Farmer & Company is the acknowledged expert on advertiser-agency relationships, with 30 years of experience helping creative / media agencies and their advertising clients improve their working relationships. This is necessary so that advertisers can increase the marketing performance of their brands — to grow, gain market share, and improve customer satisfaction.

As outlined in Michael Farmer's award-winning book, Madison Avenue Manslaughter (3rd Edition 2019), advertising agencies are caught between fee-cutting clients and growing Scopes of Work. As a result, agencies struggle to survive, and this is a distraction from helping their clients perform better in their complex and highly competitive marketplaces.

Agency strategic and creative workloads have been growing faster than agency fees since the advent of the digital and social age after 2000. SOW workloads are out of control, since neither agencies nor their clients document, measure, track, or negotiate deliverables for fee-setting purposes.

Instead, in the face of declining fees, agencies have downsized and cost-reduced their operations, liquidating their talent in a shortsighted way to deliver short-term profits.

This puts an enormous strain on agency people, who struggle to create and deliver more and more output without sacrificing quality. Inevitably, quality does suffer, and clients terminate existing agency relationships and seek new agencies….paying them even less….without solving the underlying relationship problems.

Advertisers have their own problems. For the past 20 years, advertisers have plunged into digital and social marketing, believing that it was “the right thing to do” to improve marketing through digital and social personalization.

Unfortunately, the results are mixed, and 20 out of the top 50 advertisers have actually seen, as a group, their sales decline between 2009 and 2019.

There has been insufficient attention to “getting SOWs right.” Using every available marketing channel, from TV to Instagram, is not the wisest use of scarce marketing dollars. It doesn’t work.

To fix their relationships, clients and their agencies need to work more like strategic partners than “customers and low-cost vendors” — and they need to discuss the composition of SOWs with an eye to “what will actually work to improve brand performance in the marketplace.”

They also need to fix briefing and ad approval processes to reduce unnecessary rework and other time-wasting costs.

Relationships have deteriorated over the past 20 years, and so has advertiser brand performance. It’s time to solve this problem in a serious way.