Behind the Ads: Truth #10 - The client is not always right, but you are always wrong

I spit on the grave of Kann’s Sons Co. for having come up with the saying: “the customer is always right.” True, it’s catchy and projects a culture of service excellence, but it also puts you on the losing side in pretty much every single debate you may have with a client, especially if it’s an advertising client.

What you have to be clear on is that while people in advertising agencies have a mild background in marketing, clients for their most part are marketing and finance would-be gurus who crunch numbers and need evidence to substantiate what they will approve. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when you have a stubborn client that wants to have their way, well let’s just say that they can conduct focus groups to support the statement that the sky is brown and will have enough charts and graphs to make you believe that you are and have always been completely mistaken.

This leads to what we can call the watered down effect, the switcheroo, the better safe than sorry and the my way or the highway results for a poor ad. In the watered down effect, your ad goes through so many revisions and has had so much additional information added, that you barely get a whiff of the initial intentions of your communication. With the switcheroo, your artwork is not approved and the agency basically takes an ad that already ran and changes the valid date. With the better safe than sorry, your brand of unique communication is obviously omitted in favor of good old fashioned vanilla goodness to roam among the clutter and as for the my way or the highway, well there’s only so much you can reason with a client before they threaten to leave the agency.