Perhaps it is time we took stock of these relationships. Are they partnerships? Possibly, but not in the strictest sense. Are they purchaser / supplier situations? Literally yes – but hopefully rather more than that. Will the parties sign a contract? Probably yes. 85% of ISBA members have contracts with their principal agencies (ARC 2002). And what form will that contract take? Almost certainly some variant of the standard ISBA/IPA/CIPS model. What will that contain? Around 38 pages of provision for things going wrong, tempered with a detailed description of process. Does it say that if the client team who made the agency appointment are off, then so is the deal? No. Does it allow the client to walk away if the agency they selected change beyond recognition? Equally no. But then the contract is very unlikely to contain heroic clauses about the reason they were appointed in the first place: which was presumably to help the client storm barriers and climb mountains.

After two decades on the agency side and sixteen years trying to help clients and agencies make their relationships as productive as possible. I am convinced that the real missing is a deal. And I’m not talking about the purely financial aspect that is so important to the procurement people. I’m talking about the kind of deals you find in business biographies. Big deals. Life-changing deals. Ambitious deals with the heady aroma of win-win. Anyone can move an account. Any agency can win a piece of business. But are clients and agencies signing big hairy deals? I don’t think so.

There is a big clue in the language used. “Agency Remuneration”, “Payment by Results”, “Resource Package Fees”, “Full Time Equivalent People (FTE)”. It doesn’t sound like the language of deals does it? Show biz stars don’t get remuneration. Football club managers don’t sign their squads on a FTE basis. Defence contracts are not agreed on resource package fees. Agencies have to be able to offer their clients both care and maintenance and change management. But the key deals obviously relate to the world of change management. Most clients and agencies have some kind of evaluation system to measure service, performance and value. But are these systems adequate for the measurement of the success of the new advertising and marcoms programmes for which the agency was hired in the first place? Client and agency are stakeholders in the outcome of these programmes. Effectively they are forming a strategic alliance together. The terms of that alliance, the commercial arrangements that drive it, and the subsidiary and successive goals that are set need to be enshrined in a kind of mutually agreed “flight plan”.

Obviously you still need aspects of the insurance policy. No client or agency can move forward without defining ownership of intellectual property, mutual obligations and responsibilities, notice period, termination provisions etc. But the raison d’etre of the relationship has to be the mutually agreed goal and what it is worth to the client if the agency helps them pull it off. That’s the deal.