Joanne Davis, who has been running ad agency searches for clients for 24 years, gets right to the point when asked how brands can have better relationships with agencies.

“Communicate clearly,” she says. Brands are “not communicating their business problem clearly. They’re not communicating their objectives, they’re not defining and communicating their target, they’re not communicating and defining the realities of their budget. If they communicated better with those three or four things upfront, there would be a lot more happy marriages among clients and agencies.”

On this week’s edition of Ad Age’s Marketer’s Brief podcast, Davis shares that advice and other tips from her new book, “How to Get Your Agency to Jump Through Brick Walls—Without Paying More.” 

Davis founded Joanne Davis Consulting in 2000. The firm’s services include agency searches, compensation management, marketing coaching and training and more. 

Also read: How AI is impacting agency reviews

Agency-brand communication issues have intensified in part because of headcount reductions, Davis said on the podcast. “Agencies and clients are running their operations with fewer people,” she said. “So with fewer people, things sometimes get a little sloppy and the communications isn't as deep and as clear as it was maybe a decade or two ago.”

Below, a sample of the advice she shares on the podcast.

Project work

One of the defining traits of agency-brand relationships in recent years has been the erosion of agency of record status in favor of more project-based work. For clients that go this route, Davis preaches honesty. “The bad way to do it is to say you’re going to have a seat at the table and then take their work away and give it to your internal people to execute,” she said. “It’s like taking their children away—taking a child away to have somebody raise it for them.”

Request for proposals

Davis says requests for proposals are “either too incomplete or a book that nobody wants to read.” In her book, she advises brands to boil RFPs down to “a concise list of prioritized questions, ideally, no more than 10, that are highly relevant to the work the agency is being considered for and key to determining agencies to advance or eliminate.”

Turnover

In her book, Davis observes that while marketers like to complain about agency employee turnover, it’s also a problem for brands. On the podcast, she brought up an example of a client that was about to start a review—but then she was told that a new chief marketing officer would be hired soon. She recommended a pause in the review because the new CMO might have favored agencies and it “will potentially make the agencies we bring to the party uncomfortable.” So, “they paused the review and then it turned out that the incumbent agency came up with such fabulous work, they decided to keep the incumbent.”

Getting on her radar

Part of Davis’ job is keeping tabs on new agencies and how old agencies are changing. With more agencies opening, that job becomes more time-consuming. Davis prefers to get a succinct fact sheet on agencies before meeting them. She wants “something more than we can find on your website because sometimes the websites have the logos of every client … they’ve ever worked on and I don't know what's current and I don't know what's past,” she said.