consistently demonstrate they are in the business of their clients ' growth, not just their clients ' campaigns.
The Accountability Gap
There is another dimension to this that rarely gets spoken about directly, and I want to name it because I think it matters. There is an accountability gap in how agency work is evaluated in this market, and it cuts both ways.
On the agency side, too much work is evaluated on inputs and outputs rather than outcomes. Did we deliver the campaign on time and on budget? Did the client approve the creative? Did the execution go smoothly? These are reasonable questions, but they are not the right questions. The right question is: did this work grow the business? And that question requires agencies to stay engaged beyond the delivery, to track what happens after the campaign goes live, and to be honest- with themselves and with their clients- about what worked and what did not.
On the client side, the accountability gap shows up differently. Marketing spend is often approved without a clear enough definition of what success looks like in business terms. Brand awareness scores and social engagement metrics fill the reporting gap, but they do not always connect to the outcomes that actually matter to the board- volume, revenue, market share, margin. When clients cannot articulate what they are trying to move, agencies cannot be fairly held accountable for lack of progress.
Closing this gap is one of the most important things we can do for the health of East Africa ' s marketing industry. It requires clients to be more precise about what they are buying and agencies to be more rigorous about what they are delivering. It requires both sides to have harder conversations earlier, and to stay in the room together long enough to know
35 MAL72 / 26 ISSUE whether the work actually did what it was supposed to do.
What a Different Relationship Looks Like
I have been fortunate, across my career, to experience what a genuinely great agency-client relationship feels like. They are rarer than they should be, but they exist, and they share certain qualities that are worth naming.
The first quality is mutual investment. In the best relationships I have been part of, both sides were genuinely invested in the outcome- not just their respective deliverables. The agency cared about the client ' s business results. The client cared about giving the agency the conditions it needed to do its best work. That mutuality changes the dynamic of every conversation. It replaces the vendor-client transaction with something that feels more like partnership.
The second quality is honesty about what is not working. The healthiest agency-client relationships I have seen are the ones where difficult conversations happen early- where the agency is willing to say ' this brief is not clear enough for us to do something great ' and the client is willing to say ' the last campaign did not deliver what we needed.' That kind of honesty is uncomfortable. It is also the only thing that allows the relationship to improve.
The third quality is a shared language around results. In the best relationships, both agency and client know exactly what success looks like before the work begins- not in vague terms like ' brand awareness ' or ' consumer engagement,' but in the specific, measurable outcomes that connect to the client ' s business strategy. When that shared language exists, the evaluation of the work becomes a collaborative exercise rather than a defensive one.
A Challenge to Both Sides
I am writing this as someone who now leads an agency, but I want to be clear that the responsibility for what I am describing does not sit solely with agencies. It sits with both sides of the relationship, and it will take movement from both sides to change.
To the marketing leaders and CEOs reading this: I want to challenge you to show up differently in your agency relationships. Share more of the real business context behind your briefs. Be more precise about what you are trying to move and why it matters. Push your agency partners to ask harder questions- and if they are not asking, demand it. The agencies that will serve you best are the ones you treat as genuine partners in your commercial growth, not as suppliers of creative services.
To the agency leaders in this market: the brief is the beginning of our responsibility, not the boundary of it. Our value to clients is not in our ability to execute what is asked. It is in our ability to understand what is actually needed- and to have the courage to say so, even when it is uncomfortable. ' The brief says so ' is not a defence. It is an abdication. And our clients, and our industry, deserve better than that.
The marketing and communications industry in Tanzania- and across East Africa- is at an inflection point. The businesses we serve are growing in sophistication and ambition. They are asking harder questions about what their marketing investment is producing. They deserve agency partners who can meet them at that level. The agencies that rise to that challenge will define what this industry looks like for the next decade. The ones that do not will find themselves increasingly irrelevant to the clients who matter most.
That is the conversation I believe we need to be having. And I intend to keep having it- from both sides of the table.
Timea Chogo is the Managing Director of BLANQ Advertising Network, an impact-led marketing and communications agency based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. She brings senior commercial leadership experience from Tanzania Distilleries Limited( AB InBev), Oryx Energies, TOL Gases, and Airtel Tanzania. You can commune with her via email at: Timeachogo @ gmail. com.