Clients
Last night I sat down to write a post entitled ‘Spare a thought for the client’.
It was intended to be an attempt to look at the client’s job from a different perspective so that we might empathise with them a little more instead of simply dismissing them as…now, let me think…what’s the word again?…Oh yes: Cunts.
I met an ex-client during the Christmas break and he explained how it’s actually a massive pressure having to show your ad in front of a 3000-strong sales team who basically think that you wrote it and directed it. Then there’s the MD, who may not share your enthusiasm for spending another 100k just because ‘it’s Frank’.
So I kind of wrote the above then spent ages trying to think of other tough things clients have to go through.
Reader, I failed.
Clients don’t have it hard. Of course, I expect they have all the little political bothers that most people have in most jobs, but really, it’s a piece of piss.
You get to make five agencies stick their tits in a blender just for the chance to spend 50k showing you how good they might be, then you appoint your mate, spend three months with some twat from planning to work out your strategy (something that you can usually boil down to ‘sell more of what you sell’), then you can insist on as many creative ‘routes’ as you like because no one’s going to fire you unless you’ve buggered their spouses on YouTube (and even then it’ll be 50/50), keep making changes until your tasteless, pea-sized excuse for a brain is satisfied, get the account team to sort out your dry cleaning, kid’s birthday party and dinner at The Ivy, fiddle with the ad some more, put the resultant dog’s dinner on air then claim you’re a genius when you get a 0.8% sales lift in a ‘very tricky sector’.
So you’ve got to show the ad to a bunch of grinning loons in the Slough International Conference Centre? Big fucking deal.
I’ll admit that some clients are really good – the ones who do the job properly.
But most are a bunch of bollock-brained shitmongers who don’t know their arses from the Eiffel Tower.