Keeping client work separate

Agencies run several accounts at once, often in the same category, produced by the same people using the same tools. That creates two risks that have nothing to do with creative quality: things get mixed up, and clients start looking like each other.

Both are organisational problems, and both are cheap to prevent and expensive to fix.

Separate at the top level, not by filename

Client work should live in separate spaces — separate folders, separate projects, separate shared drives — rather than in one pool distinguished by file naming.

Naming conventions fail under time pressure. Structure does not. A junior working at seven in the evening will put a file in the folder they are already in, whatever it is called.

Each client needs its own visual system

The efficiency gain of running multiple accounts is shared process. The risk is shared aesthetic.

If your team has a favourite background, a favourite lighting mood and a favourite crop, three clients in the same category will end up looking like the same brand.

Define per client, in writing:

• Their background surfaces and colours.
• Their lighting mood — bright and clean, warm, dark and moody.
• Their angles and crops.
• Their level of styling and props.

Then hold to it. A client's images should be recognisably theirs before the logo appears.

Document the system so it survives staff changes

Agency teams turn over, and a visual system that exists only in one art director's head does not survive their departure.

A one-page visual specification per client, with example images, is the single most useful document an agency can maintain. It makes onboarding fast, it makes freelance work consistent, and it protects the client relationship when people move.

Be explicit about rights

Product photographs produced for a client are usually the client's, but that depends on your contract, and samples, props and generated imagery can complicate it.

Establish at the start: who owns the images, whether you can use them in your own portfolio, whether the client can use them beyond the campaign, and what happens at the end of the relationship.

The awkward conversation is much cheaper at the beginning.

Hand over properly at the end

Relationships end. A clean handover — organised folders, full-resolution originals, the visual specification, a note on how images were produced — is professional, and it is remembered.

A client who receives an unusable archive tells people. A client who receives a clean one recommends you.

Do not mix samples

Physically, keep client samples separated and labelled. A product photographed against the wrong client's background is embarrassing; two clients' products appearing in the same frame is a genuine problem.

This sounds obvious and it happens regularly on busy shoot days.

Where per-client scenes help

If your production process involves fixed scenes rather than physical sets, define one set of scenes per client and name them for that client.

This makes the separation structural rather than a matter of discipline: the client's images are produced through the client's scenes, and there is no possibility of the wrong background appearing because the wrong background is not in that project.

It also makes consistency automatic across time and across whoever is doing the work, which is exactly what a multi-account agency struggles with most.