What 20 Years on Both Sides of the Creative Relationship Taught Me

For most of advertising’s history those two seats sat far apart: different buildings, different incentives, a contract stretched between them. That distance is collapsing. The ANA has tracked in-house agencies since 2008, when 42 percent of its members had one. By 2023 it was 82 percent, with the ANA expecting it to peak near 90. And yet 92 percent of those same companies still work with external agencies. The modern brand no longer sits on one side of the table. It sits on both at once.

That changes what creative leadership has to be. The old model — write a brief, hand it across the wall, judge what comes back — assumed the client and the maker were different people with a wall between them. When the wall comes down, the most valuable person in the building is the one who has lived on both sides and can translate between them in real time.

What the distance taught me

A few things I only learned by crossing it:

• The brief is almost never the real brief. The real one lives in a hallway conversation the agency never hears.
• “The agency missed it” usually means the client never said it. I have been on both ends of that sentence.
• The vendor sees the cost. The client sees the budget. They are not the same number, and the gap between them is where trust is either built or lost.
• The best work happens when someone in the room has stood in the other person’s shoes — and the worst happens when no one has.

The problems don’t live on the client side or the agency side. They live in the gap — invisible to anyone who has only stood on one side of it.

Why this is the whole premise

Twenty years taught me that the distance between intention and execution is rarely a talent problem on either side. It is a translation problem — and translation requires someone fluent in both languages. That fluency is not a brief, a deck, or a guideline. It is a person.

That is the entire reason I work the way I do now. Fractional creative leadership is, at its core, the job of standing in that gap on purpose: close enough to the client to know what they actually mean, close enough to the makers to know what is actually possible, with the authority to make the two meet. The distance between those two chairs taught me where the value is. The work now is closing it.