"the committee seems impressed"

For those of us on the inside, this article in today's Toronto Star about creating a public service ad won't hold that much interest. (Except of course the natural narcissistic interest in reading about ourselves.). But it does show a pretty common situation in the process of creating and producing advertising – the client seeing the work, liking it and almost approving it, but then realizing that it's contrary to some of their larger interests.

While I feel for the creatives involved and have been in the same boat many times, I think we on the agency side tend to focus narrowly on the task we're briefed on – we have to in order to get the best work possible. We forget that most of our clients have a wide range of businesses with lots of potential for conflict, and senior approvers who see the work for the first time from totally different perspectives.

Banks are a typical example; I've tried a couple of times pitching concepts for savings accounts that one way or the other implied that credit was bad, forgetting that credit cards are called that for a reason, and are of course a fairly profitable bank product typically run by another division of the bank. Someone on your team has to go through that to know.

On the client side, they tend not to realize that we will run with the brief and strategy wherever it takes us; it's an open-ended process. They don't usually know to think ahead to the needs of senior approvers, because they don't realize that we will almost inevitably transgress into those territories. We'll push things to a black-and-white statement that actually says something about the product, because that's our job – to make the strongest possible statement of our client's offering. That tends to worry committees.

So that first creative presentation can a real eye-opener for everyone involved. That's when the reality of the product and the project becomes apparent.