Close-Up: Live Issue - When is the right time to fire a client?

'Creative differences' are usually a euphemism for a shattered relationship.

Bill Bernbach's adage about a principle not being a principle until it costs you money is never more applicable than when it comes to showing a client the door.

In recent weeks, three agencies - M&C Saatchi, Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Partners Andrews Aldridge - have all had to choose between principles and pragmatism when debating whether to part company with Harrods, ITV and Barnardo's respectively.

In each case, senior managers took the view that the marriage was on the rocks and divorce was the consequence. Whether these were resignations in the true sense of the word, only the agencies and clients know There's a widespread view that splits citing so-called creative or strategic differences are really, in the words of one agency chief, 'a case of one party beating the other to the trigger'.

'In most cases, 'creative differences' mask underlying problems,' Richard Hytner, Saatchi & Saatchi's European chairman, comments. 'It's really the result of belief and understanding between the parties having broken down.'

Suki Thompson, the managing director of the matchmaker the Haystack Group, agrees. 'The only genuine resignations are because of account conflict,' she says.

Nevertheless, resignations of multimillion-pound accounts are rare. The days when flamboyant agency leaders such as Sir Frank Lowe could afford to make grand gestures such as firing Fiat at Lowe Howard-Spink despite the business providing 40 per cent of the agency's income are long gone.