ah yes, the mirror

Further to Mr. Castellano's post and his experiences, I don't mean to dump all over creatives – well, not in any way in which I wouldn't also dump all over myself. Clients are not always super nice and super smart and super respectful. They're just people, and you get the same gamut of people within client organizations as you do within agencies, which to say it all depends.

It's just that you can really easily be a very unhappy creative who thinks that everyone else is stupid, and find yourself with an okay book (because clients or account people or dumb creative directors killed all your best work) that's no one's interested in looking at, because you have such an awful reputation. I've seen it happen. The business is smaller than you think.

When presented with an intractable and perhaps incorrect client, the only thing you can do is control your own actions and responses. And remember that you want to be able to sit at a table with the same client tomorrow – and next year. If you put a gun to your head because of this or that piece of idiocy on their part, you're not going to be around to be invited to that next meeting...

You could of course pull the plug yourself and show up to, say, a Ford client meeting in a T-shirt bearing a logo that looks like "Ford" but in fact says "Fuck." (Perhaps apocryphal, but the disgruntled art director who apparently did it while I was at Y&R/Wunderman was disappeared instantly and my sources were pretty good.) But what's the point of that, except to have a good sob story when you're begging someone to buy you a round at the Pilot?

That's all I'm saying.