The new agency rebuilds

January is when accounts change agencies. The review ran in the autumn, the decision was taken before the holidays, and the new team logs in this month.

For years I believed the first thing a new team owed a client was a clean structure. Inherited accounts are a mess. Campaigns named four different ways, audiences that overlap, exclusions somebody added for a reason nobody wrote down, a convention abandoned halfway through the year. Rebuild it, start properly, and at least the reporting will mean something.

Then, from the platform side, I watched accounts change hands in the same weeks of every January, and I had it wrong.

Some of that mess is a record. The audience that survived because it worked. The exclusion that stops the brand paying to reach people who have already said no twice. The campaign that looks redundant and quietly holds the lowest cost in the account, for a reason the new team cannot reconstruct, because whoever found it out has left the relationship. Rebuild the structure and the record goes with it, and that record was bought over years with the client's money.

The new team is not being careless. Legibility is the point. A first deck is easier to present when every object in the account carries the new team's fingerprints, and a rebuild is the quickest way for an agency to show it has arrived. The incentive points straight at the restart, and the restart is the one thing the client did not ask for. What was asked for was better work on a business that already exists.

The history inside an account is the only asset in that relationship the client already owns. It is also the first thing a new team spends, and it never appears on an invoice.