a short note about the firing of an account person

A long time ago in a galaxy that I happened to be working in...

The account supervisor on a major retailer's loyalty account was new to the suit business. She'd been a strategist or data analyst or something at another agency – some sort of clever job that didn't actually involve client interaction. But she had a good résumé and references, I guess, because there she was, heading up day to day business with the client.

It was a busy account, pumping out lots of card-related DM, a monthly newsletter and a pantload more. Somewhat logically, this mean lots of client interaction every day, both face to face and, because the client was a long drive out of town, more usually by phone.

On the creative side we didn't realize that anything was wrong; this new suit had some good moments, some bad ones, but in her first couple of months this was expected. There was also a strong account exec working with her, a woman who was junior but smart and learned quickly, so things seemed normal.

One week, we started sensing some tension from this junior account exec; she wasn't getting answers from the new supervisor, and the clients were acting weird, she said. A couple of our ongoing projects stalled, pending feedback or approvals that weren't coming. She hinted at other weirdness, odd moments with her new boss that did not bode well.

The next week, the word went out in hushed, furtive doorway conversations – the new supervisor was gone. (Along with her boss, sadly.)

We found out why a few hours later. She had simply stopped returning client phone calls, stopped having any interaction at all with the people paying the bills, and her salary. With no explanations pending, and no informaton, the clients had quickly gone from concern, to irritation, to truculence, and had called the powers-that-be to demand their kilo of flesh.

Never found out why she did what she did, and I've never seen her since; speculation naturally ran to her cracking under pressure, which is of course only a euphemism for anxiety or depression or something else that was the real problem, and which her high-pressure job only exacerbated.

Advertising is not a career that grants you space or time to get over things, or allows you to hide from yourself.

nasty stories of creative directors who once interviewed me

When I was trying to escape from the in-house marketing department I'd started in and get an actual agency job, I interviewed for over a year. I had no contacts in the agency world and a book full of retail work based on what I hoped were clever lines and extremely repetitive, product-focused layouts. I was fueled by hope and desperation, and not much else.

I cobbled together a list of agencies and headhunters from award show books and the yellow pages (remember, this was before most companies and agencies had much of any presence on the intertube) and tried calling around. Most were never available; any switchboards I managed to get through led me to voicemail, not voices. It was a very long process.

One of the first CDs who agreed to see me was at Dentsu. Their offices were at University and Dundas, not far from where I worked at Eaton's, so I "had a dentist appointment" one morning and humped my nascent portfolio down there, hidden in a large knapsack. It being my first time in one of those things called an agency, I was terrified. Sweat waterfalled off my palms and forehead as I approached the receptionist to announce my presence, and pooled as I sat waiting for the Creative Director. A few minutes later he was there, introducing himself and being somewhat humourless, and he took me into a small boardroom.

Within 90 seconds whatever weak hope I had had been punctured. He hated everything; told me briefly how I should change each piece, and I was in and out of there in about ten minutes. After that I did not make any calls for several dark weeks.

Looking back, of course he had no reason to understand the situation I was in, no reason to be nice, no reason to try. Today I understand his impatience – I can only wince thinking at how awful my book my have been – but I don't understand why he showed it. If I agree to see someone junior or new, I think I owe them a certain amount of patience. Not an endless amount, but some.

Much later, while I was freelancing, I met the ACD for direct and digital at a small "integrated" shop. She liked my work; liked it so much that she took me to see the executive CD. He was a mass guy, mucho awarded. The ACD introduced me, said some very nice things about me and my conceptual DM work, and left me with the CD. He didn't have time to see my book at that moment, he said, but wanted me to make an appointment to come back before I left. He was very friendly, he talked about their recent work and how they liked to work; he even showed me some work that wasn't final yet. I thought we had a terrific connection, so I was really looking forward to my time with him the next week.

Things started to go downhill as soon as he opened my book. He saw direct mail and the temperature in the room dropped thirty degrees. He didn't look at me as I tried to talk about the strategy of the work, flipped through a few more items, and suddenly had an urgent meeting to go to. I was in his office for a grand total of five minutes.

This time, I wasn't crushed. His agency had approached me because of the work I was doing in DM. I knew why I was there, and was confident about what I offered them. He was clueless, and dismissive of work he knew nothing about.

The first CD taught me some valuable lessons, and forced me to go back to my book and rework the hell out of it. It was a necessary, if painful, first step.

The second CD was just an asshole. The only lesson he taught me was that some creative directors are just assholes.

good marketing is specific, because our behaviour is specific

(comic by Thad Guy, thadguy.com)I don't just mean good creative. I mean the whole marketing process, when it's good, is specific. Good thinking is specific.

It's tempting for people to generalize, especially about outcomes. If a campaign works, it's great, and everything about it becomes great. If a campaign doesn't work, it's a failure and everything about it gets tossed. Not enough people spend the time to actually examine details, in either agencies or client companies. Senior managers don't want to (or don't have the time to) get down in the weeds. They need to get to the takeaways, or results, or action items, and will blithely skip over the gory details of the PowerPoint deck they're being taken through to get to the last few "recommendations" pages.

Now, I'm all for results; they're a central tenet of direct marketing. But I'm also for learning. I want to do things better in the future, and everything I do now should help me down the line.

The glory of direct marketing – reinforced by the exactitude of digitial – is the discipline to test everything about a campaign, to find out exactly what worked and what didn't. So you can learn. And test again. And learn some more.

Because I want to know what caused X or Y behaviour, not what some group of people sitting in a boardroom thinks caused that behaviour. People's actions aren't caused by generalizations, but by specific triggers. As marketers, we need to know what those triggers are.

Generalizing is something we're all prone to defaulting to, and something we all have to be wary of.

PPT doesn't kill people, people using PPT kill people

Another shot fired in the PowerPoint war, this time from Slate. It's a balanced view of the application's weaknesses and strengths, and spends a lot of time – as it should – not blaming the app but the people using it.

Unlike masters of presentation like Jobs and Gore who simplify their slides, and use them to illustrate their thinking, most people get caught in the snare of templates. They cut down on the number of slides (too many looks like too much work) by packing maximum information into each slide, using bullets, sub-bullets and sub-sub-bullets. Each topic gets its own page, because that seems neat and clean. And if the slides seem too busy, then the presenter will often use builds, fly-ins, music and cute animations to make the thing more, um, entertaining.

(The worst, as of course you know, is when the only path open to the presenter, when sitting in a room full of people staring at these unreadable slides, seems to be to read them verbatim to the audience – boring them more deeply in multiple media. But that's not the point of this post.)

As a some-time participant is such affairs, it worries me when important information or a key point is getting missed for the sake of the template. I'll always suggest busting the template, or a single big headline on a single slide to ensure a point gets across, and sometimes I'm even listened to.

But writing in PPT is impossible for me. I have to write in Word, and actually have a flow and logical thinking, because I feel like PPT discourages that. And the Slate article points to a great example of exactly that, one I'd heard of but hadn't read before – this description of the way that NASA and Boeing engineers and managers used PowerPoint to elide the real risks that the space shuttle Columbia faced after its heat shield was damaged. It's a frightening look at some of the actual slides with a detailed critique. You look at them and can't help but think that, if someone wanted to hide the actual risks, they couldn't have done a better job.

As Edward Tufte says, when each issue conveniently takes up an equal single page, can it really be that they are all of equal concern? What is being deleted, missed or ignored in the serious issues? And how can you even differentiate the serious issues from anything else? Someone who is on autopilot while cranking out a PPT isn't going to be thinking about stuff like that.

What is incumbent on the presenter is to actually think about what you're trying to communicate, and ensure that your presentation and you combine to say what you want. Make sure you know what your big-ass fundamental point is before worrying about your sub-bullets. And remember that you get to choose the damn template you start with, and get to change it at will.

So, in the end I know it's not PowerPoint's fault... but the more I think about, writing presentations in Word (with full control over layout and fonts) then saving them as PDFs makes more and more sense.

another olde tyme post on the earlie education of a nascent copywriter

As avid readers of this blog (and there seem to be at least couple who don't share an IP address with me) may remember, my first adventure in this glamourous endeavour we call Marketing was as a proofreader in the in-house advertising department of the unsinkable luxury liner of Canadian retail, Eaton's. (Or, chez Québec, Eaton.)

Now, this in-house operation was serious. It was several times larger than some agencies I have subsequently worked at. It pumped out multiple newspaper ads every day, for dailies all across the country, as well as national flyers, DM inserts, credit card statements, in-store signage for over 100 stores, and retail radio spots. They had even just installed computers throughout the department, and set up their own studio using the biggest, fastest Macs being made – the Mac IIcx, I think. In retrospect, for 1989, it was pretty advanced.

I was slightly awed. (Keep in mind, I finished university in one of the last years it was possible to be an undergrad without a computer.) There were some really good people there, folks I learned a lot from. There was a whole new and very precise way of looking at language, something I hadn't really bothered to cultivate at university. And there was a pantload of material to proofread, with most flyers having several versions, based on both pricing and language variations. But in spite of my awe, there was one thing that deeply bothered me.

The tagline. Eaton's tagline throughout the late '80s made no sense to me.

We are. Canada's department store

The necessity to declare your own existence seemed a trifle desperate. (With good reason as it turned out.) But worse for me was the lack of a final period. How can you introduce the idea of a period halfway through a sentence, placing it with a good deal of arbitrariness, then abolish it three words later? Seeing as how they'd hired me as a proofreader, I began to obsess about this. How could mistakes like this happen? No one I worked with seem to know, or at least didn't want to share with some half-bright rookie asking stupid questions.

About a month after I got hired, the Advertising Department held its annual Christmas party.

I was pretty reserved; I didn't know a lot of people, and I was still figuring out who was who, let alone what my job entailed. But for the dinner, I found myself sitting at the same table as the VP of Marketing. (Let me assure you, this isn't a tale of drunken embarrassment.) He was courtly, and solicited people's thoughts, and actual dialogue seemed to occur. Lord knows it was probably painful work for him, but he didn't make it seem that way.

Anyway, at one these junctures of actual dialogue, I somehow found the nerve to ask about the missing period. And he didn't tell me to piss off. He gave me a response filled with what turned out to be the first nuance and insight I encountered in this business.

He said that when they first came up with the line, they had tried it the logical way, with a single period at the end, and that it had seemed a little flat. Then they came up with the two sentence structure, with two periods, but somehow that seemed off, too flat a declaration. Then someone had had the flash of insight to erase the final period, and the declaration "We are" got balanced by the openness of whatever followed, usually "Canada's department store." (It was a little like today's Nissan Shift campaign, with multiple phrases getting dropped in.) Suddenly the damn thing worked.

I had never thought of this before. I'd just assumed that applying the rules to the language would make it correct, and therefore right. As soon as I started thinking about what the line would look like properly punctuated, I saw exactly what he meant.

It was the first time I understood in a working sense that advertising language didn't have to be prose; that it could, if not be poetry, at least use some of the techniques and freedoms of poetry. 

It was the first demonstration I had that what works is much more important than what is correct.

And no, I didn't get fired. I don't think he remembered my name or my impertinence the next day. A nice secondary lesson that it never hurts to ask.

Bob Loblaw's law blog

Late night, but thought I'd share some genius.

Now, I can't find actual video of Bob talking about his law blog, but there is this band that's taken his name. Sort of like It's Patrick, or the Norge Union, paying homage to the uber DRTV ad in the history of this country. Which is what this link is: Norwich Union Mania – not the original Norwich Union spot, but an incredible simulation.

None of which makes sense. But as T.S. Eliot says, just kick back and enjoy.

yet another reason that Samuel Johnson is smarter than me

For someone who was a math geek through high school, and who today can still add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers without a calculator, and probably even still swing a pretty mean square root, the dread that this time of year brings is inexplicable. Because I ordinarily love numbers. I'll happily jump into a spreadsheet jammed with client data, filled with media spends or call volumes or whatever, and I really love crunching them.

But ask me to do my expenses, or my timesheets, or, when I was freelancing, my invoices, and I will find any excuse to hide. I will clean my desk, or call clients to see if they want to go for lunch, or come down with the flu. Tax time is the worst of all.

I hate money, or rather, the need to do any kind of examination of my own money. I have an absolute aversion to dealing with numbers in a business context when my own money is on the line. When any such topic comes up – expensing a lunch, submitting mileage – I get the sinking feeling that I'm about to make a mistake that will cost me personally thousands of dollars. Somehow I will do something wrong on a form and the accounting police will swoop in and I will be charged and life as I know it will be over.

It's irrational and stupid, yes, I'm aware of that.

When you're a full-time employee at an agency, and a creative, there's usually a little bit of leeway accorded you. Agency accounting departments expect creatives to ill-tempered innumerate children, and so I've been able to use this low set of expectations to cover my guilty tracks.

As a freelancer, you can't afford this level of unreason. Otherwise, you don't eat. So you find some sort of minimum requirement that you can meet, day in and day out. For me, for instance, that meant dropping all my bills and receipts into a shopping bag near my desk. I could manage that. It meant that I'd have to spend several hours before meeting my accountant every year, tallying and cross-checking everything, but I could manage that, too. I'm sure that would horrify the suits, as it did my accountant. No weekly or monthly tracking of anything. No sense of what my accounts payable or receivable were. But I muddled through it pretty well.

Needless to say, I was slack with my invoices as well. This I really don't advise. I may be one of the few freelancers I know who never got seriously burned by an unpaid bill, but this was pure dumb luck on my part. The best thing you can do is get your invoices in quickly, and if you're doing an ongoing gig, as regularly as your client will take them.

Not many clients value work they get for free.

As every writer's friend Sam Johnson once said, "No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

maybe not the laziest freelancer in the world, but I was close

Thanks to M.'s email this past weekend, and Terry's tweet to this article about when freelancers should walk away from clients, it seems like all things freelance are in the air today. Which is the perfect (if slightly pathetic) excuse for dredging up some of my old experiences under the guise of infotainment, or edumation, or just content.

I was most comfortable working for agencies. They tended not to haggle or openly balk at my rate, and when the job was done they almost always paid promptly. Folks there knew what my job was and what they should give me to accomplish my job, i.e., a decent brief. They also handled potentially sticky things like client feedback and production.

Working directly with my own clients was always a little more free form. I suppose you could spin this as being entrepreneurial, but it wasn't really my style. I had one client expect me to create and handle printer-ready files, and then to find a printer. Given that I'd signed up to write a simple brochure, the extra "opportunities" were a gnawing source of anxiety for about two weeks, until I found a freelance print producer/broker who took the thing off my hands. Some might see it as a lost chance to enhance my service delivery and make it big; being more stereotypically Canadian, I was happy that I had rid myself of the potential to screw up badly doing something I had no interest in and had never done before, something I would have had to work at a lot to get very little from.

As a freelancer, I saw myself as more of a craftsman for hire. This is what I do, I would think; take it or leave it. (But the fact is, I never actually said that to clients or potential clients.)

To the point of the Freelance Folder post, I only ever had one client that I parted ways with, but I didn't walk; it was mutual.

They were a digital signage company who wanted to redo all the brochures for multiple product lines. Their salespeople were finding that the brochures weren't communicating everything that potential customers needed; they didn't talk about benefits enough.

I spent a couple of days going through all the brochures. It wasn't the most exciting subject in the world, but their products had about a billion and a half uses in all kinds of business and consumer contexts. It wasn't too big a stretch to find compelling reasons to install their signage. I gave the client a quote and a timeline, they accepted, I started in.

A week later I sent them a first draft of the first batch of brochures. My marketing client liked them, had a few revisions which I made quickly, and then she sent the second draft to sales.

Can we guess what happened?

Yes, the bitter copywriter in the back row is correct. The deck came back from sales as an ugly, angry mess seething with red ink. Not enough about their product. Too much about the user. A whole lot of negativity. I did what I could, but with every line it was apparent that, as far as sales was concerned, I could have changed about a word per paragraph in the original briefs I'd been given. I finished the revisions, got everyone as happy as possible, and before my marketing client wasted any more time, suggested that they look elsewhere for a lot less money. She agreed, a little more quickly than I might have liked.

I really don't see this as laziness. Okay, maybe a little. But I also hate waste and inefficiency. And to paraphrase a brilliant developer, I'd like to think that, in addition to great ideas, my freelance career was also about simply trying to find the most efficient solution.

"Great, now people associate freelancers with Donald Rumsfeld"

I hope never to have enough power that my words may make such a horrible thing so. However, this was the subject line of the email that reader M. recently sent regarding my post about virtual agencies and freelancers, followed by:

I realize you wrote this in the context of virtual agencies, but I'd dispute your opening take on freelancers. "All you leave behind is your reputation" applies particularly to freelancers. The open-ended nature of the relationship means they have to consistently push their work to be considered for future gigs. Those full timers, on the other hand, can easily become too comfortable ... and even complacent.

I agree with M. that, as a freelancer, you have to do your best work for the sake of your lingering reputation. It's just that for me personally, the nature of the situation works against this happening. It's not easy. You often don't have time to build up knowledge about the client or the brand; you're thrown into a new situation and the only thing you can rely on are your abilities to brainstorm and create with the information your temporary employers give you.

When I was freelancing, I found this a hit-and-miss proposition. Sometimes you brought a fresh perspective that was really appreciated. Other times your "fresh take" was taken as evidence that you had no idea what was really going on, and you were quickly out on the street. All you can do is keep pushing out the best work you can, and that discipline is what becomes your reputation.

As for complacency, well, there I'll have to disagree with M. These days no one gets too comfortable, not in any agency I know, and not in the client world either. Complacency has been weeded out by the same Darwinian processes that changed dinosaurs into birds, newspaper classified pages into Craigslist, and everything, in some shape or form, into Google.

red is the old green, blue is the new blog

A housekeeping item of no importance whatsoever. As the many singles of people who have visited this site may remember, until about 5 minutes ago the text links appeared in red. From day one of this digital endeavour I thought the grey and black and red and white thing looked quite nice.

There was just one little problem with it.

I couldn't see the damn links.

Now, I know why that is: red-green colour blindness. On occasion I've stared at objects and been able to see the same thing as red, green, grey or brown in the space of about five seconds. It's not true of every shade of red or green, but in certain situations it seems certain shades of each just look interchangeable for me. And the links on this blog, appearing in the next body copy, just happened to meet those criteria. Hell, even some blues and purples sometimes are hard to tell apart. I've had to accept that colour, for me, is sometimes slightly negotiable.

Let me tell you, this is not a very helpful trait when you're in art school. And it's an occasionally hilarious trait for the people I work with; needless to say I will not sign off on any printer's proofs without an art director being available. Fortunately it looks like medical science may be rushing to my rescue. Gee, I can't wait.

I'll end this somewhat embarrassing post on this note, to reassure the people I work with and with whom I drive to client meetings: I can tell the difference between a red and green traffic light, and not just because of their position. They actually do appear as different colours to me.

Really.

Update on Sunday, May 2, 2010 at 12:06AM by Scott

Ah. That's better.