What Clients Think 2026, Premium Edition, highlights beleaguered clients and AI scepticism
Each year, Up to the Light’s What Clients Think report helps provide creative agencies with a deep insight into how clients feel about their work. The free version is incredibly useful, but the author’s shared the premium edition with us, full of additional insights, which we’re able to share below. With the inaugural premium edition created in conjunction with the Design Business Association (DBA), founder Jonathan Kirk has pulled back the curtain on a corporate landscape characterised by intense organisational stress, an AI paradox and a profound desire for more assertive, value driven creative partnerships.
This year’s report is based on over 700 client interviews, representing a wide range of organisations from large corporates through to small non-profits.
The standard report provides the numbers, whilst the premium edition provides the raw sentiment. Here’s how the past year has transformed the agency playing field:
The internal client pressure cooker
The struggle isn’t just about shrinking budgets. Instead clients face a deeply internal pressure.
Pressure scale: From 1 to 10, clients rate the pressure they face to deliver on company expectations at an exhausting 7, jumping to a staggering 9 when speaking to marketing directors alone.
Perpetual restructuring: 54% of clients state their organisation is undergoing internal restructuring. This is an 18% increase over the previous 4 years that leaves client teams in a constant state of flux.
The rise of procurement: Agencies can no longer get past corporate watchdogs: 73% of marketing directors agree that the procurement function is far more central and influential in agency selection than 5 years ago.
The internal challenge: 63% admit that their ultimate everyday hurdles have little to do with market competitors – they are completely internal.
AI scepticism
The past few years have felt like an AI hype machine, which now seems to have given way to a more pragmatic and protective client mindset.
Severity versus Savvy: Whilst client organisations score a 9 out of 10 for how seriously they take AI, they feel that their understanding and usage currently sits at a much lower 4.
Agency knowledge deficit: Clients are looking to lean on agencies for AI guidance, yet they rate their current agency’s AI proficiency at a miserable 3 out of 10. Furthermore, 76% state they are not yet feeling any benefits from AI from their incumbent agencies.
Commoditisation warning: 87% of brands view strategic thinking as an essential shield against generic AI content. This gives a clear message that agencies who function purely as tactical doers will soon find themselves automated or aggressively squeezed on price.
Moving beyond doers
Agencies love to call themselves partners, but the data in the premium version of this report delivers a sharp reality check. Only 12% of clients look at their agency and see a “true partner”.
The supplier spectrum: The rest of the industry is caught in limbo where 8% categorise their agency as a functional supplier, 33% see them as part supplier and part partner, and 47% view them as floating somewhere “more towards a partner”.
The fragility of churn: Star individuals carry massive weight. 78% of clients state that their primary bond is with a few key agency people rather than the agency itself, sparking immense anxiety around talent churn.
Winning clients and the four boxes of categorisation
Agency delineations have become hazy over time, with them offering a wide range of services today, 87% of clients noted that they now find it incredibly difficult to categorise agencies on rosters. As a result, clients have taken matters into their their own hands, sorting agencies into four distinct psychological boxes:
| Agency Category | Industry Weight | Client Perception & Role |
|---|---|---|
| Top Table Heavyweight | 8% | Seen as a high-level advisor, consultant, and problem solver who enjoys senior-level relationships well before the brief stage. A large proportion of their work is pure strategy rather than being directly linked to creative output. |
| Strategic Creative | 51% | A highly consultative creative agency that is strategically driven and led. The vast majority of their strategic work is directly linked to a creative output to ensure it is targeted, relevant, and effective. Involvement in pure strategy is limited. |
| Thoughtful Creative | 37% | A creative agency that offers strategy as a “bolt-on” service rather than it being integral to their approach. The creative is based on a solid platform, but clients typically approach them with straightforward briefs rather than knotty problems. |
| Tactical Doer | 4% | An agency suited for fast-turnaround, lower-budget, and tactical tasks. Seen strictly as a supplier rather than a partner, they compete in a heavily price-driven area and consequently experience relatively low client loyalty levels. |
Pitching, decks and subtle sins
The presentation mode trap: 66% of clients complained that agencies launch into slide decks too quickly. Decks suffer from a goldilocks problem of too much on screen text to absorb whilst listening but too little detail to look back on later. The fix? Use bare presentation slides as talking props, but leave behind a richer copy with fleshed out text.
Stand to deliver: 79% of clients prefer agency teams to stand up whilst pitching, noting that it brings gravitas, confidence and signals that the agency is taking their opportunity seriously.
Retaining, growing and standardising relationships
The premium version of this report exposed a mounting friction between agency operational speed and client market velocity.
2 hour response times: Clients expect agencies to match their internal pressure. 83% expect urgent emails to be answered within 2 hours, and 77% admit they are actively disappointed if a weekend emergency email sits unread until Monday morning.
Two tier pricing demands: 44% of clients want their primary agency to adopt a formalised two-tier pricing system – a premium rate for high-level strategy, and a cheaper, streamlined unencumbered tier for quick, tactical turnaround tasks. Without this flexibility, 76% confess they have little option but to outsource smaller tasks to the cheapest external vendor.
Agency takeaways
The full report shows that clients are increasingly looking for safety though incremental creative improvements, rather than reckless, giant creative leaps. They value consistent everyday reliability over unpredictable bursts of artistic genius.
As clients find themselves blinded by their own internal fires, they are practically begging agencies to serve as their external eyes and ears. The agencies that survive 2026 won’t be the ones trying to wow the client with hyperbolic statements – they will be the clear, assertive, transparent allies who do their homework and confidently share the strategic steering wheel.
Whether these desires align well with what many feel have been persistently static or reduced budgets over the past decade, whilst wages have continued to rise, is another issue. Do you feel these are reasonable demands, or is too much being expected of agencies who, ultimately, aren’t always in the room when strategic knowledge is acquired and key decisions made? Let us know in the comments.
You can find both version of the report at the Up To The Light website. If you’re a substantial agency the premium version has considerably more data and is likely to be a worthwhile option. I have two jobs – one is running Design Week, and the other is running a small design and development studio, and a large part of me is regretting not having read this in detail in the past. The insights are actionable and genuinely useful; they have given me cause to think about what I should change in our practice.
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