Think about the last time a creative project felt smooth. Where the brief was water-tight upfront, consolidated feedback arrived early, freelancers were put to full use, invoices were paid on time and the creative output outdid the concept.

If you’re struggling to remember one, that’s the point.

The reality is agencies are drowning in revision loops that a single earlier conversation would have prevented, whilst chasing invoices overdue by 90 days. Clients are absorbing the chaos of a relationship that was never properly set up, whilst watching the budget disappear into process over output.

That tension isn’t personal or malicious. It’s structural. And it’s eating away at our ability to make great work. But the answer to difficult human relationships isn’t to remove the humans. It’s to build systems within which we (and our creativity) can flourish.

What’s to come isn’t an argument for frictionless work. World-class creativity requires world-class human chaos. But chaos in the right places. What the contributors to this research describe is a different category of friction entirely - the kind that produces nothing. The kind that burns away at the conditions that make great work possible.

Today we explore those road blocks, and what might happen if we designed the process so that all of that energy went into the work itself. Wouldn’t that be nice?

This is the third article in a seven-part series produced in collaboration with . The insights below are drawn from original research gathered from 30+ senior voices from some of the world’s most respected brands and agencies.

What emerged from this research was a yearning for relationships where the process is designed collaboratively from the start - and a recognition that, somewhere along the line, the simple question ‘how do you like to work’ got lost. What exists instead is a set of habits that have been inherited, unexamined and (more often than not) incompatible.

Frida Hedqvist, who consults on Innovation at IKEA, put it well: “I don’t expect agencies to solve everything upfront, but I do expect them to shape a framework that can hold ambiguity.” A framework that can hold ambiguity is not a request for a perfect process. It’s a request for a malleable, shared one.

Instead, agencies arrive with their process, clients arrive with theirs, and rigidity sets in from the get-go. Two operating systems, two Asana, Monday.com or Frame.io accounts – not interacting, not checked for compatibility. Alongside an assumption on both sides that the way you like to work is the way this will work.

So how can we align client-agency processes so they’re more compatible?

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Start with the first structural fault line - because it’s the one that hits before anything else has a chance to work. Pace.

A contradiction we heard a lot, from agencies and brands alike, was the idea of pace. Who could keep up, and who couldn't. Our research uncovered that the shift away from the slower-moving network model was happening on both sides. Up to now it's mostly been agencies pushing slow-moving brands to keep up. Now, it appears the tides are turning.

Mo White, CEO of Refy Beauty, raised a point that needs airing: agencies often underestimate how fast decisions are made and how hard it is to keep them in the loop. “An agency has to be as smart, fast and agile as the company they are working with and lean into the imperfect processes instead of resisting them.” That last part is the uncomfortable ask.

The agency that holds out for a clean process is waiting for something that may never arrive. The one that learns to work inside imperfect conditions, without losing quality, is the one worth keeping.

But there is a version of this story that more agile, independent agencies rarely tell themselves. The assumption that a brand will be slow is often borrowed from experience with network clients (who were used to working with network agencies) - global holding companies with seventeen sign-off layers and procurement processes that take longer than the project. That history is real, but it isn’t universal.

What if the person who needs to “keep up” was the independent agency? How would that realisation change the way they responded to in-project changes. Some brands have built their entire advantage around speed. When an agency arrives assuming slowness that isn’t there, the misread creates its own friction before a single brief has landed.

But this works both ways. Genuinely slower, network brands need to make changes internally before working with more agile studios who can out-pace slower, network agencies. Because that’s what you’re paying them for.

Laura Conway, Founder of Creative Blood, named what happens when the assumption runs the other way: “Bigger organisations - brands and large agencies - bringing independent partners in wanting their creative and cultural capital, but not recognising their own slow nature of decision-making and money constraints. It drains the agile capabilities and energy of the indie spirit.”

Dani Coyle, Founder and Creative Director at Intersexy Studio, describes the best clients “pay 50% upfront quickly, so the work can receive 100% of the creative focus.” Ultimately, expecting agile agencies to supply agility then pay them in 90 days isn’t going to work. That’s an overhang from the network era. As the model changes, prehistoric cash-flow strategies need to change with it. Brands who want agility need to pay with agility.

The pace mismatch isn’t one-directional. It’s a vice that tightens from both ends. And it almost always goes unnamed. If you think your brand set up is more agile than the agency, tell them. And vice versa. Uncover the pinch-points. Then work out a new way forward together. Because evolution is only possible when both sides hold themselves to account.

And then there’s what happened in 2020, which most people have quietly accepted as permanent.

The in-person kickoff is the most underrated casualty of the pandemic. Not because it was a nice ritual, but because it was doing real structural work that Zoom was never going to replicate. The research is unambiguous: in-person settings produce better creative thinking and stronger relationships. We knew this before 2020. We just stopped acting on it. A Stanford and Columbia study found in-person meetings resulted in 20% more ideas1. And more original ones at that.

Lil Fletcher, MD at Broadwick Studios, said it directly: “2020 killed in-person kick-offs, and projects are weaker for it. Invest in getting your agency in the room with you and treat them like customers you want to fall in love with the brand.” Relationship maintenance is part of the production cost. Cutting it is a false economy. That’s not to say 5 days in the office is the way either. But factoring in IRL time saves relationships. And relationships save the work.

Gallup, whose workplace research spans millions of employees globally, is consistent on this: meaningful human connection at work reduces burnout, increases engagement and creates a sense of purpose2. And human connection, it turns out, requires human contact. It cannot be built asynchronously on Slack.

Another thing that came up again and again was the element of surprise. Surprise feedback; surprise creative outcome; surprise costs and surprise delays. And, beyond craving more in-person time, there was a clear hunger for consistent, honest communication throughout.

The black box model (where an agency takes the brief, disappears, and returns to present) is one of the most persistently adopted habits in the industry. It feels professional. It respects the creative process. It gives the team space to think. And it is, in practice, one of the most reliable ways to generate an unpleasant reveal. According to clients.

Frida Hedqvist explains: “if we don’t collaborate throughout the process, the agency won’t fully understand the company, and the company won’t be challenged in the right way either. The black box can easily become an awful surprise box.” An awful surprise box is not a metaphor for mild disappointment. It’s the experience of having invested time, budget and goodwill into a process that was sequential rather than collaborative - and arriving at a reveal that has come too late to fix anything at a reasonable cost.

Which is what several contributors pointed to when they described wanting to see thinking earlier.

Agencies show up with polished decks because polished decks signal competence and justify fees. But in a world where polished decks are easier and easier to come by, what clients really want is evidence of clear human thinking. How did the brief land in your mind? What parts can't you stop thinking about? Which parts is your subconscious still working on? What early directions are you considering? That's what they're paying you for, over AI.

Chat to your clients about it. Bring them into your world. Let them see the cogs turning, like they let you see the cogs of their business at the factory visit. Tease the outcome to come. Run the process like a marketing campaign. Let them challenge you. Let them co-own the answer. Because when they do, they'll fight for it internally. And that's when the work actually gets made.

Susie O’Brien, Senior Art Director at Adidas, put the client-side preference simply: at the concepting stage, she and her team would rather see ideas more often and less polished, because moving efficiently matters more than arriving at a perfect visual. “As long as you can communicate your creative ideas and vision effectively, this is more important to us than seeing a polished and perfect visual.” That sentence should probably be printed and included in every agency onboarding pack.

Just like how we like seeing the messier, unpolished version of people’s lives on social, or you prefer the friend who is actually real and lets you into their unfiltered internal world, there is a growing yearning for unfiltered, unpolished work. Work that goes analog. Shows us a tag line on a napkin.

But p.s. you only get away with the napkin if the relationship is already there. If you've over-digitalised the relationship, you're likely to over-digitalise the output. Over-index on the in-person and the napkin just works.

All this connects back to something broader about feedback culture. As Ana Lapa, a designer we spoke to, explains: nobody really uses the quieter periods between active projects well. No pre-mortems. No post-mortems. No regular check-ins to catch misalignment before it calcifies. The consultation model that would make all of this easier doesn’t exist, because nobody designed it.

And so the closed feedback loop becomes the default. Polished presentation, considered response, no one saying what they actually think until it’s too late to act on it. The open one, where early and uncomfortable reactions are genuinely welcomed rather than managed, is the exception.

Bad feedback, delivered early, is a gift.

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The absence of clear feedback and direction comes at a real, human cost. The industry tends to call it a workload problem, because workload is quantifiable and direction is not. But the accumulated cost of all that misdirected energy doesn’t just lead to inefficiency, it leads to burnout.

Ana Lapa, who has worked inside this system for long enough to name it precisely, identified the real mechanism: "Agency life has no shortage of people managing day-to-day, but fewer people genuinely holding a vision. I think a lot of what gets called burnout in creatives is actually just the feeling of working without one. It's not a workload problem. It's a direction problem."

Burnout treated as a workload problem gets addressed with lighter schedules and wellness benefits. Burnout treated as a direction problem requires something more fundamental: a reason to care. Add that to strong human relationships, and you're off.

There is something else worth naming here, which is what happens at the halfway point of any project. When you are halfway through something, there is no dopamine left from starting and none yet from finishing. The work is half done and everything is in a state. It looks worse than it did at the beginning.

This is the moment when both sides are most likely to lose confidence, redirect, or introduce changes that unravel the work already done. Like cleaning a room, or unpacking from holiday. It always looks more chaotic halfway through than when you started. The mess is proof of progress, not proof of failure.

Designing the process means designing for this moment: building in the review points, the honest check-ins, the shared acknowledgement that the middle is supposed to feel hard. Sit down, have a cup of tea together, and push on.

But who to put in charge of this, very real and very important role?

The ops person you were about to fire, of course!

Here’s my prediction. Within the next five years, the most in-demand person in any creative business will not just be the strategist. It will not just be the creative director. It will be the ops person.

The producer. The project manager. The account lead who understands not just what needs to happen but in what order, at what pace, with which people in the room. The person who holds the connective tissue of a relationship together so everyone else can focus on the work itself.

The ops person is often the easiest one to cut. And that's because when they're doing their job properly, you can’t feel them. The process runs. The timeline holds. The feedback arrives at the right moment from the right people. The ops person is invisible precisely because their job is to make everything else visible and functional.

Then they leave. Or they get restructured out. And within six weeks the project is in a state that nobody can fully explain, because the thing holding it together was never the strategy or the creative. It was the architecture around them.

When the process fails it is rarely because the ideas were wrong. It is because nobody was managing the conditions in which the ideas were supposed to grow. The industry has spent years elevating strategy and creative to the top of the value chain. The ops function sits underneath, undervalued, doing the work that makes everything else possible.

That is going to change. The businesses that understand this first will move faster, retain better relationships, produce better work and win more clients. Not because they hired a better strategist. Because they finally gave the person running the infrastructure the status the job demands.

Which brings us to the question that has been sitting underneath everything in this series so far.

Frida Hedqvist is one of the contributors whose thinking has shaped the foundations of this research from the beginning. Across her responses, a single question appears that is not rhetorical and not yet answered: “How do we create more human connection and structure inside increasingly complex systems?”

Here is the honest answer. You cannot systematise your way to human connection. Every layer of process you add is a small act of distrust in the people inside the system. Connection is not a feature you can install. It requires ongoing maintenance, like a garden, regular attention, the right conditions, and it cannot be automated.

The question was never how do we create more connection inside complexity. It’s how do we stop our systems from eating the connection that already exists? And how do we hold doors open for the creative vision to step through?

By remembering why the system exists in the first place.

The founding principles of great creative work are not complicated. They are human. Our human-ness did not become less true because the tools changed. It became more important. The best creativity comes from the ability to sit in and move through the discomfort of human fallibility. To turn it into an advantage. Because the tools will keep changing. The humans in the room are the only constant (we hope).

That is not a romantic idea. It is a competitive advantage. And it only exists if you design your processes around connection and creativity over efficiency. Because creativity is what makes us human. And a human creative process is what makes human creativity possible.

So where best to start? Here are eight ways this article explores to guarantee a difficult relationship. See if you recognise any… I can (!):

1. The kickoff happened on a screen.
2. The process was fixed before anyone asked how the other side liked to work.
3. The pace was misread from the start - and nobody said so.
4. Nobody co-wrote the vision, so when the brief shifted, everything cracked.
5. The brief went into a black box and came back as an awful surprise.
6. Nobody checked in on the relationship along the way.
7. The person holding it all together got cut.
8. And when the work felt joyless and the team felt burnt out, everyone called it a workload problem.

Sound familiar? Here’s what to do instead.

If you’re the client:

• Name your pace, your vision and your decision-makers upfront. Don’t make the agency reverse-engineer any of it.

• Ask for rough thinking early. The performance of polish is costing you both time and truth.

• If you’re hiring an agile agency for their agility, reward them with agile payment terms.

If you’re the agency:

• Bring clients into your process early. Let them co-own an idea worth fighting for.

• Build a framework that can hold ambiguity then check in, regularly. Not just on how the project is going, but how you are working together.

• Protect the direction of your team. If untethered feedback is burning people out, name it. Re-align the vision.

And both: Co-write the process before you start the work, create a shared vision, and over-communicate. Make it human and creative. Not just efficient.

Which of the eight do you recognise? And what would it take to change it? Let us know in the comments.

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A massive thanks to our contributors:

Frida Hedqvist (IKEA), Alex Tan (MOUTHWASH Studio), Nav Gill (Nike), Nikita Walia (U.N.N.A.M.E.D.), Joel Linkewer (AIRBNB), Isobel Farmiloe (DAZED), Thomas Kirkby-Jones (BREAKS), Mark Carroll (PINTEREST), Andy Harvey (COMMUNION), Mo White (REFY), Damola Oladapo (House Captain), Annie Masciavè (VINTED), Dani Coyle (Intersexy), Luke Li (IKEA), Liam S.Gleeson (HIDDEN and Hi-fi.london), Susie O’Brien (adidas), Lily Fletcher (Broadwick Studios), Lesley Winterbach (The GOODList), Paul Austin (Made Thought), Shanice Mears FRSA (The Elephant Room), Laura Conway (Creative Blood), Ana L, and Munise Can (Highsnobiety).

And a few who wanted to stay anonymous ;)

And special thanks to Lucinda Bounsall of Post-Culture by Sibling Studio – who the series was written in collaboration with.

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For 20 years, Morwenna has watched what separates creative businesses that take off from ones that plateau. LOOK-UP.WORLD™ is taking those insights public.

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Trust is the word that appeared more than almost any other across the thirty-odd responses we gathered from leading brands and agencies for this series. Cited as the foundation for good work, the precondition for creative bravery and the quality people most want from a partner.

It is also, almost without exception, undefined.

People declare it, invoke it and describe its absence with remarkable precision. But very few button down what it actually means: what it’s made of, how it accumulates and how to sustain it.

So let’s try.

Trust is not a value. It is not a vibe. It is a ledger. It accrues through specific, observable behaviours: being honest upfront, showing up consistently, saying what you actually think when it would be easier not to, staying in the room when the project goes sideways, and choosing to solve the problem together instead of allocating blame. It drains through specific behaviours too: avoidance, arrogance, broken promises and by giving fear a seat at the table. Both sides hold a pen. That is the thing the industry keeps forgetting.

The research made the stakes clear.

The average brand-agency relationship in the UK lasts around 3.2 years1. Among the world’s top 40 brand-agency partnerships, the average is 22 years2. That gap, nearly two decades, is not a coincidence. It is not explained by better portfolios or sharper briefs or more efficient processes. It is the trust gap. The brands cycling through agencies every three years are optimising for something. Just not, it turns out, the work.

Ana Lapa, a designer we spoke to, named the timeline plainly: the first project is usually when everyone is on their best behaviour. The good stuff comes later, once there’s enough trust in the room to be honest with each other. That is not a soft argument for patience. It is a strategic one. The conditions for genuinely great work, the kind where both sides take real creative risks, only become available after a period of demonstrated reliability. The first brief is not where the trust lives. The fifth brief is.

Paul Austin, Partner at Made Thought, described the common thread across all of his studio’s longest-standing client relationships as a shared creative ambition and the appetite to genuinely move the needle together, where the agency’s role was not as a service but as a collaborator. Co-creating briefs. Inspiring each other. Alex Tan, Partner Strategy Director at Mouthwash Studio, put it simply: projects are great, but partnerships are better. The distinction matters. A project has a beginning and an end. A partnership has a direction.

The most resonant answers in our research described something beyond even that: the moment when the boundary between client and agency stopped mattering entirely. Andy Harvey, Founder of Communion, described it as becoming integral to each other's worlds, to the point where client and agency boundary dissolved.

The best of these relationships were also defined by the scale of what was being attempted. Harvey described working with a brand that set a shared ambition so high it almost felt out of reach. Scary, even. Then they committed. They stayed. That discomfort, the shared willingness to attempt something that might not work, is where the best work in this industry is born.

Before we get into what destroys trust, it’s worth naming something that agencies often forget.

Nav Gill, Brand Manager at Nike, said it directly: the client is generally on your side. They brought you in. They trust your expertise. They want what you bring to the table. But that goes both ways. If you want to create incredible work, you need to trust them back. It sounds obvious. In practice it is one of the most consistently overlooked dynamics in the relationship.

The agency that treats its client as a gatekeeper to be managed rather than a partner to be worked with has already lost something. The client feels it, even when nobody says so. And it comes back to an agency's willingness to roll up their sleeves instead of rolling their eyes. To move out of a “them” and “us” dynamic and into something more fluid and meaningful.

Healthy challenge is part of this too. Joel Linkewer, Senior Marketing Manager at Airbnb, named the quality he values most in a creative partner as the willingness to get into healthy debate, to disagree, to push back on established processes. Luke Li, Global Creative Lead at IKEA, agreed: the best partners challenge the work constructively and push ideas further than originally imagined. The agency that only says yes is not building trust. It is avoiding it. And sometimes, and this is worth saying plainly, we are too British to realise that’s what we’re doing.

Cultural fit is the precondition for all of this. Mo White, CEO at Refy Beauty, described the best agency relationship of her career as one defined entirely by cultural synergy: two teams committed to solving problems together. Frida Hedqvist, who consults on Innovation at IKEA, agreed: what matters most is grounded people you can build trust with. Great work is rarely linear, so human collaboration and connection matter. Lil Fletcher, MD at Broadwick Studios, named the same conditions from the other direction: the most common barriers to good work are taste, trust, and respect for the process. And you cannot build trust across a values gap, however good the brief is.

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Now. What destroys trust.

The dominant operating condition in more client organisations than anyone officially acknowledges is fear. Andy Harvey named it plainly: indecision, second-guessing, pulling the work apart line by line. It kills momentum, and with it belief. Fear is the mind killer. And the science backs this up: fear suppresses the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for original thinking, and triggers a survival response that is the physiological opposite of a creative state.

Fear is not a personal failing. It is an organisational condition. And it expresses itself through the relationship whether or not anyone names it. The creative team senses it. The brief arrives shaped by it. The work gets pulled back to safety before it's had a chance to be brave. The painful irony is that the caution designed to protect the work is usually what diminishes it.

Fear’s primary expression in the relationship is avoidance. Joel Linkewer named it as the dominant strain in the partnerships that fail: avoiding decisions, avoiding commitment, avoiding difficult conversations, avoiding honest opinions. The word appears five times in a single answer. The repetition is the point. Conflict handled well produces clarity. Avoidance handled politely produces the same ambiguity, indefinitely.

The reject-and-repeat loop is avoidance’s most visible form. Mark Carroll, Creative Strategy Lead at Pinterest, described it precisely: a client actively hunting for problems, not collaborating, not building on potential, just scanning for reasons to fault the work. A posture of critique without construction. What makes it corrosive is not the rejection itself. It’s the client’s absence from contributing to the answer.

Arrogance does the same damage from the other direction. Nav Gill described the superiority complex that can develop at agencies on longstanding retainers as an impossible hole to climb out of once you’re in it. The client becomes someone to be managed rather than worked with. Clients feel it. And when they do, the relationship is already over. The conversation just hasn’t caught up yet.

And then there is overpromising, which is where trust breaks down most visibly before the work has even properly started. Luke Li noted that being sold by a senior team and handed to a junior one erodes the relationship before the first round of work comes back. One contributor who asked not to be named described their worst agency experience as so damaging it ended their organisation’s willingness to work with agencies entirely. Drowned in meetings and workflow. Underhand communications. Promised the world, then blindsided on execution.

Lesley Winterbach, Founder of The GOODList, put the pattern plainly: most client relationships that go wrong started with a pitch where the agency said yes to things it couldn’t deliver.

When things go wrong, repair is sometimes possible. Rupture and repair is a healthy part of any relationship. But repair is only possible when both sides choose it over contempt.

Liam S. Gleeson, Founder of Hidden Agency and Hi-fi.london, described a moment when an escalated concern was taken seriously by the client hierarchy and reviewed internally. It didn't fix everything. But it changed something. "We felt seen", he said. Not a complete fix. Not a formal process. Just the knowledge that what the agency had experienced had been heard. In a relationship where so much goes unnamed, being seen, genuinely, is sometimes enough.

How a brand talks about the work publicly, and who they name when they do, reveals something about how they actually see the relationship. Thomas Kirkby-Jones, Founding Partner of Breaks, put it in terms of reputation: we will only be as good as our last piece of work. The agency's name is on the outcome whether or not it's credited. The clients who understand that tend to be the ones who get the most back.

Not every partnership is meant to work. As Alex Tan pointed out: somewhere along the line the industry told itself that every brand-agency relationship needs to work out. Knowing when to stop is its own form of professionalism.

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Trust is not the kind of thing you can reference in a credentials deck. It does not live in a slide about values or a section of the agency website titled Our Approach. It comes alive in the moment the work goes sideways. Whether you stay when it gets hard. Whether you tell the truth when the truth is inconvenient. Whether you push back when pushing back is the right thing to do, even knowing it might cost you the relationship.

And yet the industry keeps treating it as a given. Something that simply exists, or doesn’t, rather than something that has to be actively built and actively protected on both sides. We talk about trust constantly and design almost nothing around it. No process for building it. No shared language for naming when it’s gone. No agreed moment to ask whether it was ever really there in the first place.

Which raises the harder question. If trust is the foundation for everything, what is the industry actually doing to build it? What would a pitch process look like if it was designed around establishing trust rather than winning business alone? What would a retainer look like if both sides had agreed, upfront, on what trust between them actually required? What would the work look like if fear stopped being the dominant operating condition in the room? And if the service model is dead, shouldn’t we be rethinking what we even call these roles? Should you be hiring a Head of Trust?

So, what would a relationship built on actual trust require? A few places to start…

If you’re the client:

• Brief five is where the good work begins. Give your agency time to get to know you.

• If your agency never pushes back, ask yourself why. You may have trained them not to.

• You hired them because you trusted their expertise. Let them use it.

If you’re the agency:

• Tell the truth in the pitch. Otherwise it comes out in the execution.

• The moment you start treating your client as them rather than us, they feel it. And so does the work.

• Trust-building is the most important job in the building. Reshape your teams, pitches and processes around it.

And both: the absence of conflict is not evidence of trust. It is usually evidence of avoidance. The relationship worth having is the one where honesty is safe enough to be practised regularly, not saved for the exit conversation.

Anything we’ve missed? What does trust actually look like in your creative relationships right now? And what is getting in the way of it? Tell us in the comments.

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A massive thanks to our contributors:

Frida Hedqvist (IKEA), Alex Tan (MOUTHWASH Studio), Nav Gill (Nike), Nikita Walia (U.N.N.A.M.E.D.), Joel Linkewer (AIRBNB), Isobel Farmiloe (DAZED), Thomas Kirkby-Jones (BREAKS), Mark Carroll (PINTEREST), Andy Harvey (COMMUNION), Mo White (REFY), Damola Oladapo (House Captain), Annie Masciavè (VINTED), Dani Coyle (Intersexy), Luke Li (IKEA), Liam S.Gleeson (HIDDEN and Hi-fi.london), Susie O’Brien (adidas), Lily Fletcher (Broadwick Studios), Lesley Winterbach (The GOODList), Paul Austin (Made Thought), Shanice Mears FRSA (The Elephant Room), Laura Conway (Creative Blood), Ana L, and Munise Can (Highsnobiety).

And a few who wanted to stay anonymous ;)

And special thanks to of – who the series was written in collaboration with.

Subscribe to LOOK-UP.WORLD™, By Morwenna

For 20 years, Morwenna has watched what separates creative businesses that take off from ones that plateau. LOOK-UP.WORLD™ is taking those insights public.

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A few months ago, at and I sent a questionnaire to some of the people we most respect in the creative industry. Founders, strategists, brand leaders, agency heads. We asked them to be honest about what’s working in the client-agency relationship and what isn’t. What came back wasn’t a tidy set of industry opinions. It was something closer to a collective exhale.

Thirty-odd responses from people across some of the world’s most respected brands and agencies, and underneath almost all of them sat the same broader tension: the systems surrounding creative work no longer reflect the reality of how modern creative work actually happens. Over the coming weeks, we’re turning those findings into a seven-part series.

Starting where the trouble usually starts. Before the brief exists…

One of the biggest structural problems in the agency-brand landscape right now is one the industry doesn’t talk about enough: that the service model is outdated. The idea that the client sets the brief and the agency produces the output is a model built for a different era, and one that is unlikely to survive AI. When generation tools can execute on a brief in seconds, the brief itself stops being the point. What matters is what happens before it.

The more conversations we had, the clearer it became that this ‘thawing out’ of an outdated model is slowly revealing the hidden value of brand-to-agency relationships. One that needs vocalising.

It became clear that the agency-brand relationships that have always thrived, are thriving today, and will continue to thrive into the future are those that understand that the value sits well upstream of the brief. That agency partners need to understand the brand’s future business strategy; their clients’ individual KPIs; and the internal systems or political hurdles that quietly kill great work.

Great agencies treat the brief not as instructions but as a starting point, or sometimes a false start that needs interrogating. Because the thing clients are paying for (even if they haven’t asked for it yet) are the conditions that make great work possible. Not just the work itself.

The research made this pattern impossible to ignore. Agency after agency described projects that felt slightly off, not because the execution was wrong, but because the foundation wasn’t right. And when you traced the foundation back, you always arrived at the same place. A brief that had been handed over before the real problem had been addressed. A problem that often tallied with unvocalised pressures on the client-side, and led to agencies rolling their eyes instead of rolling up their sleeves.

Annie Masciavè, Head of Creative Production at Vinted, described the best agency she had ever worked with as one that was “always one step ahead.” They didn’t wait to be chased. When something wasn’t possible, they said so and then offered three other ways in. That proactivity built trust faster than almost anything else. But it also points to something larger. They were filling a gap between what the brief said and what the problem actually was. Not being asked. Being a step ahead. Something not even Chat GPT can do, yet.

Frida Hedqvist, who consults on Innovation at IKEA, put it plainly: the most valuable thing an agency can do today is understand the brand’s future business strategy, not just the brief. It sounds obvious when you say it like that. In practice it almost never happens, because brands don’t always offer that context, agencies don’t always ask for it, and the whole system agrees to work from the document rather than the reality underneath it.

The best clients, it turns out, don’t want you to nod and execute. If they wanted that, they’d have briefed ChatGPT. What they want, even when the brief doesn’t signal it, is to be challenged. Mo White, CEO at Refy Beauty, put it plainly: the agencies she values most are the ones who are “persistent about asking the right questions and uncovering the issues that people aren’t talking about.” The ones that understand what’s being said, what isn’t being said, and why the gap between those two things is usually where the real problem lives.

Part of what makes this hard is that the brief arrives carrying conditions the agency often can’t see. Fast-growth businesses make decisions faster than agencies can absorb. Internal stakeholders change their minds not out of carelessness but because the data shifted, the world changed and someone senior got nervous, or the quarterly numbers landed differently than expected. The brief that lands on an agency’s desk is rarely a clean document. It’s the residue of a dozen internal conversations, some of which haven’t finished yet.

Laura Conway, Founder of Creative Blood, was direct about it: get your brief clear and signed off internally before you approve creative work. Not during the creative process. Not in response to the first round of creative coming back sideways. And before you sign off that brief, make sure a producer or production company has sense-checked that your budget actually matches the ask. Creative work is not a research tool for brief formation, and it isn't a place to discover that the numbers don't add up either.

When a brief arrives marked final but the internal conversation hasn't actually finished, everyone pays for it. And according to the responses we gathered, that happens far more often than anyone admits.

What the research made clear is that the clients who produced the best work were the ones who understood this about themselves, and compensated for it. They brought agencies in early. They shared context generously. They stayed consistent rather than going quiet between sprints and urgent when deadlines hit. What emerged from that kind of investment, several respondents noted, was something that went beyond good process. Agencies became not just empathetic to a client’s internal pressures and growing pains, but genuinely invested in helping navigate them. Less supplier and client. More two sides facing the same direction.

Ana Lapa, a designer we spoke to, described the best thing a client ever did for her as being brought into conversations she wasn’t strictly supposed to be in. “The interesting thinking tends to happen before a brief exists,” she said, “and sitting in on that early mess taught me more than any project ever did.” The early mess. That’s the territory. The part of the process where the actual problem is still visible, before it gets translated into objectives and mandatories and approved by three layers of stakeholders. Getting an agency into that room changes what they know, how they ask questions, and how much they care about the answer.

Lil Fletcher, MD at Broadwick Studios, described a client who took this seriously: "factory visits, funding channels, and challenges", all of it shared openly. "The more we know, the more we care." And the more they cared, the more invested they became in making work that actually moved the business. Nikita Walia, Strategy Partner at U.N.N.A.M.E.D. made the same case as a direct ask: "Let us under the hood. Let us speak to the right people. Teach us the politics of your org." Good agencies, she said, are "information maximalists". Agencies don't want the edited version. They want the full picture, including the awkward parts, because the awkward parts are usually load-bearing.

Munise Can, SVP & General Manager of Highsnobiety, named it directly: "Tell us the side quest. What’s the thing that we need to do to push the work through and we will help you." An agency that understands the internal landscape isn't just being accommodating. They're being strategic. Creative work happens inside organisations, with politics and pressures that have nothing to do with the brief and everything to do with whether the work ever actually gets made.

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Damola Oladapo, Founder of House Captain said something that stayed with me: the client needs to have just as much curiosity in the brief as they’ve billed the agency to have. The brief is not a handover. It’s the beginning of a shared inquiry. And when only one side is curious, when the agency is expected to be detective, judge and executor all at once, something important gets lost. Not just in the work. In the relationship that makes the work possible.

If you think the brief isn’t ready, say so. Make it better. That is not overstepping. That is the job.

The agencies that understand this aren’t just offering a service. They’re offering something harder to replace and harder to commoditise: human-to-human thinking. The upstream work that determines whether everything downstream has a chance. Perhaps the entire briefing system needs to change, and with it how agencies get paid. Perhaps clients should arrive with their world context and future business strategy, and the brief gets written together. Perhaps agency team should sit with clients upfront to surface the unspoken hurdles: approvals, systems and internal politics. Then iron out the process, together.

But for any of that to happen, something needs to shift on both sides. Agencies need to get much better at saying out loud whether they're selling execution, thinking, or process. And clients need to be honest about which one they're actually buying. Because right now, in an industry being rapidly reshaped by tools that can do the output in seconds, knowing where your value actually lives, and being able to say it out loud, matters more than ever.

So what would a better system look like? A few places to start…

If you’re the client:

• Get your agency in the room before the brief exists. Use their expertise to shape it.

• Share your future business strategy, not just the campaign context. If you haven’t, you’ve underbriefed.

• Tell your agency what success looks like for you internally. The politics aren’t a distraction. They’re hurdles to overcome.

If you’re the agency:

• If the brief is wrong, say so and come with a better way in. That’s not overstepping. That is the job.

• Stop selling outputs. Start articulating the thinking, the process, the upstream value. That’s what AI can’t replace.

• Roll up your sleeves, not your eyes. Your client’s internal chaos is part of the brief. Work with it.

And both: work from the reality underneath the brief. The brief is a piece of paper, after all.

We heard a lot of candour putting this research together. We'd like to hear yours too. What does your briefing process actually look like right now… and what would you change about it?

A massive thanks to our contributors:

Frida Hedqvist (IKEA), Alex Tan (MOUTHWASH Studio), Nav Gill (Nike), Nikita Walia (U.N.N.A.M.E.D.), Joel Linkewer (AIRBNB), Isobel Farmiloe (DAZED), Thomas Kirkby-Jones (BREAKS), Mark Carroll (PINTEREST), Andy Harvey (COMMUNION), Mo White (REFY), Damola Oladapo (House Captain), Annie Masciavè (VINTED), Dani Coyle (Intersexy), Luke Li (IKEA), Liam S.Gleeson (HIDDEN and Hi-fi.london), Susie O'Brien (adidas), Lily Fletcher (Broadwick Studios), Lesley Winterbach (The GOODList), Paul Austin (Made Thought), Shanice Mears FRSA (The Elephant Room), Laura Conway (Creative Blood), Ana L, and Munise Can (Highsnobiety).

And a few who wanted to stay anonymous ;)

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For 20 years, Morwenna has watched what separates creative businesses that take off from ones that plateau. LOOK-UP.WORLD™ is taking those insights public.

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