December 01, 2016

Whose work is it? The client’s or the agency’s?

The question sometimes arises if a creative concept is the agency’s or actually the client’s work. This is a matter of responsibility, not some philosophising.

The client has every right to have a say, but if their interference is so extensive that it disrupts the concept, the agency should not bear responsibility for the outcome. The agency’s subconscious effort is to eliminate the client’s interference as much as possible, while the client, naturally, wants to keep maximum control over the work. This makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to draw the boundary between helpful and harmful involvement.

Concept disruption may serve as a crucial point for identifying this boundary provided that the agency thinks and works conceptually. I am talking about disrupting the match between the graphical proposition and the meaning of the text message to the point where it is negatively impacting the target groups. And what makes things even more complicated is that there is not one single truth on either side.

It is wrong for the agency to accept zero interference in its work, claiming that it alone is right. Likewise, it is also wrong if the client requires the agency to guarantee that its work is the only correct outcome. It is a well-known fact that nobody can be sure that a campaign will work as expected. As mentioned above, it is impossible to clearly define where interference in the agency’s work begins to be such that the outcome becomes the client’s work. For this reason, the relations must be based on symbiosis. If the symbiosis works, both parties understand each other, cooperate and have mutual trust. It is the only way to create something both parties will be satisfied with, without any need to analyse how much each of them has negatively affected the outcome.

Published by: spravceobsahu in Uncategorized

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