If there is one thing that goes out the window when you have been doing this for a very long time is this: patience. Yep. The more years you work at advertising, the less tolerance you have for idiotic stuff that clients do in a daily - and I mean daily basis. It is unbelievable to me the simple fact that no matter how much you try to teach clients not to do stuff, they always find a way to repeat and repeat the same errors that... well, make your life, my life and amazingly even the client's life, miserable.
So this is kind of a love letter to all those clients that cannot for the life of them, learn the right way to save time and money. Enjoy, in no particular order, the five little things that your clients - and mine - have to learn to NOT DO in order to achieve the goal of a decent ad in little or no time.
1) Please, for the love of God. Send me all the information at once.
They say that time is money, but in client's case, my time is their money. I'm all for wasting time and making your bill even bigger, but come on. If you get organized and gather all the information at once, you will save hours of me calling and calling to ask you minute details and trying to decipher what you are thinking. Besides, any decent copy or designer knows that when we design/write, we need all the info at once because the artwork gets directly affected by all the crap you want to jam in there.
2) I will gladly give an ovary if, for the very first time, a client sends in all the photographs of a project in high res.
How difficult is asking for other suppliers for a photoshop document, 300 dpi and larger than a 5" x 7" image? Really? Oh but they sent it 3 x 2" at 72 dpi. Does that work? NO! ALWAYS ASK FOR HIGH RESOLUTION! Period!
3) I'm not psychic. Please tell me in advance all the different adaptations that you will want.
For some strange reason, I think clients think we're scratching our asses waiting for them to call. Even worse, they forget that we have other clients who need us to write that winning and ever selling piece of crap, full page full color. So at 5:50 pm they call, asking us to adapt the campaign to 5 or 6 additional pieces, and of course, they want it for tomorrow...
4) I made an effort to make your design shine. Please don't send it to the worst printer of all times.
It feels like if I've been cooking for hours and someone comes and just takes a huge dump all over my nice dinner. I've seen artwork of mine which I was very proud of suddenly become a turd in a second by washed colors, bad materials... just nasty. Sometimes cheap is not good, clients. Want to save money? Read above.
5) Send in all the delivery specs at once. If you don't know how, give me the telephone of the supplier you insist on using.
That saves me time on writing CD after CD with the artwork in all the different formats you are thinking of, instead of just letting me do my job and talking it over with the supplier in one single call. Trust me, 80% of the time you will end up not understanding ONE thing and giving me a call to try to figure it out. Save us time. Just give me the number.
There you go. My five beefs. Any that I forgot that you would like to add or comment... that isn't porn spam with little dots?
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