For years, agencies were rewarded for impressions, reach and frequency. That era is over. Clients have sat through enough post-campaign reports to know that visibility alone does not equal business impact. The bar has risen. But knowing what not to measure is not the same as doing the right work. The real shift begins much earlier—at the brief.
Too often, agencies treat a marketing brief as the starting point. But a brief is only a translation. Somewhere between a leadership conversation and the document that lands in our inbox, the real business problem often gets reduced to a marketing ask.
To become a true growth partner, I believe we have to go one step further. We need to ask: what is the brand actually trying to achieve? Is the pressure on revenue, margins, retention or acquisition? Is growth expected from new customers, higher frequency of purchase, or greater value from existing customers?
Those answers rarely sit in the brief. They require a deeper understanding of the client’s business, category and market realities. Too often, agencies rush to solutions and spend too little time understanding the actual problem. Flipping that order immediately changes the quality of the work.
Once you start from that place, the brief changes. You are no longer planning a campaign. You are identifying a business problem and building a marketing system to solve it.
I remember a client running a large IP involving schools across 12 to 15 cities. The original ask was straightforward: achieve a certain number of registrations within a defined budget, based on historical CPLs and CPAs. Embedded in the brief was a familiar assumption—more budget would create more reach, and more reach would drive better outcomes.
But the universe was finite. There were only so many schools and only so many decision-makers. The more useful question was whether there were other groups capable of influencing those decisions. That led us to parents. The moment we widened the lens, the strategy opened up. Instead of relying only on school management, we could create broader influence around participation. The conversation shifted from questioning cost to asking what the smartest way to deploy available resources would be.
Build the correlation, not just the campaign
My co-founder and twin brother, Tufayl, has written earlier that campaigns create spikes; growth creates slopes. That distinction matters. Spikes are easy to generate and easy to report. Slopes are harder. They are compounding, directional and sustained. They require a clear and defensible link between marketing activity and business outcome. That correlation cannot be built after the campaign. It must be visible at the planning stage.
Every major element of strategy should have a traceable path to revenue, retention or another business metric leadership genuinely values. If I cannot draw that line before the work begins, the plan is not ready. The agencies that will matter in the next decade will be the ones that make themselves indispensable to business growth. That does not happen through good campaigns alone. It happens when we understand the business well enough to question assumptions, reshape the brief and recommend a better path.
When understanding the business changes the brief
A few years ago, we worked with a leading elevator manufacturer in India. The business problem was clear: the new installations vertical was underperforming and needed qualified leads that could directly contribute to revenue.
We built a digital lead-generation funnel tied closely to that commercial objective. It was not a brand-awareness exercise. It was a system designed to move a business number. But the more meaningful work came from a deeper question: why do consumers almost never notice elevator brands?
People use elevators every day, yet rarely remember the name on the panel. Sitting with that observation led us to an important insight. It was not a marketing failure. It reflected how engineers think about their craft. The ideal elevator experience is so seamless that it draws no attention to itself. You notice the brand only when something goes wrong.
That became the basis of the brand’s positioning—invisibility as a mark of excellence. It did more than sharpen communication. It grounded the brand in the reality of how the business operates.
Advice for young agencies
I believe agencies need a stronger grasp of business fundamentals—across stages of growth, industries and categories. Whether a company is moving from 0 to 1 or from 100 to 1000, teams across copy, design, production and accounts should understand how businesses are built. That also means spending more time with customers. For an EV mobility brand in the large-vehicle category, we made ad hoc visits to dealers and drivers. The objective was not formal research or hard data. It was to understand behaviour, motivations and emotion. The growth-partner model demands a kind of commercial courage many agencies avoid. It may mean telling a client that the brief rests on a flawed assumption. It may mean recommending a strategy the client did not ask for—and may initially resist.
Agencies often remain stuck in vendor roles not because they lack capability, but because they hesitate to push when needed. Clients eventually recognise when an agency is executing without conviction. When results disappoint, agencies that merely deliver what was asked are often the first to be replaced.
The agencies that build enduring partnerships are the ones that arrive with a point of view—and defend it. We have to challenge the brief, question assumptions and stake our reputation on what the business truly needs. Only then should the solution follow.
