There is a formula spreading across Instagram and TikTok this summer: you name something ordinary and you rebrand it as effortlessly cool. Kinda chic to wear the same outfit twice. Kinda chic to eat dinner alone. Fine, funny, harmless. But there is a version of this that is not a joke: kinda chic for an agency to tell the client what is not working.
And as of August 2026, I cannot think of a better framework for something I have believed for twenty-eight years in this business.
The 'Kinda Chic' Truth
Let me be direct about what this isn't: this isn't a marketing angle. I did not read about radical transparency in a newsletter and decide Found&Chosen, the agency I founded and have run for the better part of five years, should try it. This is simply how good agency work operates, and I have learned it the only way that sticks: by doing it wrong first.
Early in my career, I watched what most agencies do. You curate the wins. You frame the flat numbers charitably. You quietly sit on anything that might make the client worry. Nobody ever calls it lying. But the structure of the relationship, monthly reports, quarterly reviews, the implicit social contract of a retainer, creates a strong gravitational pull toward smoothing things over. The instinct to protect the client from bad news is almost always well-intentioned.
Here is the thesis I would stake my reputation on: protecting a client from bad news is not loyalty. It is the single most damaging habit an agency can have, and it costs them the trust they think they are preserving.
The best client relationships I have ever had, the ones that lasted through leadership changes, budget cuts, and genuine strategic mistakes, shared one feature: the client knew what was happening, why it was happening, and what was going to happen next, including the parts that were not going well yet. That is it. That is the whole architecture of a partnership worth keeping.
Why Silence is a Choice
Here is the idea I want to spend the most time on, because it is the one I see agencies get wrong most often: silence is not neutral.
When a CRM audit turns up something that should honestly be retired, a tool draining budget, a process everyone complains about but nobody has killed, and you decide to mention it gently in the appendix of a quarterly review, that is not silence. But it is not honesty either. It is a choice to let the client discover the problem later, on their own timeline, rather than on yours.
I have never met a client who was surprised by bad news. They are surprised by the timing. They are surprised that they had to ask. They are surprised that the thing they are seeing now on a competitor earnings call was sitting in your data for two quarters and no one mentioned it. The report that goes quiet on a metric tells a client almost as much as the one that reports it. The difference is what the agency is willing to say out loud. And clients notice that difference eventually, usually at the worst possible time.
Let me steel-man the opposing view, because it deserves a real hearing. A seasoned agency leader could make a strong case that premature disclosure of a problem that is still being investigated creates panic, undermines client confidence unnecessarily, and damages internal morale. Their argument: waiting until you have the full picture before speaking is not deception, it is professionalism.
What this actually requires
Telling a client what is not working is harder than telling them what is. It is also considerably more valuable. The reason is simple: flagging a problem is cheap. Diagnosing it is not.
Any intern can build a dashboard that turns red when a number drops. The work, the real work, is knowing why it dropped, what it connects to, whether it is signal or noise, and what the next move should be before you walk into the room. That takes institutional knowledge, pattern recognition across enough engagements to spot what is structural versus what is circumstantial, and the willingness to be wrong in public when you guess the cause and the fix does not work.
This is also why the instinct to soften has consequences beyond trust. When you delay bad news, you also delay the diagnosis. A campaign underperforming benchmark that gets reported as underperforming in week two, with a hypothesis and a set of levers to pull, is fundamentally different from the same campaign reported as fine for two months and then surprising everyone with a miss. The first version is an active partnership. The second is a passive monitoring relationship with a very late invoice.
This is the part of agency life that does not show up on a case study page. A case study is a retrospective narrative: everything worked, or it was fixed, and the before-and-after tells a clean story. What does not make the site is the conversation in month two where you told a CEO that the strategy they championed is the reason the numbers are flat, and then walked through what you would recommend instead.
I walked into a room three years ago with a recommendation to decommission a marketing automation platform the client had used for six years. It was their system. Their team was trained on it. The renewal was sixty days out. The data showed the platform was the primary reason their lead-to-close timeline had stretched from fourteen days to thirty-eight. It was technically functioning but architecturally wrong for the volume they now ran.
The trend will cycle out of Instagram feeds by October, replaced by another format that reframes something mundane as aspirational. That is how internet culture works: fast and forgettable. But the underlying instinct the trend captures, the permission to stop pretending, is worth holding onto in places where the stakes are higher than a like count.
The next time your team drafts a dashboard that softens the truth, ask yourself this: would you rather explain this problem now, or explain why you hid it when it becomes a crisis? The answer determines whether you run an agency or a facade.
The clients worth keeping are not the ones who want to be told everything is fine. They are the ones who would rather know. And the agency that tells them, before they have to ask: that is not a trend. That is the whole value proposition.