the verdict (on your crappy brief to the agency)

Our friendly neighbourhood co-blogger Steve C. reports via steam-powered email about a tidbit of Massachusetts law that actually has some relevance for this thing of ours: 

"The credible evidence amounts to this: Representing a [professional woman] with disposable income and a zealous interest in litigating against [two of] her former employers, the respondent allowed the client to dictate a misguided strategy involving excessive and improper discovery requests that did not materially advance the client's cases but did generate large hourly-based fees for the respondent."

Steve wonders about the parallel responsibilities that marketers have to their clients – to wit, do you tell your client they're wrong? Do you tell them they're wasting their money, especially when they have a lot of money? And how exactly do you do tell them that?

Now, law's a far more regulated discipline than advertising, meaning that there are clear rules for dealing with this stuff, and punishments that can be levied, up to and including disbarment. But (perhaps unbelievably, to the general public) even most advertisers do have some professional scruples. (And yes, we even have a code of ethics, or two.) And however unlikely it may seem, I have been party several times to the process of saying, "Um, no, really bad idea guys."

It's pretty liberating. It's also extremely fucking terrifying.

In this business you never want to say "no" to clients. Even in as big a market as Toronto, there is a remarkably small pool of clients in pretty much every industry, and even one bad impression can rob you and your agency of vital business years down the road. Typically, conscience and capitalism don't mix well.

But in my experience, if you know something's going to tank (a spot, a site, whatever) before you even begin to brief the job, most senior ad folks will tell the client that up front. (Our Massachusetts legal friends apparently didn't do a very good job of this.)

Now, are these ad folks so noble and pure that they're willing to forego millions of dollars simply because it's ethically right?

Well, maybe. But there's a whole lot of self interest in it, too. This thing we do works best when it's in the context of a long-term relationship with the client. And relationships only work when there's a fair degree of honesty between the parties. In such a context, simply doing what you're told and executing the sure-fire loser campaign, without complaint, is a good way to get dumped. (It's called order taking and I've railed against it recently.) Good relationships have back and forth, after all, and involve messiness and agreements to disagree. This is the environment in which trust gets built and good work gets done. Plus bad relationships are doomed anyway, so you may as well get out on your ethical high horse.

This will usually happen in an email, as well as in person. It's not done lightly. And in my experience it's a pretty clear statement, without a lot of pussyfooting.

So now you've warned the client that what they want to do is a really bad idea, and a money loser. What if they still want to do it? Well, the client may take it elsewhere, knowing how low your enthusiasm is. Or they may say, we know it's bad, it's still got to happen and we want you to do it. Human nature and business being what they are, you take it and do the best you can.

And if you're lucky, the whole schmozzle leads to a better relationship with your client.

Does it always? No. Hence the terror I mentioned earlier.

a chicken salad sandwich, hold the chicken...

Order Takers. Sigh.

The bane of any agency. The reason why a lot of good work becomes, well, less good. The reason why a lot of agency-client relationships become, over time, much less good.

You know who Order Takers are, or at least you've dealt with them. They're the people who don't think; the people who participate in this thing of our ours often with a smile, with enthusiasm, without hesitating – and without thinking. There are several key traits of the Order Taker, but you only need to possess one to become one.

They're people who are in over their heads; without understanding or confidence, they have no choice but to parrot things they've been told to say. They're people who have no sense of perspective, and who are never going to grow one. They're people that do the minimum asked, without regard for consequences. Or, not trivially, they're people with no sense of humour.

Emphasizing that the people I currently work with are not Order Takers (we've built an exceptionally good team) here are a few actual examples, with the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

On the client side: We once got feedback from an assistant marketing manager that her boss, the relationship marketing director whom I'll call J, wanted the piece we'd presented to be yellow. Now, yellow wasn't a brand colour. It had no relationship to the concept, or to the consumer. We just couldn't understand it. We politely tried to dissuade the junior client during the call, then after the call we becme slightly more vocal. Tired of our swearing, our account team tried again, but there was no appeal. J was now out of town/in all-day meetings/whatever, and this Order Taker was standing firm on J's final word.

Now, J was (and is) a smart guy. He's consistently been a champion of good creative. And as we have several friends in common, we have also become friendly outside of work. Weeks later, I was able to ask him point blank: J, what the hell was up with the yellow?

"Oh my god," he said. "I was joking." And because he was being a good manager, giving input but letting his people run with their projects with a high degree of autonomy, he had no idea that his minion had mindlessly executed his joke. Autonomy is useful only for those who are autonomous.

On the agency side, there's the irritating account Order Taker: The person like A, a junior suit, who emails you the client feedback as a fait accompli. There is no discussion; his tone is simply, "You will do this." Except that, for me, there's always discussion if I don't agree or see issues. Questions to A about this feedback get the response, "I don't know, I'll have to ask the client."

Now, A should know. But he has simply taken the client's order, without asking questions, without being curious about the client's business, or even other projects within the agency.

When you say, great, if you have to call him/her to ask, why don't I come to your office and we can chat to him/her together, it turns out that before you were able to send that email, A has already managed to call the client and gotten an answer to your question. Except it isn't actually an answer to your question, it's an answer to what he thought was your question, which actually isn't right.

So, apart from cursing A's basic level of intelligence, you have the choice of: a) just doing the damn feedback; or b) involving A's boss and calling the client and finding out what the real situation is and what you can do about it. Unfortunately, you have to judge for yourself whether the feedback warrants this kind of intervention. You can't piss everyone off on every single one of A's projects, or suddenly A isn't the problem, you are.

However, also agency side, there is the even more irritating creative Order Taker: A good writer, X, brought me a deck of hers that had been marked up by client with their first round of feedback. She was cranky. The client feedback was stupid. Did she really have to deal with this? Couldn't I do something about it?

I went through the changes and, while more extensive than any creative might ideally like, found that they were actually workable. I went through them with X, telling her that I was confident in her ability to handle it. I got her attempt back 24 hours later; she had done all the changes literally, and had killed off the spirit of her concept. I gave it back to her with lots of suggestions about how to bridge the gap, as they say. At the end of that day, with the account team clamouring for the now late revision, I took a look at her second attempt. It managed, somehow, to be equally pathetic.

With a view to the timeline, I had her send me her Word doc and quickly did what I could to keep her concept alive, and shipped it off to the account team. Inevitably, more changes came back a few days later, from more senior managers and lawyers. X continued to flail away with growing hostility. Any time I tried not to intercede, the account team found her work impossible to pass on to client, not because she couldn't keep the concept alive in her copy, but because the sentences were disjointed. Feedback was inserted as asked, without thinking if it made any sense.

X didn't last much longer.

As much as you'd like to say that Order Takers can still have a role in marketing (as, say, project managers, editors or accountants, because those are more detail-oriented roles), there's just no room for people who don't understand marketing or their part in it. Those detailed jobs like project management and the others all require thinking and judgement. There should be no room for people who, really, just can't do their jobs.

the shock of the shock of the new

As a follow-up to my last post, I admit to being, well, shocked by the fact that our clients have been even more forward thinking than us. They've chosen a concept and quickly gotten us feedback, slight revisions which made the creative even more standout. During the call there were a couple of moments where I literally didn't know what to say; I realized that, out of habit, I was getting ready to counter feedback that in this case I actually agreed with – and which liberated us – and I had to stifle myself. It was a great moment for the team, and for the client.

All of which goes to show that you should never lower your expectations of the client. It may be challenging to be shot down over and over again; it may feel like banging your head against a wall sometimes. But you never know when your real, high expectations will be met, and when you can together achieve something impressive.

pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

In this land of marketing, so much depends on the wizard behind the curtain. Or at least, a whole lot of flying monkeys.

Case in point: we've done a couple of big presentations recently, each of which meant several hours of writing by several senior people, then meeting for at least a couple of hours with several senior people to examine the deck and go over how it will be presented. Account, media, strategy, production and creative all have to be taken into account not because we feel like it, or because we don't have anything better to do, but because all these things impact our clients' business and as professionals we have to deal with that.

Clients may not like the fact that all this takes time (and money), but the fact is they like things a lot less if all this time is not taken.

And after the meeting, in the weeks after the our big important presentation, we might not like the fact that clients take so much time to mull over what we as an agency take as large, throbbingly obvious facts, but they too have multiple experts and POVs to talk to, they too have to assemble in large groups to think through what we as agency weasels have spent an equally long time generating. Turns out they too are professionals.

um, which way is the HR department?

One of the reasons that a lot of the people I work with (including me) are in advertising is that we're unemployable in any other line of work. Not because of our vast creativity or anything, but because we swear. We're messy. Some of us have been known to vent frustration by, on rare occasions, throwing objects.

In most workplaces, in most businesses, that's not acceptable. (Except here.)

The office of every client I've ever had has been a civil, dignified and tidy place. Inappropriate things are not loudly said or loudly enjoyed by large groups. There aren't outbursts of passionate venting. Foot-high piles of paper are not tolerated as a form of filing. Discourse or actions that are disrespectful are frowned on or actively punished. And that kind of civil, ordered and respectful place is just not an environment in which I can work.

And I'm not alone. I once worked with a really strong account person who got hired by the marketing department of a large finanical institution. When I talked to her a couple of months into the job, she was bordering on despair. "I can't swear. I have to watch what I say. It's torture."

She'd taken the job I think pretty much because the company would top up her salary during mat leave, something she'd obviously been planning and was now several months hence. At the same time she'd get exposure to things from the inside, something that could only help her understanding of and relationships with her clients. It had looked like a win-win. But she was having serious doubts.

"I don't know if I can make it. No one jokes. No one has an opinion. I just want to scream at them. Even the meetings are dull. They're so serious. For every meeting they make agendas and stick to them. Can you imagine?"

No, I couldn't. And neither could this organized, serious, smart marketer who thrived on the chaos, untidiness and passion of agency life. After she came back from mat leave she jumped back into an agency as soon as she could, for not quite as much money, for not quite as good benefits. But the work, and the way of working, was not negotiable for her.

my postcard copy struck a gravitic mine

I went into the client presentation today, on a small job that I'd done the writing for, thinking that I'd nailed it, but also knowing it was the kind of project that gets... well, complicated.

It's a new program for which the messaging is still getting worked out. Even as I was approving the brief, I could feel the thinking get, not muddy, but nuanced. Which is my fault of course; with those thoughts in mind it's dumb of me to approve to a brief. And yet time was short; only a few days until final files are required. If I'd pushed back on the brief I would have eaten up all the time for actually doing the work, and the client would likely have taken the work in house.

Now, I'm pretty passionate about good briefs. I'll yammer on about them repeatedly in this blog. But I'm also, I'd like to think, somewhat practical. I've seen too many creatives, even good ones, stand on principle for entirely sound but utterly futile reasons; job-ending reasons, client-switching-agencies reasons. 

So I consciously entered into this job, knowing that part of the first presentation of the work would be to talk about the target audience's needs, the messaging, and the real benefit that the client was offering. It had to happen eventually, but under the circumstances today the creative was a necessary part of the client understanding the implications of their choices.

Yes, the copy got sacrificed. But I knew it would. I wasn't defensive about, and we had a really good discussion with the clients about the real messaging. We'll make our final file date.

To me, principle only takes you so far because reality never aligns with it. I don't know that it's a test of character exactly, but at some point a Kobayashi Maru blunders into your client's neutral zone and it reveals your character. Because you simply deal with it.

just because it's always teed up for you...

Direct marketing is by definition a response medium. And when I get briefed on a direct job, I’m automatically thinking about how to maximize response.

In digital, the intentions aren't so clear cut. In digital anything is possible. A kick-ass awareness campaign. A staggeringly efficient CRM campaign. A hugely succesful consumer engagment and prospecting campaign. It's all there for you...

But not even digital can do all of the above things simultaneously.

And that’s a really important thing to look out for when you're working in digital, I find. You have to be really clear about your purpose – your client, your account team, your creatives and tech people all have to be aligned on that one strategy. And that strategy should answer the question, how are you building the client’s business? 

I've had clients in the past say they wanted to do an awareness campaign with banners, but they'd measure its effectiveness by clickthroughs and number of leads generated. Not that those are bad metrics of course, but they're not the first (or even second or third) metrics I'd look at if I'm trying to broaden awareness. Inevitably, when we got briefed on that client's work, they kept assuring us, "No, this time we really want to create awareness," and so the team would go off and come up with some pretty cool ideas. And the reaction in the creative presentation would be great. And then the feedback would come, hours or days later, and it would all be couched in the language of being more effective at generating clicks. We began to feel like Charlie Brown, barreling down the field to kick the ball that Lucy promised not to pull away this time...

The finished work was never as good as it could have been for this client, because the creative always twisted as the strategy and metrics changed.

It should all come out at the brief, I know. Everything should be clear at that meeting when everyone's questions get voiced and hopefully answered. It just doesn't always happen that way.

And I don't mean to say it's all the client's fault, because agency folks can do something similar. I've had an art director get briefed on something like a landing page for registering people, and actually tell me that the page was all about registration – and then present me with page designs that buried the register now button under all sorts of cool flash and video, the fifteenth thing that a user might see. It's so easy to play, to do cool things, to offer up the latest technology. It's so easy to push your design for an email and insist on sweating over it when it hits someone's inbox as one big jpeg... forgetting of course that images don't automatically download in most people's preview panes, where your award-winning creative is instantly skipped over, its message totally lost.

In digital it's really easy to be unclear about what you want to do, because you can do it all. It's always all served up for you. It just requires the extra discipline to remind yourself that you can't do it all at once.

"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.

so you walk into the client call and...

Admit it, you spoiled creative ass. You hate feedback. You dread it. You loathe it. You know that even the least talented hack in the saggiest creative department in the city thinks that feedback is beneath him, and you don't think he's wrong. 

Maybe that's why most of you overreact to it. Even for relatively minor changes, creatives whip themselves into incensed states during the meeting. They vibrate with outrage. They become unable to speak coherently. They find their disgust smothered by account people before it squirts out like an exploding zit. They get back to their desks and throw paper in disgust, or staplers in anger. And when major revisions are required – well, if you remember the Old Testament story about the chained Samson bringing down the temple on his tormetors, you have some sense of the vibe.

All of which is stupid because it makes your work worse.

The impulse you feel (trust me, I've lived all of this) is spite. You'll give them exactly what they say they want. You'll take your brilliant concept and amazing writing down to the level they demand, and they deserve all the crap you're about to do for them... Except you really shouldn't. It's not good for your work, or your client, or your agency, or you.

I had... well, let's call him an opinionated client a couple of years ago. He started his job halfway through a major project we were doing, and he was rumoured to be a bear. Just before one of the first calls we had with him, which was to approve music tracks for the job, his underlings warned us that he considered himself to be something of a music expert. He knew everything about it. Gulp. And as he remained silent through all our reco'd tracks, our panic grew. Somehow, in spite of all our lurking despair, the subject of the '80s band Juluka came up. (I honestly couldn't tell you if it was mentioned by him or me.) It was slightly obscure, as no one else in the room was old enough to remember them, and it allowed us to start talking. We arrived at some common ground and we were able to rationally discuss what he wanted. Without (too much) rage.

As the weeks and projects went along, I found that talking directly to this key client was the only way to: a) get him to understand what I was after, and save much more of the spirit of our concepts; b) discuss things with the real decision maker, not minions; and c) feel much less rage. Email was useless, and calls with only the minions didn't help either.

You've got to engage, creatives. You can't be sulky or defensive. You can't fight. And you can't expect to keep absolutely everything intact. But you can simply talk about things and maybe keep the spirit of what you created alive. You'll have a better relationship with your clients. You might even stop thinking of them as being beneath you.

if you're a creative, you might not want to read this

You're a client who has employed an ad agency to build your business. (There's really no other reason to employ one, after all.) You want more sales.

Now, there are many ways that you and your agency can go about that. You can generate more awareness of your products, which is the traditional "mass" method. You can generate more engagement with your brand, which is what digital can do so well. You can try to acquire more prospects, or retain the loyalty of your existing customers, both of which are direct marketing strengths.

But what you're not looking for is someone to tell you that your microsite needs to be in flash simply because it's cool, or your TV spot needs to be funny simply because the creative team wants to win awards, or your DM piece needs to have an awesome and complicated format simply, well, because. And unfortunately, too many creatives walk into client presentations believing exactly those kinds of things as their basic reason for being in this business.

They're wrapped up in their own craft – the words and the pictures. Each is a craft that isn't easy to do well and each requires real focus. Somehow, in all that focus and intensity and passion, it's easy for creatives to get isolated from the client's real purpose. (And come to think of it, from the consumer's reality.)

Too many creatives don't fundamentally believe it's their job to help you sell your product. Too few think that they will have failed if your sales don't increase.

Creatives need to understand that they're in business. Your business.

What can you do as a client to ensure that you're working with folks like that? Before you hire an agency, talk to the creative director and team you'll be working with about your business. They're not going to be experts at what you do, not yet. But are they at least interested in it? Do they ask questions about it? Do they listen to what you're saying and get excited by it?

And find out about how they work. Will you be seeing the creatives at every concept presentation? (Some agencies tend not to let the creatives out in public, which fosters that isolation.) Do the creatives have input on the strategy? (Some places hand creative teams a brief and expect compliance. Other places give the creatives equal responsibility in the development of strategy, and expect questioning.)

The more that the creatives are at the table with you, talking about your needs, showing your their work, hearing what you have to say about it in person, and accepting responsibility for the results, the more they'll know your business, and the more you'll be sure you're working with creatives who truly want to build your business.

I can't imagine a better partnership than that.