The price of a yes

Friday, and somewhere an account team is already drafting Sunday's recommendation.

I have sat on both sides of that desk, and the shape is the same in every version of it. The client asks whether the plan is right. The agency says yes. The client asks whether the budget should go up. The agency says yes, and has the slide ready. The client asks whether the new format is worth testing, and the answer is yes again, warmly, with an example from another market.

Nothing in that exchange is dishonest. Every yes is defensible on its own. And after a year of them the client cannot price any of them, because a yes that has never once been a no carries no information.

So the client starts reading the recommendation as a renewal document. Never out loud, and usually not even consciously. It shows up as a second opinion sought quietly, a procurement review that appears from nowhere, a request for the raw numbers instead of the summary. Politeness on the surface, suspicion underneath, and nobody in the meeting naming which of the two they are in.

The agencies I have watched hold accounts for years are not the agreeable ones. They are the ones that have said, on the record and in writing, that this money is better spent somewhere they do not bill, or that the idea is good and the timing is wrong, or that they would not do it at all.

That is the whole product. Judgement is the only thing a client cannot buy anywhere else, and it is unreadable without a refusal to compare it to.

A yes is worth what the last no cost.