Episode 2 When strategy happens in a room: who was there? (Who wasn’t?)

Episode notes

Agencies often meet a strategy only after it has been translated into deliverables. The brief requests a website, campaign or content programme, but the assumptions behind the request have not been tested against client-side capacity, approvals, content ownership or budget.
Episode 2 shows why this matters. An agency can estimate production work, but it cannot compensate indefinitely for a strategy that lacks internal agreement or operating support. When the right client stakeholders were absent from the planning room, their needs arrive later as scope changes, contradictory feedback and delayed decisions.
A stronger engagement starts by asking how the strategy was made. Who owns it? Who must supply content and approvals? Which skills sit inside the organization? What is genuinely fixed, and what remains open? These questions protect both craft and commercial reality.
The agency is not asking to run the client organization. It is asking for enough access and shared understanding to build toward an outcome rather than a list of outputs.
 
 

Question for clients and agencies

Before pricing the deliverables, do the people responsible for content, approvals and implementation agree on what the strategy requires?