing brief may actually be a strategy, culture, proposition or frontline issue in disguise. Without proper diagnosis, even brilliant work can be wasted: winning awards and delivering results without moving the business far enough.
That’s why I believe strong Client-Agency relationships are vital. They create the space to ask better questions, challenge assumptions and work towards the right commercial answer.
We need to speak the language of growth
To do that, we need to make growth the starting point of more Client-Agency conversations. That means beginning with the challenges Clients need help solving, then deciding which capabilities need to come together around them.
Marketing leaders are often caught between the brief and the boardroom. They need to justify that the money was well spent and that it was right to spend it in the first place.
The opportunity for Agencies is to translate what we know and do into the language of growth and commercial value. Creativity can be invaluable in those conversations, especially when the challenge is complex and the answer is not obvious. But to make that contribution, Agencies need the credibility and access to be involved earlier and higher up, where the real business questions are being shaped.
The most complex business problems rarely sit neatly within a single marketing discipline. Increasingly, value comes from bringing different perspectives and capabilities together
around a shared commercial challenge. Strategy, brand, technology, data, communications, customer experience and culture all play a role. The real value is knowing how to bring them
together in an open, integrated and focused way.
We need stronger, more honest partnerships
When I was running strategic partnerships at BP, my definition of a proper partnership was whether both sides had permission to say no. The strongest relationships were those in which both sides could challenge each other to pursue the best outcome, even when that meant admitting the right answer might require bringing in different expertise.
That mindset matters more as businesses change quickly. The best organisations are constantly evolving, responding to shifts in customer demand, markets, technology and culture. To be useful at that level, we need to understand not only what a business wants to say, but what it may need to change.
You see the same issue now with AI. The organisations getting the most value are not starting with the technology, but with a business problem, a source of friction or an opportunity for growth. They identify use cases, understand where the greatest impact may come from, and then decide whether AI offers a genuinely useful solution.
The Agencies that create the most value will be those that treat diagnosis as seriously as the work that follows. Being clear about the problem being solved, why it matters commercially and who needs to help make it happen.
Because brilliant work is wasted if it answers the wrong question.
