Congratulations! You’re about to greenlight some much-needed work on your brand. The goals are clear, the scope is defined, and the timing is right. One critical decision remains: the partner you choose to get the work done.
By this point, a number of factors have brought a few agency hopefuls to this final stretch. You’ve considered their reputations as companies, experienced their energy in the room, perhaps even heard some early-stage ideas on what your brand might become.
But now it’s time to look your would-be partners in the eye and ask the hard question that few leaders in your position dare to pose. What have they done for clients lately?
Here’s the little secret that many of our industry peers would rather us not reveal. More often than not, the case studies they show you are carefully chosen to dodge this question. Because they don’t have a good answer for it.
Your finalists may reveal beautiful, high-profile work that their agency did on a brand you admire. But they won’t mention that the images on those slides are from 15 years ago. They won’t specify whether the people who did the work are still employed there. Worse yet, the “project” in question might be purely speculative—a solution in search of a problem.
Don’t fall for these kinds of shenanigans. Your partnership—and your brand—deserve better. Now’s the time to ask agencies what they’ve done for clients lately.
When you ask agencies what they’ve done for clients lately, specifically address the individuals before you. Their employer’s past work may well have some relevance to your project. But turnover in this industry is often high, and you deserve to see the work of your would-be project team. They’re the ones whose talents will be entrusted with your future reputation.
Without this level of interrogation, their case study bears the authenticity of spotting Scarlett Johansson in a wedding photo on a colleague’s desk. Unless you’re fortunate enough to share an office with Ryan Reynolds, Colin Jost, or that other guy she married, you’re not getting the real picture.
When you probe about work they’ve done for clients lately, restrict your inquiry to projects that have solved real problems for organizations. Sure, speculative explorations can be a useful exercise for agencies. But they don’t reflect the strategic rigor and unique challenges of bringing work to market for a paying client.
For all its dazzle, spec work also lives in a fantasy land without the temporal and financial realities of real client work. Demand transparency from agencies on whether past efforts have been on time and on budget, resulting in a positive ongoing relationship with their partners.
After all, you’re allocating your budget dollars in exchange for an enjoyable collaboration that yields materials you can use. Not the musings of some late-night tissue session during a slow week—or a project that promised completion in months but ended up lasting years.
And when you direct the conversation to the work they’ve done for clients lately, look carefully at the last few years. Long-term relationships are great for business, but without a fresh influx of clients, agencies can get stale quickly. You deserve collaborators who have been challenging themselves regularly, solving new problems in a fresh stream of industries, time and again.
The team you hire must be ready to take your brand into the future—using its tools and techniques, getting ahead of its market trends, speaking its ever-evolving language. Otherwise, based on some case studies we’ve seen lately, you’re setting yourself up to be the best-looking brand of the 1990s.
You and your brand deserve a partner comprised of senior experts who do the work themselves. Who have brought a series of new and evolved brands to market for satisfied clients this year, not just back in the day. And whose focus is on where brands are headed, not only where they’ve been. You don’t need a greatest hits album. You need a hitmaker.
Pose the tough questions. Call out shenanigans. Insist on indelibility.
