Why Agencies Must Take the Brief 'a Step Beyond'

'Know what’s best for your clients before they do'

The partnership between an agency and brand is the foundation of the whole industry’s success. Agencies want to be embedded in the client’s business and fully understand their makeup to make the best decisions. Brands want agencies that will support their vision. Both sides want to make successful work.

When they pull it off, it sounds idyllic: the client and agency share the same marketing goals and ethos, working together toward a common goal. In my humble opinion, this notion of agencies and brands standing side by side on the road to success is outdated.

Agencies shouldn’t work in lockstep with their clients. If they find themselves in tandem—ever—they’re already behind.

As the agency, if you look at a project from the same vantage point as your client and you want to make changes, you won’t see anything different. You may have the opportunity to catch solutions through a different lens—but ultimately, your POV remains the same. When you choose a different path or scout in fresh directions, you get a better understanding of the entire landscape. With that information, you can properly see every creative opportunity for your client. Even the ones that go unasked.

I’m not inventing a new advertising mindset. But it’s an approach that I believe will give the client the best agency partnership they actually need, even if they don’t know it yet. A partnership isn’t about being attached by the hip all the time. It’s about looking ahead to uncover opportunities based on forward thinking, like helping a client reach their next phase of growth. And all agencies departments can do this work, as opposed to just creative. This mindset succeeds anywhere within the organization, because it’s cultural at its core.

As for how agencies can scout ahead in practice, we make it a point not to just answer client briefs as-asked. Apologies, current and future clients. We bring them the option they requested, but also stretch the idea as far as it can go—even past the ask. In that sense, we take the brief a step beyond and ask for forgiveness later. Usually, we don’t have to. With an open mind, agencies can find more opportunities to surprise and delight their audiences. These kinds of advantages matter when facing increasingly competitive markets.

For LPL Financial, the brand had secured a marketing partnership with the PGA outside of our engagement. Folding this partnership and its potential into our marketing was not a part of our initial brief. But when we heard the news, we did it anyway. We made sure our targeting included locations where PGA attendees would congregate that also met LPL’s new consumer audience targets.

By putting our efforts in different places to pursue the same shared future goals, we made sure our efforts didn’t come across as abandoning the client brief completely. We retained the partnership, but stayed one step ahead and opened the opportunity for greater outcomes overall.

Agencies should always ask themselves: How can a brand extend themselves, and how can marketing be part of that solution? Using marketing as an opportunity to move the client business forward removes the agency from a reactionary position and sets up the relationship for long-term success. And that’s the ultimate goal.

If you want to see what’s around the corner, you have to be first around the corner. On its face, that sounds obvious, but we all see examples of churn far too often.

Know what’s best for your clients before they do. Be their James Bond. Without scouts, secret agents deployed to look ahead, agencies and brands risk creative stagnation and diminished results.

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