Sometimes the Client Is Right
We’re in the middle of a Walmart launch campaign for one of our clients.
Like most campaigns, it started with a point of view.
Our point of view was simple:
Put the majority of the advertising budget into Meta.
Because for a campaign like this, we genuinely believe it’s the strongest platform.
The scale is massive. The targeting is excellent. The algorithm is incredibly good at finding the right people.
So that was the plan.
Then the client pushed back.
They wanted to be on Reddit.
They wanted to be on TikTok.
Our initial reaction was, “let’s take a small percentage of the budget and put it there.”
If I’m being completely honest, it was mostly to accommodate the request while keeping the majority of the spend where we thought it would perform best.
Then we started talking internally.
One of the things I appreciate about our team is that we’re comfortable challenging our own assumptions.
Yes, we believe Meta will probably outperform Reddit and TikTok on most traditional metrics.
But then we asked ourselves a simple question:
If we think Meta is going to win, are we actually giving the other platforms a fair shot?
The answer was no.
So we changed course.
We currently have three campaign groups running on Meta. Instead of pulling a small amount of money from the overall budget, we decided to match the spend of our Meta awareness campaign on both Reddit and TikTok.
Now we’re running a much cleaner test.
Same objective.
Similar creative.
Comparable budget.
Different platforms.
We’ll let it run for a month and see what happens.
The interesting part isn’t whether Meta ends up with the lowest CPM.
The interesting part is whether Reddit and TikTok bring value that Meta can’t.
Maybe the metrics are worse.
But if we’re reaching people we wouldn’t have reached otherwise, does that matter?
That’s what we’re trying to find out.
I think this is one of the biggest misconceptions about agency work.
Clients don’t hire us because we’re always right.
They hire us because we have a point of view, we’re willing to test it, and we’re willing to change our minds when new information shows up.
The best client relationships aren’t the ones where the agency wins every argument.
They’re the ones where both sides push each other toward a better answer.
A month from now, Meta may prove us right.
Or the client may prove us wrong.
