The Buck Stops With Them
A while back I wrote about the fact that most of us are clients.
When you hire the next person along in the production line (director, photographer, illustrator etc.) you do all the things that you despair of in your own client (I’m talking to/about creatives here).
You might second-guess the person above you, you might impose strictures that may not result in the very best work and you could well get them to go back and do it again.
In return, they behave like you do: going off and making the thing they want to make instead of listening to you, having frustrated arguments with you through a third party and generally using someone else’s money to create something they like even if it doesn’t coincide absolutely with the agreed brief.
Then you see a client behaving in the same way as you and you simply cannot believe how immovable/ungrateful/implacable they are.
Of course, this happens to greater or lesser degrees, but show me a creative who says he has never behaved in the annoying way that his client does and I’ll show you a fibbing cunt.
Anyway, rather than just repeat an old post, I did have a new point to add which struck me this morning: the chain of production stops with the client. That may sound obvious, but it’s actually a bit odd. Although some of them might have to suffer for a real dog’s dinner of a campaign that results in their company’s factory being firebombed, most of them can just chuck something out there without having to point to an actual upswing in sales. There are so many other factors involved (distribution, pricing, retail space etc.) that advertising cannot being expected fully to succeed (or fail). You can always blame crap results on something else, which is why clients like to make the safe MOR campaign: there is barely any risk of the 1/100 chance of making a true stinker. Tick the boxes and cross the Ts and no one will fire you; spunk a million on a Facebook page celebrating dog poo that gets 14 fans and someone might well hand you your P45.
So whatever decision a client makes, unless it’s pretty darn crazy, it’s going to be right. They even get to research what they put out so that if something does go wrong they can point to what that roomful of mouthbreathing plebs said and plead due diligence.
So they never really have to answer to anyone, which is why we are their bitches, all day long and twice on Thursdays.
Enjoy!
I'm a tough client… but anonymous is right, it's my idea, so I have to be ‚Äì and nobody cares about it more than I do.