How many times have you or someone you know said something on the lines of: “Wow, that ad blows so hard. If I had that account, I could do so much better”? If you can say at least once, then feel free to slap yourself or your friend on the stomach repeatedly until you achieve a bona fide red-belly (slapping on the face is not exhorted but not punished either, so feel free to do that to).
Why do I come out with that random rant? Well it’s because consistently we practice unfair binges of empathy while lambasting the names of those who have to work the account, at times blaming them for the shit work that comes out.
“So is this another bitch fit about clients?”
Why of course. I bring this point up because hell we all love to rip a shitty ad a new asshole but more often than not, we exclusively put the blame on the creatives or at least non-industry people or newbies commit this faux-pas and I just like to say that I learned the hard way not to say shit like the initial phrase in the first paragraph. We were doing a sales pitch for an account and said all the ways we could clearly and easily make better work. Of course we forgot to take into account the Client Factor and simply based revisions on the ad per se. Trust me if working in advertising were that easy, there wouldn’t be a third of the blogs including this one.
What you need to understand is that a client has developed a sense of making things so implausibly impossible that any shit fellow ad-ites give to any of their creative kin is to be not only frowned upon but preferably shat on tainted chili style. Of course we had all the advertising solutions to help get that brand out of the gutter but applying said theorems, designs, solution blue prints etc is far from the day-to-day malaise of practice that is the reality of working certain accounts.
Really, everyone has the perfect solution for an account but if you don’t convince the account that it desperately needs a change, they won’t fix what they still swear isn’t broken. Sales could be more depressing than Michael Jackson masturbating to something other than the Disney channel and they wouldn’t care. Sales personnel could offer a no commitment fuck you to clients, and there is still no problem. Adverts could look more dated than Vanilla Ice’s flat top and they still wouldn’t give a shit. But it’s not because the client thinks within the box. No, no. The client thinks within the hole they have dug for themselves and the only rational solutions advertisement wise is to copy the competition if they really need to change. Safe campaigns get approved by clients but they are rarely willingly produced by creatives. They are the shit option developed to show them why what we recommend is better. But when’s the last time a client gave a shit about a recommendation.
When you think about it, for being experts in the matters dealing with advertising, a large chunk of what we produced is tailor made to the likes of the client. Their criteria is what’s being taken into consideration and our expertise is worth about as much as the toy in a happy meal after heating the entire bag for two minutes. But you really don’t figure out how much it’s all about the client and not about the potential of the account until you’re ankle deep in the cesspools within the trenches where brave, wonderful and imaginative campaigns lay wounded or dead among a group of scared, apathetic, lifeless, soulless and/or unmotivated creatives.
So next time you think you can do much better work for a client, feel free to do a salespitch. Who knows, you might just win that illustrious account and while you burn away the hours in front of your computer and you are being spliced by seven metric tons of wasted paper of rejected layouts, you’ll hear two things… the slave drum on a ship as you sail the seas of shit and far off, the cheers and symphonic beauty of the old agency celebrating their “devastating loss” of one of their “most important clients”.
Cheers
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