It’s time to renew the vows: How to mend the fractured client/agency relationship

Opinion

Great relationships don’t manage risk. They manage trust. And trust is built on three things: ambition, decisiveness, and kindness, writes the co-founder of X&O.

I’ve spent twenty-five years in this business, and I can tell you: the client-agency relationship is fractured.

These aren’t irreconcilable differences. It’s not the time to lawyer up or anything. Just high time to hit the couch and let the truth pour out. It’s not everywhere. It’s not always. But it is often enough that it’s worth saying the hard parts out loud. The problem isn’t capability or budget. It’s not even scope creep or misaligned expectations.

It’s that both sides have become risk managers instead of risk takers

Clients have built fortresses of approval layers and stakeholder management. Agencies have perfected the art of presenting three options—safe, safer, and “the one we actually want you to pick, but we’re hedging our bets”.

We’ve engineered all the danger out of the work. And in doing so, we’ve engineered out everything that matters. The great relationships—the ones that produce work worth a damn—don’t manage risk. They manage trust. And trust is built on three things: ambition, decisiveness, and kindness.

A shared ambition

Most agencies come to the table with an ambitious fork and knife in hand, drooling over the potential of what could come out of that oven.

However, here’s the uncomfortable truth: most clients don’t actually want ambitious work. They want safe work that looks ambitious. Work that wins awards without scaring the CFO. Work that checks the “innovative” box without requiring anyone to stick their neck out.

Great clients are different. They’re ready and willing to push their brand toward where it must go, not where it’s been. They’re not interested in safety or incremental improvements on last year’s playbook.

They’re open to new engagement models: flattened hierarchies, accelerated timelines, integrated teams.

I actually had a client move its organisation away from the traditional (and oh-so-inefficiently antiquated) pitch process and award the job on chemistry, history of expertise, and merit alone.

Ahhhhhhhhh…so refreshing. These ambitious virtuosos understand that pace is the name of the game, and traditional structures are designed for a world that no longer exists.

And here’s what agencies need to hear: ambition without discipline is just chaos.

Your job isn’t to push for the sake of pushing. It’s to know the difference between brave and reckless, between breakthrough and bullshit.

Ambition means being uncomfortable. It means trusting that discomfort is where growth lives. For both sides.

Decisiveness

This is where most relationships die. Not in the work itself. In the endless loop of “let me run this by a few more people”.

In the six rounds of revisions, there are no improvements, but everyone feels heard. In the standing meetings that exist only to create the illusion of collaboration. I’ve sadly had more client partners than you’d think kill work because their life partner didn’t like it. Or their cousin who happens to work on Madison Avenue doesn’t dig it. No joke.

Great clients know what they want. But they also have the modesty to know they can’t go it alone. 

Agencies know they create walled gardens to protect “the integrity of the idea,” more often than not giving client ideation and imagination a deft Heisman stiff-arm to keep their vision unfettered. Both sides are guilty of the same sin: mistaking consensus for progress.

The best relationships operate on a different principle: earned authority. Each side has earned the right to make certain calls without committee approval. The client knows the business, the politics, the constraints. The agency knows the craft, the culture, the zeitgeist.

When someone with earned authority makes a call, you trust it. You might question it. You might push back once. But you don’t relitigate it six times across three layers of management.

This is best summed up by a quote I should eventually get tattooed in a prominent place:

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which great ideas are lured and quietly strangled.”

As we all aim to move collectively faster, trusting in instinct, taste, and expertise is paramount. It’s not a luxury, it’s a mandate. Deliberation and indecision are downright kryptonite, eating ideas alive. And let’s be clear: decisiveness isn’t about being right all the time. It’s about making calls, moving forward, and not second-guessing every creative risk or strategic pivot into oblivion. It’s about clarity. Momentum. And trust.

Kindness

At this point, this has to be non-negotiable. If your ego enters the door before you do, there’s no place for you in this relationship anymore. Be gone. Por favor.

However, kindness doesn’t mean being soft. It means being honest. It means telling your partner when they’re about to walk into traffic, even if they don’t want to hear it.

Great clients have the kindness and progressiveness to deconstruct the archaic belief that agencies exist only to serve them.

They reject the “I direct, you do” model. They treat their partners as truly that, giving them the rope to make the chances they take work out. They have the backbone to support those decisions with leadership—even standing with them in moments of uncertainty and discontent.

Agency partners empathise with their client partner’s position. They give them space when they need it, and most importantly, provide the irrefutable substantiation and belief needed for the idea to sell itself.

They have the respect and kindness to know the business and the job-to-be-done, tossing vanity projects out the back door.

And here’s the part nobody talks about: kindness means knowing when to walk away.

Not every idea, or client-agency relationship for that matter, should survive. Some are built on fundamentally incompatible visions of what good work looks like. And staying with it out of inertia or fear of change doesn’t serve anyone.

Kindness in this context isn’t about being nice. It’s about respect. It’s about shared ownership. It’s about having each other’s backs when the work gets hard or the stakes get high.

The work that follows

When you get these three things right—ambition, decisiveness, and kindness—everything else works itself out. The creative gets braver. The strategy gets sharper. The output moves faster.

But more importantly, the relationship becomes something worth protecting. Something that outlasts campaigns, quarterly reviews, and leadership changes.

The best partnerships aren’t frictionless. They’re built on productive rather than destructive tension. On honesty that stings but heals. On the willingness to show up, do the work, and choose each other again when things get hard.

Here’s what I know after twenty-five years: the work is only as good as the trust that produced it. And trust isn’t built in kickoff meetings or agency dog-and-pony shows. It’s built in the moments when someone has to make a hard call, and their partner backs them without hesitation.

That’s the kind of relationship worth renewing. And if we’re being honest, it’s the only kind worth having in the first place.

Brett Banker is the co-founder of X&O