Building Breakthrough Creative Starts With Building Client Trust

Most agencies know the familiar tension of trying to push a campaign's creative boundaries without pushing the client out of their comfort zone. Getting a brand to sign off on a bold idea requires a level of candor that only works when the client trusts where it is coming from. Pushing too hard without that foundation can derail the work before the idea reaches production. The agency-client relationships producing breakthrough creative right now are built on a deep, empathetic understanding of the client's actual business challenges before the creative team even starts working.

Shawna Ross, Chief Strategy Officer at Dentsu Creative Chicago, spends most of her time working the exact push and pull between creative ambition and client comfort. She has steered creative strategy at top-tier agencies like Energy BBDO and mcgarrybowen for nearly 20 years. Ross recently served as a shortlist judge for Creative Strategy at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, evaluating some of the strongest global campaigns of the year. Her working thesis is that breakthrough creative depends on understanding a client's business intimately enough to earn the trust it takes to pitch bolder ideas.

"We have an adage around here: intimacy breeds trust, and trust breeds bravery. Once clients know you're as invested in their business as they are, that's when you earn the ability to push the work further," says Ross. She operates by a simple rule that frames deep client understanding as the prerequisite for pushing boundaries. True intimacy often involves becoming so enmeshed in a brand's specific hurdles that the agency and client effectively operate with a shared perspective. "We talk about almost mind-melding with them, feeling like you've got their challenges in your mind as much as they do," Ross adds.

Building trust from pitch to production

Ross begins building trust during the pitch, positioning the agency as already invested in the client's business regardless of whether the account gets awarded. During the pitch for Lowe's Home Improvement, her team identified the strategic truth underneath: Lowe's is fundamentally a helping brand. When the client later asked Dentsu how to maximize its new partnership with Lionel Messi, the team's answer came from that earlier strategic work. Their proposal centered the campaign on Messi's role in creating assists, positioning him as the player who helps others succeed. "It ended up both solving that partnership and really giving them a place to hang their hat in a breakthrough way," Ross explains.

Trust also means recognizing when a client has already moved into bolder territory on its own, and building on that momentum where it exists. Working with the feminine healthcare brand AZO, Ross's team encountered a client that had already moved its visual identity to stark black-and-white photography. The team built on that foundation by developing the differentiated message the visual direction was missing, launching the "We've Been There" campaign around female camaraderie. "What we were able to do in that instance is meet them where they were and honor the fact that they had already made a bold move," says Ross. "By honoring that and then helping advance them to where they needed to be, we ended up in a much better space."

Structurally, Dentsu embeds its creatives directly into client conversations, giving teams direct exposure to business problems without a strategy translation layer in between. Ross also uses Cannes as a working environment with clients, "walking the work" and reviewing creative as a way to make ambition legible. "We orchestrate it in a way that our creative teams are also quite close with our clients, making sure that they are not just bringing work that they want, but work that the client needs," she notes. "We ask 'What about this do you love? What would we never do? What's too far for you? What feels right? And what do we think is a big bet?' You get to have those really rich conversations around creative ambitions."

The bedrock beneath breakthrough work

Judging the Cannes Lions reinforced what Ross had already come to believe about how the strongest creative work gets made. The campaigns consistently rising to the top of the shortlist reflected agencies and clients taking calculated risks together, with visible investment on both sides of the relationship. The same trust also protects the work when the inevitable missteps happen. "If you can go back to that bedrock of trust where a client is like, 'Look, I know you've got my best interest at heart. This thing went south,' or 'We misstepped here and there's shared accountability,' At the end of the day, if the trust exists, it's going to be a bump in the road versus falling into a crater," Ross says.

The operating framework Ross has built for maintaining that trust starts with an alignment around what the work needs to achieve. Once that alignment holds, a shared creative vision becomes the connective tissue that keeps the agency team and the client team functioning as one team. "I think there has to be a willingness to always be honest and open, and I think it is less about personal subjective taste and more about what we'll do right by the work," she concludes. "You get a sense of camaraderie, a sense of team. You can foster that team mentality once there is a shared creative vision. You all know what you're shooting for."