How to be a better client

Welcome to Spark, a newsletter from Vivace. We curate and publish the most interesting thinking and ideas from our community on themes ranging from business and finance to culture and creativity. Send pitches and feedback to [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

Hello Spark reader,

This week we’re lucky to be featuring Eileen Lynch—our former Marketing Leader and CMO at Thomson Reuters and Refinitiv respectively, as well as a current partner at Broadridge, where she leads Investor Communications Marketing. Eileen’s marketing leadership has been inspirational for many of us here at Vivace, so we’re thrilled to be able to share some of her insights in Spark.

Throughout her career, Eileen has led large-scale, global marketing at leading organizations, across Brand, Marketing Strategy and Planning, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, Organization Design and Performance Measurement functions. She shared her thoughts on agency relationships and being a better client with former colleague and friend of Vivace, Katharine Ramsden.

—Ryan

How to be a better client

Over your career in brand you’ve worked with many agencies and partners. What are the hallmarks of a good partnership?

Great partnerships start with a shared vision, agreement on priorities (i.e. are we both solving for the same challenge?) and respect for what each team brings to the table.

Accountability from the client side requires what you would expect: knowing the customer and the competition, deeply understanding the business challenge and the marketing opportunity and, importantly, ensuring your leadership is aligned with the opportunity at hand.

Identifying the right agency partner requires careful consideration and an appreciation of both the art and the science of creating great work:

Is the agency culturally aligned with us?

Can I see this agency as a natural extension of my own team?

Does the agency admire our brand and are they excited and passionate about creating great work that will help us win in the market?

Those intangibles are in addition to technical skills: knowing your industry and your business, knowing how to create amazing narratives, and understanding the channels and platforms that will accelerate your success.

What are some of the critical challenges for organizations that you have worked on with agency partners?