Overview
A debate hosted during ADWEEK House at Cannes Lions has laid bare a simple but stubborn truth: the future of agency-client work will be decided as much by culture and contracts as by creative talent. Reporting by Melissa Ward for ADWEEK frames the conversation, which Weber Shandwick co-hosted, as a practical interrogation of what makes strategic partnerships durable and where they typically fracture. See the original coverage on Adweek for full context.https://www.adweek.com/agencies/building-strategic-brand-agency-partnerships/
Rowing in the same direction
At the centre of the discussion was trust. Karen Pugliese of Weber Shandwick argued that openness and mutual respect are the basic plumbing of good work, and the panel was unanimous that those qualities let teams move from executing briefs to solving business problems. That requires agencies to stop thinking in deliverables and start thinking in outcomes – which in practice means access to client strategy, internal data and, crucially, permission to challenge the brief when it is slipping off course.
Niek de Rooij from Unilever offered a useful litmus test: partnerships become strategic when agency teams start saying we instead of they. That linguistic shift, he suggested, signals shared purpose and alignment. It is small, and it is telling.
Building for the long game
Several panellists pressed the point that genuine strategic relationships are built over time and designed for longevity. Carolina Cespedes Virguez of Bel Group described inviting her agency into day-to-day realities and even onto pilot projects for new AI tools. That kind of transparency, she said, was proof the agency saw the client as a partner rather than a transaction.
From a practical perspective the implication is clear: clients and agencies should operationalise shared ownership. That can take the form of joint KPIs, outcome-based remuneration or co-investment in pilots. Agencies that remain locked into output-based billing risk being commoditised; brands that do not insist on alignment risk paying more for less strategic input.
When transparency breaks down
Not all partnerships survive the stress of pace and expectations. Panel contributors compared relationship failure to a marriage where listening stops and directing begins. The symptom is familiar to anyone who has overseen marketing spend: agency teams stop pushing back, client teams stop listening, and both end up tolerating mediocrity.
A current flashpoint is AI. Caroline Ingeborn of Luma AI warned that agencies’ reluctance to disclose their use of AI tools creates a new fault line. If an agency hides processes or tooling, it undermines the psychological safety required for candid strategic debate. That same opacity raises reputational and legal risks that many briefs and contracts do not yet address.
Onboarding the invisible partner
The conversation moved from idea to implementation when panelists described AI as an invisible partner that needs onboarding. Daniel Sills of NewtonX put it plainly: most existing contracts make no provision for AI governance or disclosure. That vacuum leaves both parties exposed if an AI system produces problematic creative, misused data or a drop in creative quality.
The pragmatic takeaway is not technophobia but governance. Brands should insist on clear clauses covering AI use, provenance of training data, human oversight and audit rights. Agencies should be incentivised to be transparent about tooling and to demonstrate how AI amplifies human creativity rather than substitutes for it. Practical steps include pilot programmes with shared evaluation criteria, regular post-mortems and an agreed escalation path for reputational issues.
What brands and agencies should do next
The ADWEEK discussion, co-hosted with Weber Shandwick, surfaces a roadmap that any Irish or international marketing leader would do well to follow:
– Rebalance contracts toward shared outcomes and joint governance rather than a list of deliverables. This creates skin in the game and aligns incentives.
– Insist on transparency around tooling and methodology, including explicit disclosure and governance of AI. That reduces reputational and operational risk.
– Build regular strategic reviews into the relationship, not just activation checkpoints. A quarterly readout that both sides attend will spot misalignment early.
– Pilot new capabilities together, with clear success metrics and an agreed learning loop. Pilots are the fastest way to convert trust into evidence.
Conclusion
The takeaways are straightforward and unromantic. Long-term partnerships require the hard work of transparency, the discipline of shared metrics and the courage to challenge each other when it matters. As Melissa Ward reported for Adweek, the firms in the discussion recognise that technology is changing expectations, but it will be governance and accountability that determine which partnerships survive and which become another procurement line item. For further reading, see the ADWEEK report and Weber Shandwick’s perspectives on agency-client collaboration.https://www.adweek.com/agencies/building-strategic-brand-agency-partnerships/ https://www.webershandwick.com/
