When do clients go bad?

• Do agencies have a moral responsibility to the public as well as their clients
• Which comes first: client loyalty, or the public interest?
• Where and when should agencies draw the line and “fire” client
• What do you think?

Just this week, these questions have arisen in a surprisingly understated way during an otherwise high-profile case in London.

To the shock of the UK public, the 84-year-old children’s television personality, Rolf Harris, was found guilty on Monday (30 June) of multiple counts of sexual assault on young girls, in incidents dating back decades. He will be sentenced on Friday (4 July).

The Guardian, The Independent and The London Evening Standard newspapers, among others, included in their reports the detail that the PR and communications agency, Bell Pottinger, had been employed by Harris and his defence team, for media representation and media monitoring.

Following the verdict, this fact makes for quite uncomfortable reading from a PR and marketing professional’s point of view, and raises some equally uncomfortable questions:

• Did Bell Pottinger know all the facts of Harris’s defence prior to the trial, and were they convinced of his innocence when they took on their task?
• Or did doubts about Harris’s innocence exist, and did they take on the task anyway?
• Did Bell Pottinger only become aware of Harris’s guilt during the proceedings, and did they have an option to pull out of the task?
• Were there any members of the Bell Pottinger PR team on the Harris account who had reservations about it, and were they able to articulate them, and choose not to work on it, as details emerged?

I don’t know the answer to these, and it would be wrong to speculate, but they show that sometimes clients’ conduct can raise difficult issues for agencies, and it makes me wonder whether agencies should make the difficult decision to stand a client down.

With the benefit of hindsight it would be easy to express disquiet at Bell Pottinger’s involvement, but that would be a wrong and lazy judgement. Until the verdict was handed down, Harris was innocent until proven guilty. No agency of any kind has the qualifications or the right to hand down a legal judgement of their own. That is the court’s imperative. Innocence must be presumed, and so arguably, from a company perspective, they have been working for an innocent man. This being the case, there is no moral double-standard.

Besides, this is simply an extreme example of the type of potential conundrum that agencies face all the time.

Agencies across the globe are employed at great expense (for clients, and at huge profit for the agencies) by businesses that others find morally distasteful for a variety of reasons. Campaigners against big pharmaceutical companies argue that they manipulate the market and manufacture demand for their drugs, and their agencies help them achieve this. The fast food industry is accused of encouraging our children to eat junk and of threatening the health of nations. Food and drink companies are berated for pushing us a harmful diet of fats and sugars. The spotlight is turned on big retailers for exploitative employment practices. International clothes manufacturers are taken to task for using slave labour in developing countries. Even the tobacco companies employ their lobbyists, PR and advertising people. The list goes on, and in all cases, opponents of these companies can accuse agencies of being complicit with them. Just watch the movies “Thank You for Smoking” or “Fast Food Nation” for a couple of great examples.

But the companies themselves have counter-arguments. They are meeting a demand. They have corporate social responsibility policies and manifestos. They create jobs. Their list also goes on. They believe that they are providing customers and consumers with benefits (many people would say the tobacco industry is an exception to this), and they employ agencies to communicate these benefits.

Having worked in a number of agencies, I feel sure that any agency worth its salt does not knowingly and wilfully take on a client whose business practices are questionable. But standards change, laws change, suppliers and practices change, and what was once acceptable or ignored can become unacceptable and contentious.

In these cases, is it the agency’s role to encourage the client to change?

What if the client refuses and a line is crossed?

When do clients go bad, and what should agencies do when it happens?