I can still remember my first Agency Work Review meeting.
Being a newbie to the advertising industry, I was asked to tag along for a Quarterly Review. I didn’t know it was going to be a long, almost unbearable, 2.5 hours.
One side of the table: the clients. CMO, brand managers, everyone. Our side: Chief Client Servicing, Executive Creative Director, account servicing folks. The usual hierarchy, assembled and performing.
The deck summarised the quarter’s work — completed, in-progress — followed by slides and slides of compiled output. Each brand manager took turns commenting on the work produced for their portfolio.
It was bloody.
Occasional compliments. Mostly negative. Missed deadlines. Missed quality benchmarks. Not understanding the customer segment. Not understanding how advertising works. Demoralising — I felt like I was sitting inside the most incompetent agency on earth.
My colleagues were surprisingly calm about the whole thing.
“That’s all normal,” someone said afterwards.
Some faults were obviously the agency’s. Volume of work, lapses happen. But some of it — most of it, in that particular quarter — was clearly the clients’.
The Southern regional marketing head sent approvals in weeks late. Another brand manager went AWOL for two weeks without doing the briefing first. One gave budget approval by mistake and later slashed it by 30%. Another insisted on having his own idea used. One wrongly informed the agency about media booking dates — when the error was detected it was too late to reshoot, because media bookings can’t be changed.
A list of reasons why the agency wasn’t at fault.
And yet — the agency sat there and took it.
So if these were technically the client’s mistakes, why wasn’t anyone held accountable? Why was the agency the lame duck under a firing squad?
That was my introduction to Client Politics 101.
The hidden rule: keep quiet and let them speak. They have to impress their bosses in the room. Pointing out that the screw-ups were actually on their side would be a humiliation. A bruise on the ego. And if the conversation crossed an invisible line — just hint, quietly, that you hold the cards. That you could spill everything if you wanted to.
Malaysians have a word for this. Wayang. Theatre. An agreed performance everyone maintains because the alternative is worse.
Why the elaborate charade? “In the end, we still have to work with them on a daily basis. Not their bosses.”
And the newly erected SOPs — the morning calls, the end-of-day reports — built to prevent the same mistakes? “No one will remember them after two weeks. Who has time to read an end-of-day report every day?”
Here comes the final lesson. That CMO in the room — he knows. He works with his team every day. He already knows every mistake they made. He just chooses not to correct them in front of the agency. He’ll have a private word later. But never in public.
No one wants to look incompetent in front of peers and bosses. To maintain a good client-agency relationship, you maintain the charade. Everyone’s ego stays protected. The show goes on.
Thankfully, I didn’t last too long in advertising.
I still wonder why we rarely have Client Review meetings.
Where the tables are turned. Where the people who actually worked on the projects take turns listing the shortcomings that were the client’s doing — and make proposals for how to set things right.
Not an ambush. A mirror. The same format, the same quarterly rhythm, the same action points. Just pointing in the other direction for once.
I used the word rarely because it does happen. Just not often enough to change anything.
Because the client is always right?
Or because everyone has agreed, quietly, that the charade is easier than the truth?
