The Work Before the Work Is Still Work

A client asked an advertising agency to solve a problem. The agency did. Then came the harder question: Would presenting the answer mean giving it away?

Afieq Abdillah

Author’s note: The situation described below is hypothetical. Certain details have been generalized to keep the focus on the larger industry issue.

Imagine an agency has worked with a large company for several years.

The relationship is successful. Campaigns perform. Internal stakeholders are happy. The agency has earned trust across a variety of assignments— sometimes media, sometimes creative, sometimes audience insights or production, and occasionally some combination of all four.

But there is no retainer.

Every engagement is project-based. The agency is generally paid only after it develops an approach, presents it, wins approval and begins the work. The purchase order tends to arrive after the most important thinking has already happened.

That arrangement may sound backward. In advertising, it is hardly unusual.

The brief was not the plan

Most assignments begin with a product description, a business objective, a target audience and a budget. The client may also supply creative assets, although those assets are often raw, highly functional or better suited to an e-commerce product page than a persuasive advertising campaign.

The agency does the rest.

It identifies the real audience. It studies the category and competition. It determines where that audience can be reached and what might move them. It develops the media strategy, messaging architecture, creative direction, campaign idea and, all times, the actual headlines and copy.

In other words, the brief describes the assignment. The agency creates the answer.

Under the master services agreement, the agency receives a predetermined commission for media. Research, strategic planning, creative development and production require separate approval.

There is one complication: the client operates with highly restricted budgets. Any additional agency fee may have to come out of working media.

That creates a false choice— thinking vs. reach or creative quality vs. media weight— as though one can succeed without the other.

I have never understood the logic. Creative is not decoration added after the media plan. It is the part of the media plan the customer actually sees. Underfunded, low-quality creative can damage the brand and depress performance by far more than the fee it supposedly saved.

Efficiency matters. Frugality can be smart. But cheap work that does not work is not efficient.

Then the campaign failed

Now imagine one campaign begins to underperform.

The agency had raised concerns before launch. The target audience appeared wrong. The available creative did little to persuade that audience. The recommended media platforms did not match how those consumers discovered, evaluated or bought the product.

The client nevertheless directed the agency to proceed.

So it did.

The results eventually confirmed the concern: very little meaningful response and few, if any, attributable sales.

With evidence now on the table, the client became open to a different approach. The budget would not change, but the agency was invited to show what it would do instead.

The entire brief consisted of four words:

“Yes, please show me.”

So the agency went to work

The team treated the challenge as if the assignment had already been awarded.

It conducted a full 5-C assessment: Consumer, Culture, Category, Competition and Company. It studied audience attitudes, motivations and media behavior. It reconsidered the role of the product, the barriers to purchase and the message most likely to overcome them.

From that work came a new audience strategy, a new media approach, a new campaign platform and detailed creative executions— right down to prospective headlines and ad copy.

It was not a light recommendation. It was the plan.

The Left Off Madison team loved it. More importantly, the thinking was grounded in evidence and designed to solve the specific failures of the previous campaign without increasing the budget.

As the presentation neared completion, however, a question interrupted the momentum:

What, exactly, was the client being asked to approve— and what was the agency about to give away?

The agency had done the client’s work and its own. It had given the assignment priority, senior attention and its best strategic thinking. Yet there was no approved scope, no purchase order and no guaranteed compensation for any of it.

Rejection was one possible outcome. That would be disappointing, but fair. Clients are allowed to dislike ideas. LOL— they often do.

The more troubling possibility was that the client might like the plan, decline to hire the agency and then execute some or all of it internally— or hand it to another agency.

That possibility was not theoretical. Variations of it had happened before.

A pause before the pitch

The agency reviewed its master service agreement. Like many standard agency agreements, it contained broad work-for-hire language stating that work created for the client would ultimately belong to the client.

That may be entirely reasonable for commissioned work.

But was an unsolicited, unpaid pitch— created before there was an approved project— also commissioned work?

The agency decided that question needed to be answered before the deck changed hands.

It prepared a short Pitch Materials and Speculative Work Addendum. The document did not obligate the client to hire the agency. It did not require the client to approve the plan. It simply established that the pitch remained the agency’s property unless and until the agency was retained to execute it. The material could be reviewed, considered and rejected— but not transferred, replicated or implemented without permission and compensation.

The agency asked the client to sign the addendum before receiving the presentation.

A few days later, the answer came back: no.

No explanation. No alternative language. Just a refusal to sign.

So the agency did not send the deck.

What did “no” mean?

It is tempting to assign the worst possible motive. Did the client want the freedom to take the ideas? Was it calling the agency’s bluff? Did it doubt that the presentation contained anything worth protecting? Did it simply believe that an agency should be grateful for the opportunity to compete for work it had already been helping to improve?

Maybe.

But there are less provocative possibilities.

The legal department may have had a blanket policy against amendments. Procurement may have been unwilling to create a precedent. The person requesting the plan may not have had the authority to approve different intellectual-property terms. The client may have believed the existing agreement already covered the situation. Or the organization may simply have decided that seeing the recommendation was not worth accepting even a limited obligation.

The agency could not know the motive. Refusal alone was not proof of bad intent.

But it did clarify one thing: the two parties did not have a shared understanding of what the agency’s thinking was worth or how it would be protected.

That was enough reason to stop.

Strategy is not the free sample

Ad agencies have helped create this problem.

We want to demonstrate enthusiasm. We want to be proactive. We want clients to see how quickly and deeply we can think. So we routinely begin before the paperwork. We answer questions that were never formally assigned. We turn “Can you show us a few thoughts?” into weeks of senior-level strategy and creative development.

Then we act surprised when the work is treated as free.

There is a difference between demonstrating capability and delivering the solution. There is a difference between offering a point of view and handing over an executable plan. There is a difference between investing in a relationship and financing a client’s marketing department.

The work before the work is still work.

It draws on experience the agency spent years building. It requires research, judgment, imagination and time. Often, it is the most valuable part of the engagement because it determines whether every dollar that follows will be spent intelligently.

Media does not become more effective because the thinking behind it was free. Creative does not become less valuable because it was developed before a purchase order arrived.

And protecting an idea does not signal a lack of partnership. A healthy partnership should be able to distinguish between paid client deliverables and an agency’s speculative intellectual property.

What would you have done?

The agency kept the plan.

That meant walking away from the possibility of winning the assignment. It also meant preserving the value of the work and drawing a boundary that probably should have existed much earlier.

Was that the right decision?

Should the agency have trusted the relationship and presented the work anyway? Offered a paid strategic phase? Shared only the diagnosis and held back the execution? Negotiated narrower language? Or done exactly what it did: protect the plan and accept that some opportunities are not worth pursuing without mutual safeguards?

I know what I would do now.

Before the next “Yes, please show me,” I would make sure both sides understand what is being requested, who is paying for it and who owns it if the assignment goes no further.

Because generosity can build a relationship. Ambiguity can quietly destroy one.

What are your thoughts? What would you have done?