How To Create A Healthy Client/Agency Relationship

The relationship between a client and an ad agency is kind of like a marriage.

We both choose to enter the partnership because we see the incredible potential of what we can create together, but to make something beautiful, there needs to be communication and trust.

Otherwise things can sour, and no one likes a messy client breakup—especially when the ads grow up so fast.

That’s why at Harmon Brothers, we’ve worked out some general rules of thumb for making our clients feel safe, happy, and excited about the future with us. We’re not perfect, but we have a lot of real-world experience that has helped us get pretty darn good.

You can steal these insights and use them with whatever ad agency you work with, your internal team, or heck, you can apply it to your real life marriage—because it all settles down to communication. Shocker.

We set expectations together. We have a brain dump call for every project where our client gives us the low-down on who their customers are, how they want to be talked to, the results they’ve had so far, so we can deliver what the client is looking for.

We have multiple calls where our creative leaders can ask questions so we can mitigate as many misunderstandings as possible and skip to the fun part of creating together.

We ask for feedback. No one understands the tone and personality of the brand more than the founders. So it’s essential that we look to the client for high level feedback.

Unlike some marketing agencies, we include the client in our writing retreats, and invite them from the onset for feedback because we know how valuable the feedback loop is throughout the whole process if we want the ideal finished product.

We ask for trust. When we get feedback, we take it very seriously, and we ask for our clients to trust us in moving forward with the best creative solutions possible.

To save time and money it works best if the roles of the client and the agency are clearly defined, and we trust each other to thrive at each of our jobs.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love working with our clients. They’re the salt of the earth and their products make the world a better place.