On having Skin in the game

I have spent the better part of forty years sitting on the agency side of the table, watching clients respond to advertising concepts. I thought I understood what was at stake for them.

I didn't.

I commissioned a designer last month to develop the cover for my book. Not a client's book. Mine. A project that has taken years, that bears my name, that will exist in the world long after whatever discomfort I'm currently feeling has faded or turned into something else.

When I reviewed the initial concepts with the designer, something happened - I became, for the first time in my professional life, genuinely frightened. Not of the designer (he’s lovely). Of the decision.

When it is your money and your reputation nothing about the process changes, but everything about the stakes does. The brief is the same document it has always been. The creative process is the same process. The conversation about vision and reference points and what feels right is the same conversation. And yet everything about how it feels changes completely.

When I was at Wieden+Kennedy, I worried about the work. I cared about it, often ferociously. But it was, at some level, insulated by a structure I never fully appreciated at the time - it was someone else's money, and it was someone else's brand reputation I was working in service of. If it went wrong, it went wrong for them. My investment was professional. Theirs was financial and existential. I had always intellectually understood this distinction. I had never felt it in my body.

There is a word worth pausing on here for just a moment. We forget, at our peril, and despite all the talk of 'pirates' and independence, that 'agency' refers not to free will but to representation - to a body authorised to act on behalf of another. An agent is not the origin of intent but its executor. Agencies were never designed to be sovereign actors. They were invented to carry someone else's intentions into the world with skill and competence. The cost and risk, by definition, was never supposed to be theirs.

Mine is - and the risk calculus I have discovered, is exponentially different. Spend a client's money poorly and you lose a relationship, maybe an account, certainly some sleep. Spend your own money poorly on something that represents you and is made visible to the world and you lose something quite different. The designer is not just making a cover. They are making a claim about who I am - one I will have to live with, publicly, for as long as the book exists. Every decision in the brief, every reference image, every moment of creative feedback, carries a weight that is simply not present when you are spending someone else's budget.

The agency side of the table talks about ownership -  clients to feel ownership of the work, how to bring them on the journey, how to make the creative decision feel like theirs. What we are less aware of (or honest about) is what ownership actually requires. It requires skin in the game. Real exposure to the consequences of the choice. And most agency practitioners operate without it. We make the case. We do the craft. We manage the process. The client bears the cost and the risk.

Which is why the word 'brave' deserves some scrutiny. Agencies deploy it constantly - brave work, brave clients, brave decisions. Bravery, properly understood, requires exposure to the consequences of the choice. It requires something to lose. The person across the table has something to lose. The person encouraging them to be ‘brave’, with their budget on their reputation, does not - or at least has significantly less. Calling for clients to be ‘brave’ is a failure to understand what the word means - or what it costs.

I am not, to be clear, arguing that agency people don't care. I have been lucky enough to have worked with some of the most dedicated, genuinely invested people in the business. But caring and bearing risk are not the same thing, and that confusion is, I'd argue, how we end up with a profession that is, at best, intermittently good at understanding what it is actually like to sit across the table.

Perhaps the industry’s professional development programmes should require every agency practitioner, at some point in their career, to commission creative work with their own money, for themselves, and report back. Something consequential. Something public. Something that exposes them. Something that frightens them a little. Not because it would make them more empathetic - though it would - but because it would make them more honest about the gap between what they think they're asking of clients and what they are actually asking. About what it costs to be a client. About what it feels like when the room goes quiet and everyone is looking at you. About the gap between an idea somebody else will fund and the work as a lived experience of exposure.

I approved a concept this morning. Forty years on, I finally know what I was asking of my clients - and how much I owe the ones who said yes without flinching.