5 Ways to get the best out of your creative agency

The relationship between clients and creative agencies is crucial to excellent work. In fact, it is irrelevant whether you’ve chosen the top multinational agency for your campaign or a small independent. What counts is how you manage the creatives and your internal stakeholders.

Many clients are easily disappointed by results but fail to see their responsibility in what became the outcome. Creatives are led on slippery slopes by vague briefs and changing requirements. Corporate politics get involved and the relationship is strained. But with a few tricks, you can improve the collaboration, keep inspiration high and shine with brilliant results.

1. Do your homework.
   Before approaching your agency for a new campaign, film or design project, know what you want out of it. Get all stakeholders involved early if you need them for final validation. You don’t want them to boycott your work once it’s already finished or far along.
2. Also, check that your brief is prepared. A good agency will help you refine it, but you must do the legwork. Agree on must-have content, tone of voice, deliverables, deadlines and budget.
3. Be honest.
   When you discuss the project’s initial phases you should advance doubts, preferences and no-go zones. While a good agency will help you gain confidence about scary new initiatives that are worth pursuing, they will need you to be clear so that you can work together on arguments in case anyone else in the validation line needs to be convinced.
4. It’s tough to defend a project when your own position isn’t 100% solid. A good creative strategist will give you the sales pitch and the proof too back up your stance.
5. Respect the creative process.
   Once you’ve agreed and you are convinced you’re doing the right thing, let the creatives do their job. We all know how to write an email without spelling or grammar mistakes (at least those of us in communication I should hope), but that doesn’t make us writers. We might have a camera at home and shoot the occasional session of our family, but we cannot pretend to be photographers. Many of us more or less speak a foreign language, but we aren’t translators.
6. There is nothing more frustrating to a creative with years of experience than a communication manager trying to do the work for them. Imagine having to tell a client, who pays the bills after all, that what they’re proposing is clichéd, simplistic or plain boring. They might not in fact, thus compromising the quality of your campaign.
7. So if you find yourself making suggestions for replacements, stop in your track. Instead, try to identify what bothers you and share it with the team. They will take care of proposing new options, crafted by professionals.
8. The same holds true when you take first drafts for feedback. Encourage your colleagues and managers to think about why they don’t like a certain aspect of your proposal and avoid giving room for specific suggestions.
9. Work as hard as they do.
   Many communication managers are proud of having a range of agencies working for them in the background for a loadful of bucks while they are sitting back waiting for the shine to fall down on them when a good campaign is born.
10. That works for some people some of time. But not only can you actively improve the outcome by doing your part of the job as well as the creatives do. You will also gain the respect of your agency. This is crucial for the trusting relationship at the base of each outstanding creative process.
11. As a client, we can do research, assemble work material, spend extra time preparing briefs, presentations, validation meetings and implementation processes. We can often get on the phone with our creatives asking what we can do for them. We can do the same with our managers, making sure they are on board all the way. We can translate the creative language into business lingo and make sure that whatever we hold in our hands at the end of a creative process is used respectfully and as widely as possible.
12. Challenge your artists.
    The Medici were probably named all sorts of things when the family poured unfathomable sums into one of the most courageous and improbable projects of their time: to let Brunelleschi build for the Florence cathedral a dome larger than any at the time and without external buttresses. It was deemed impossible.
13. When the builders started to fear for their life in sight of the heavenly heights under the stormy sky, the artist and architect, hardly the builder type, picked up his robe, climbed the scaffolding himself and got his hands dirty, his enthusiasm and conviction dragging everyone with him to complete a building that would enter human History.
14. While asking the impossible could backfire, it is wise to consider following your high profile creative on a path of exploration and challenge. I’ve gotten the best work when I provoked my agencies or artists to dream of new frontiers.
15. If the Florentines had done a feasibility study, gotten the city’s stamp of approval and resisted Brunelleschi’s passion and megalomania, the World would have one less wonder today.

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