December 11, 2025
At our recent Future Leaders Day, we invited Ebru Özgüc, Group Marketing Director at Babcock International, and former Group Head of Brand & Reputation at Vodafone Business, to join us for a “Meet the Client” session. The Wall Street Journal’s Chris Woodall interviewed Özgüc, taking questions from our audience about how to build trust between clients and agencies.
Özgüc began by talking about the importance of establishing good client-agency relationships. On moving from Vodafone to Babcock, she made one thing clear to her former agency: “I’ll work with you, but I want to work with Nik. Put Nik on my account.” It wasn’t about the agency, or the credentials, or the case studies. It was about having trust in one person. Agency relationships can rise and fall based on individual connections and honest conversations.
The brief is everything (so stop sending it by email)
Of course you’re only as good as your last brief. Özgüc doesn’t mince her words when it comes to clients supplying bad briefs to agencies: “Don’t accept lousy briefs. If the brief is bad, the work is bad, and then it can cost you the account, because the account judges you on the work, they don’t judge on the brief.”
When Özgüc joined Vodafone, her boss thought their agency needed replacing. Before making that move, Özgüc did something radical: she looked at what the agency was actually being given to work with and discovered: “We’d been giving the worst briefs, and the brief is so important.”
She urges agencies to stop accepting briefs by email without any discussion. “You need a meeting to go through it and challenge it. The work you do, you’re not delivering a tangible product. It’s an important service. So to be able to understand the brief and raise the bar – to take it and make it even bigger – is so important.”
Challenging the brief is how you demonstrate value and build trust. It shows you’re thinking strategically, not just executing tactically.
A three-way partnership
When it comes to media partnerships, Özgüc says there’s a dangerous assumption that the agency and media partner should handle everything whilst the client waits for the finished product.
“I believe the client should be at the table as well,” she insists. “It shouldn’t be the agency talking to the media partner. You should be part of the discussion so that you can shape it.”
She says the agency’s role in these partnerships is to provide project management excellence. “The agency is a wonderful facilitator, but in essence, the client is working with the media partner. That’s high stakes for the media partner and the client. The agency’s job is to make it a very successful relationship.”
The strategic conversations, such as what success looks like, KPIs and measurement, require all three voices at the table with the agency acting as the project manager “keeping everyone on their toes.”
What clients really need from agencies
“I would never operate without an agency. The agency has much more experience than me. They’ve seen other clients, other industries.” Özgüc says. She expects them to “Take the brief and make it bigger. Give me examples from other clients, other industries, because I want to be successful.”
She’s a big believer in “big bets” and wants agencies to “really make me dream bigger.” This is where agencies become genuine partners: “I had an idea of what I wanted to do, and the agency came and we made it bigger. We made it different. Helped me stand out.”
If you’re wondering whether to include a ‘wild card’ in response to a brief, the answer is yes. “I love ideas that are off-brief. Every time I give a brief, I expect some sort of a wild card as well. It is often the wild card we end up bringing to life.” This isn’t about ignoring instructions. It’s about demonstrating lateral thinking whilst delivering what was asked for.
Navigating internal politics
Özgüc is keen to stress that the whole team needs to understand the client directly. She believes that when only account managers interact with clients, you lose the creative tension that produces breakthrough work.
“I hate to work just with account managers. Account managers are important. But I don’t like the Chinese whispers. The creative lead, the strategy lead – they should all be at the table.” The team needs to understand the client directly, not through layers of briefing.
Özgüc invites other stakeholders to agency meetings, even if they’re not directly involved. She worries that some people are “quite protective with that relationship. It’s so important to bring people along the journey with you. And that’s actually important for the agency side and the media partner side as well – knowing the client.”
When it comes to sign-off, Özgüc says agencies often fail to grasp the internal approval processes their clients navigate. “You deliver something on time to your client, and then the client goes completely silent,” Ebru acknowledges. “But sometimes you need to manage the internal dynamics.”
At CMO level, for example, “You need to sell something, and that takes time.” When pitching a major partnership to a former CEO, a media partner created a high-quality video about the partnership, before the contract was signed to help with the internal presentation.
It helped Özgüc sell it in: “The CEO was: ’Wow!’ That video, without them knowing, really got me the open door.” The best partnerships extend beyond deliverables to helping navigate internal complexities.
Lead with ideas, not budget constraints
“I’ve never been restrained by budget,” Özgüc reveals. “I want great ideas, great initiatives.” Often, she encounters the team saying ‘Oh, we’ll never do that, because we never have the budget.’ She says “The only way to break that is to not think about budget but run after great ideas. And to be honest, everything I believed in, I got the resources to run.”
She wants agencies to think like that as well. “That’s why that whole wildcard idea is the best.”
Her advice is to lead with ambition. The budget conversation becomes easier when a brilliant idea is on the table.
The three-year work rule
Meaningful achievements take time. Özgüc recommends three years minimum in a role.
“I hate to see people jumping – one or two years and they change. It takes so long to be able to have something you’re proud of. At least three years. Don’t kid yourself – you can’t really talk about an achievement that you’ve done in one or two years.”
But there’s a balance. After 12 years at Vodafone, she moved to Babcock. “Learning keeps you young. You have to build new skills.”
When it comes to job interviews, Ebru’s approach reveals how she thinks about all partnerships: “In an interview, you have to ask as many questions as the interviewer. You have to be on the front foot. You are investing your time, your fabulous self. You have to show up and deliver. You want to make sure that it’s a win-win.”
Before joining Babcock, Özgüc asked: “It’s clear what needs to be done. It’s not that clear if you will let me get on with it”. It’s important to clarify that you are hired for the right reasons and get reassurance that you will be supported.
You earn trust by demonstrating confidence and being clear about what you need, to succeed.
Trust is built through clear communication, mutual challenge and shared ambition to do meaningful work together. Choose your partners wisely. Demand clear briefs. Challenge each other to dream bigger.
Because when things go wrong – and they will – trust determines whether you work through it together or start the exhausting process of finding a new partner.
For more insights from the Agency Future Leaders event, read our companion pieces on Harnessing the Potential of AI and Turning Imposter Syndrome Into Your Secret Weapon.