How To Be A Good Client

This is the first in a two-parter focused on the agency/client relationship. I’m going to start off with “How To Be A Good Client.” Don’t fret: tomorrow, in the interest of fairness and accountability, I will follow it with “How To Be A Good Agency.”

Treat your agency like a part of your team. Partner, any way you look at it, is an inclusive term. Agencies work best when they’re a part of – or least aware of – goals, performance, internal news, changes, initiatives, et al. Unless you have that kind of exchange you’ll be lucky to get any smart ideas. Ideas come from understanding challenges and opportunities, and if your agency doesn’t know what those are, they won’t spend much time thinking about you.

Don’t show your wife the creative. The process goes something like this: you do backgrounding stuff, you set objectives, you agree on strategies, and you set the agency’s creative team loose. They sweat over it, live it, breathe it in and out, and finally present concepts. You have an immediate reaction to one (I call it The Girl At The Bar Syndrome: there’s just one you really, really want to buy a drink for), and you all go off believing you’re headed in the right direction…until the agency hears “I’m just gonna show it to a few people…”

This rarely turns out well. If you need to parade it around the office, grab a drum and let’s go. But as often as someone integral to the team weighs in, someone in a client’s personal life will take a stab at it, too. That’s fine. If that person is in the target audience.

The point is not to doubt your own instincts. Ask 50 people for their opinion on a concept and you’ll get 67 different answers. Whose matters most?

Yes, you can get it cheaper somewhere else. When your agency gives you a price, they are (or should be) basing it on experience knowing what it takes to do the job properly. When you Wal-Mart the project – when you make the choice to buy on price alone – you will get just what you pay for. That’s not to say good creative can’t be done inexpensively. Rather, it’s my way of saying that you should expect to pay a fair price for good work.

Understand there will be challenges. You can’t expect any relationship to go along swimmingly for years without an occasional challenge to the peace. The key is not to file it away and let it accumulate until you can bear no more. As soon as something happens that you don’t like – you get a confusing invoice, a link doesn’t work, someone screws up an insertion – pick up the phone and make your ire known. A good agency will fix things.

Understand an agency’s business model. Agencies make money, like attorneys and plumbers, by the hour or by the value of the work done. We charge when we’re working on your business. If we don’t charge for our service we don’t have a business. In tomorrow’s blog, “How To Be A Good Agency,” I’ll discuss how agencies need to “throw in a little free bathwater with the baby” occasionally, but if you’re getting value from something – an idea, plans, energy behind a challenge – an agency should get value from doing it.

Tune in tomorrow for the other half of this sordid story...