"I don't know. It lacks something".

"It needs more pep."

"We need to make the design to pop."

"The copy needs to be more striking".

What the fuck? Yeah. You know what I am talking about. Strange revisions that make you want to kill yourself because you have NO IDEA of what the client is saying. The first line was delivered via telephone a couple of weeks ago... a revision to a stock music I had put on a radio spot. Pep, huh? (I would like to point out that I didn't put anything jazzy or classical) When I tried to have them explain pep... silence. Just pep.

What ever happened to normal revisions, or revisions based on something that you can understand??? Do they realize that we are not psychics? We need facts, not ambiguous ideas. The winner is... I don't know that is wrong with the ad, it just doesn't speak to me. Um. Right. Now I have to do another ad, trying to bet that I will speak to the client, instead of... gasp... the target audience? Great. I will now close my eyes, breathe in deeply and try to envision what is pep, for example. Can I put a little music that sounds more... pornish? Hey porn music has pep in my book. So does a lot of other music, but you don't see me using my taste in music in my ads!

If only clients would realize that revisions are welcome when they make sense and are based on the target audience, not their particular taste, we would all leave home earlier. As another decade comes in working in this business - damn, I have to retire NOW - it dawns on me that every single time I have sat down and have had "the talk" with my clients ("you should try to remember that it's not about you, but the reader, yada yada yada), I have wasted my time. As much as they tell me that I am right, they continue to do that obnoxious thing of trying to approve an ad for themselves.

The thing that bothers me the most is, I think we have the only profession in which clients always need to point out something stupid about our work. Don't think so? Go to the doctor and get a facelift. How many patients do you think tell the doctor how to pull their skin better? Go to your latest hip restaurant. Do you ever have the need to tell the chef that the chateaubriand needs to be cooked better in this style or that style? No, right?

They pay them, knowing full well that they know what to do. But in advertising, you get revision after stupid revision. And the kicker is, when you hand in the bill, they start whimpering about all those pesky revision costs.

There are team building workshops, all around the globe. You know, those awful I hate this and I love that about you, catch me from the ladder bullshit, talk in circles... eeeeeeeesh. Well, you know what? I would gladly fall to my coworkers hands and sing kumbaya any day if one of my clients, just one, went into ad revision boot camp. If you don't give us a decent, based on logic revision, you have to drop down and give us 30 push ups.

Wishful thinking... Wishful thinking.