Darren Woolley on the briefs that conceal boardroom disagreements, the cost of keeping clients comfortable, and why an agency that stops arguing may have stopped trying.
By the time a brand decides to replace its agency, it usually has a convincing account of what went wrong. The thinking became predictable. The team lost its energy. Work took too long, and the agency stopped bringing ideas nobody had asked for. A pitch offers the prospect of starting again with sharper people, fresh enthusiasm and a relationship that has yet to disappoint anyone.
Darren Woolley’s first concern is what will survive that change. The approval process will probably stay. So will the stakeholders who disagree about what the business needs, the feedback that arrives too late, and the senior executive whose personal preferences can overturn an agreed brief. A new agency may win the account without knowing how much of its predecessor’s experience it is about to inherit.
In his work advising on agency pitches and relationships, Woolley examines the conditions under which agencies are expected to perform. His argument places an uncomfortable responsibility on marketing leaders: clients help shape the behaviour they eventually complain about. Reward agreement consistently enough and an agency learns to stop challenging you. Make every decision difficult and its strongest people may find another account to work on. Silence can feel like a relationship improving, even as its value is disappearing.
This does not absolve agencies of responsibility. Woolley is equally clear that missed deadlines and weak thinking belong with the agency when the client has fulfilled its side of the agreement. The difficulty is establishing what actually happened before dissatisfaction becomes another tender. We spoke to him about how clients earn better work, what agencies should investigate before accepting an account, and why the most useful review may begin inside the marketing department.
M: When a brand says it needs a new agency, how do you establish whether the agency is actually the problem?
Most marketing tenders are initiated to solve internal client failures rather than agency incompetence. When marketing returns decline or day-to-day delivery encounters friction, initiating an agency review is the easiest administrative reaction. It projects decisive leadership to the executive committee without requiring the marketing team to interrogate its own operational shortcomings.
In practice, agencies underperform because the client has failed to define a successful commercial outcome, or because internal governance has deteriorated. If the client cannot articulate a clear objective before approaching the market, it may be using the tender to externalise its own strategic confusion. The agency becomes a scapegoat for ambiguous targets, shifting priorities and corporate indecision.
Before proceeding with any pitch, we require the client to establish an explicit, measurable definition of success for both the review and the ongoing partnership. We examine the commercial reasons for pitching and identify the specific failure the client expects a new supplier to correct.
If internal delays, inconsistent briefing and broken approval hierarchies are driving the friction, running a tender wastes time and capital. Without repairing that internal alignment, any new agency will encounter the same obstacles.
M: Agencies face extensive scrutiny to win an account. What should they ask to see before agreeing to work with a client?
Agencies regularly erode their profitability and exhaust their staff by competing for clients whose internal operating environments make successful work impossible. The tender is conventionally an asymmetric interrogation: the agency must prove its capabilities, financial standing and strategic rigour, while the client acts as an unexamined judge.
That imbalance allows brands to hide operational dysfunction, cumbersome governance and aggressive commercial demands behind the strength of their name. Agencies accept these conditions out of commercial urgency, only to discover after appointment that the client has unworkable payment terms, undefined scopes or an inability to sign off decisions.
Agencies need systematic reverse due diligence before signing an NDA or committing unbillable hours. Is the pitch list reasonably contained? Is the incumbent being used purely for benchmarking? Will the agency have direct access to executive decision-makers, or will everything be screened through procurement?
Contract terms, payment timelines and scope expectations should be transparent from the outset. Beyond its ability to pay, a client needs to demonstrate stable agency tenure, clear decision-making authority and an operating model that respects supplier sustainability.
M: “Chemistry” often helps decide who wins a pitch. How do you distinguish a team that can do difficult work together from people who simply enjoy agreeing with one another?
Most chemistry sessions test for personal comfort and compliance rather than the ability to produce difficult, commercially valuable work together. When these sessions are informal conversations, marketing teams instinctively gravitate towards people who mirror their personalities and validate their assumptions.
They confuse social rapport with professional competence. If an agency agrees with every client assertion during a pitch, that signals submissiveness rather than strategic capability. Working chemistry requires cultural compatibility and intellectual friction, yet standard pitch formats reward superficial charm because genuine challenge carries an immediate commercial risk.
Marketers should replace conversational chemistry meetings with structured working workshops. Use the session to challenge the agency’s thinking and its approach to existing case studies and campaigns.
That reveals how the agency handles disagreement and pushes back on flawed premises. It also reveals whether the client can accept a challenge without becoming defensive. Constructive debate that produces a sharper understanding of the business tells you considerably more than a pleasant conversation over coffee.
M: A brief can look clear on paper while concealing disagreement inside the business. How do you establish whether the client has actually decided what it wants?
Contradictory and bloated briefs are political compromises engineered to paper over executive division. Marketing leaders face conflicting mandates from sales, finance, product and regional executives. When leadership cannot agree on priorities, such as protecting operating margin or pursuing short-term volume, marketing drafts a brief that attempts to accommodate every agenda.
The organisation then hands that brief to an agency, hoping creative execution will reconcile opposing business goals. When the work fails to satisfy competing internal factions, the agency is blamed for a conflict the client’s leadership failed to settle.
We test for this by examining the composition and alignment of the client’s pitch team. Every relevant business stakeholder needs to be involved, including commercial, product and financial leadership. During interactive sessions, we ask direct trade-off questions that require stakeholders to choose between competing outcomes in real time.
If senior executives give conflicting directions or hesitate to commit, there is still an unresolved internal debate. The tender should not proceed until those stakeholders explicitly agree on their primary strategic objective.
M: Brands say they want an agency that challenges them. What makes that challenge commercially safe when it questions the judgement of the person controlling the budget?
Marketers often say they want to be challenged, but when the challenge questions the budget holder’s judgement, it is treated as insubordination. Trust becomes something the client grants and can withdraw whenever executive pride is dented, although it should be built on shared risk and accountability.
When an agency operates under a thirty-day termination clause and precarious contract terms, challenging the person controlling the budget represents an existential financial risk. Agency leaders quickly learn that protecting fee income requires deference to executive preferences.
Honest disagreement becomes commercially safe when governance and remuneration structures explicitly protect it from personal retaliation. Agency evaluation must be linked to objective commercial measures rather than subjective client satisfaction scores.
Marketing leaders need rules of engagement that separate professional challenge from contractual vulnerability. When an agency pushes back, assess its argument against agreed strategic objectives and market evidence. The discussion should examine commercial risk without becoming a personal confrontation.
M: What does a client’s feedback reveal about power inside its organisation?
Vague or highly prescriptive feedback often reflects the internal political anxieties of the client organisation. In politically cautious environments, marketing managers can spend more effort managing stakeholders than evaluating commercial effectiveness.
Arbitrary aesthetic demands or vague claims that the work “fails to resonate” can mean a team is trying to placate a senior executive who was never properly aligned with the brief. Cosmetic adjustments and non-committal criticism become ways of avoiding a difficult conversation with the budget holder.
The test is whether each requested modification connects to the original brief and consumer insights. Legitimate criticism identifies an unmet strategic objective and leaves the agency to find the solution. Political appeasement dictates specific, subjective alterations without a commercial justification.
Feedback needs objective evaluation criteria. If a stakeholder cannot explain how an amendment serves the target audience or commercial goal, that instruction is serving internal political positioning.
M: Can a good agency become a worse agency by learning how to keep a particular client satisfied?
Clients frequently turn high-performing agencies into mediocre order-takers by rewarding unquestioning compliance. Agencies are commercial enterprises, and they adapt quickly to client behaviour. When a client penalises debate, bristles at pushback or demands immediate execution of every internal whim, the agency learns that survival depends on keeping the client comfortable.
Over time, it removes its most rigorous thinkers from the account and replaces them with agreeable project managers who prioritise smooth delivery. The client cultivates that subservience, then eventually dismisses the agency for the lack of proactivity its own behaviour produced.
Maintaining agency capability requires transparent communication, disciplined relationship management and structured two-way performance reviews. Clients need to reward constructive challenge and measure the agency on business outcomes.
Those reviews should assess whether the agency feels commercially safe questioning instructions and whether the client listens. If an agency has stopped interrogating briefs and simply executes every request, the marketing leader needs to recognise that the client’s internal culture may have compromised the value it receives.
M: What does a difficult client cost an agency beyond the hours recorded on a timesheet, and how do those costs find their way back to the client?
Erratic demands, dismissive feedback and bureaucratic delays cause damage well beyond recorded hours. The strongest strategic and creative thinkers are mobile and highly sought after. Agency leadership quietly moves them to more collaborative, respectful accounts to protect morale and prevent resignations.
In their place, it installs compliant, risk-averse operators who concentrate on managing the process. The agency becomes defensive, pads staffing schedules, builds administrative buffers into timelines and stops investing discretionary intellectual energy. The client continues paying full retainer rates while receiving work from a demoralised, second-tier team.
The cost becomes visible in staff turnover and the absence of unsolicited thinking. Marketing leaders should examine personnel continuity on their account over an eighteen-month period. Perpetual staff rotation, or an agency that never brings unprompted, commercially challenging ideas, can reveal what I call the hidden tax of toxicity.
Restoring value requires the client’s leadership to examine its own culture, establish professional boundaries and create conditions in which the strongest agency people actively want to work on the business.
M: Agencies are expected to demonstrate continuous improvement. What would a meaningful client performance review measure?
Most agency evaluations are administrative rituals that measure subjective client sentiment rather than commercial productivity or mutual accountability. Annual satisfaction surveys record historical grievances and personality clashes while ignoring the operational friction the client creates.
Under that power imbalance, an agency cannot give candid feedback about late approvals, chaotic briefing or compressed remuneration without risking its contract. The result is a sanitised, one-sided evaluation that protects internal dysfunction and blames the supplier for declining performance.
A meaningful evaluation needs a two-way, objective framework covering both the health of the relationship and its commercial arrangements. Specialised diagnostic tools such as Evalu8ing can support that process, but performance needs to be reviewed continuously and symmetrically.
The measures should cover mutual obligations: clarity of briefing, turnaround efficiency, approval discipline and the alignment between scope and fees. Crucially, the findings must reach executives who have the authority to change how the client organisation operates. Otherwise, the review produces another assessment of the supplier without correcting the conditions affecting its work.
M: Some clients believe they have an excellent relationship because their agency never complains. How can they tell whether the agency has simply decided speaking up is not worth it?
An agency that never complains may have calculated that honesty is a commercial liability. When it stops debating strategic direction, accepts every conflicting revision without comment and executes uninspired briefs without resistance, it has abandoned genuine partnership.
Agency leadership has decided that challenging executive opinions creates friction and threatens the monthly retainer. It protects revenue by giving the client exactly what it requests, allowing flawed work into the market because passive compliance is safer than professional pushback.
Marketing leaders should examine the level of intellectual friction in regular meetings. Does the agency present alternative strategic routes? Does it interrogate the business case behind a brief? Does it challenge unreasonable deadlines, or quietly absorb them?
Formal relationship management needs to solicit and protect dissenting views. Whether an agency actively defends strategic boundaries tells you a great deal about its commitment to commercial outcomes.
M: Pitch consultants are paid by the client too. How do you protect your own willingness to challenge them, and when would you refuse an assignment?
The client pays our invoice, but our professional responsibility is to the health of the partnership and the standard of the work. Many pitch intermediaries operate as transactional brokers whose business models depend on running as many reviews as possible.
Accepting agency success fees, participation charges or membership fees compromises independence. Even consultants funded exclusively by the marketer can fall into the habit of flattering the paying client instead of delivering uncomfortable truths.
The client-agency relationship is interdependent. One party cannot succeed if the other is structurally compromised, and acting as an uncritical representative of the marketer ignores half of that relationship. We love marketing, media and advertising, and we want the industry to be as good as it can be. Treating agencies as expendable vendors undermines that ambition.
We decline assignments when a marketer insists on compressed pitch timelines, conceals budgets, demands unpaid agency intellectual property or uses a tender purely to suppress supplier margins. If a marketing leader refuses to address internal governance failures or treat agencies as partners, the ethical response is to decline the brief.
M: How do you distinguish an agency making excuses from one accurately identifying obstacles on the client’s side?
You need an independent audit of workflow data and commercial facts. When an account underperforms, the client may say the agency lacks creative vitality and strategic rigour, while the agency privately blames disorganised briefs, slow approvals and scope creep. Without anyone tracking the mechanics, the discussion becomes finger-pointing.
Underperformance is rarely one-sided. It often emerges when remuneration no longer matches the scope, decision-making authority is fragmented across departments or operational discipline has broken down.
Examine the number of review rounds per asset, client approval times, the volume of out-of-scope requests and how often briefs change after production begins. Those measures help establish where the obstacles originate.
If briefs keep changing and sign-offs take weeks, the failure is on the client’s side. If the client briefs clearly and approves promptly while the agency misses deadlines or delivers weak strategic thinking, responsibility sits squarely with the agency. An evidence-based audit allows leadership to address the cause.
M: Before spending money finding a better agency, what should a marketing leader change internally? And what would convince you, three months later, that the change was real?
Start with briefing quality, approval bottlenecks, stakeholder involvement and remuneration. Marketing organisations complain that agencies lack initiative or strategic depth while maintaining systems that penalise both. Long approval chains, delayed feedback, ambiguous briefs and endless subjective revisions exhaust agency teams.
Compress fees steadily enough and senior practitioners are replaced by junior account handlers focused on administrative compliance. Clients cannot keep those conditions in place and expect consistently better performance.
Marketing leaders should reduce approval chains to essential decision-makers, eliminate consensus-driven committee reviews and establish disciplined briefing sign-offs.
Three months later, the evidence should be concrete: approval times have fallen from weeks to forty-eight hours, agreed briefs remain stable through production, and work reaches final sign-off within two or three rounds. In many cases, putting that internal discipline in place restores the incumbent agency’s performance and removes the need for a pitch altogether.
