Following client servicing through to its natural conclusion

We've all worked with some bad suits.

We've all worked with some really good ones too. But for some reason it's the bad ones that stick with you.

I think the thing I've always been most annoyed with is the idea of "giving the client what they want."

Don't get me wrong, I love keeping the client happy. I take great pride if a client gets promoted because of my work. I love presenting. Shit, my DAD was a client. I like them. I criticise them, yes. But I like them.

But I despair of the attitude that we exist to give clients what they want.

That's not what I exist for. I doubt it's what you exist for, either.

We especially do not exist to give a snotty juniour product manager what they want.

We exist, as the old cliché goes, to give the client what they need. The difference is enormous. Perhaps we need to exert a lot of energy in persuading the client that what they need is perhaps not what they want, but that is the job.

There is a "client is king" mentality that you normally hear in mid size agencies just as they are about to expand into a large agency. You know the type, the agency that's just about to win British Telecom or Lloyds TSB. The business just about ready to sell out to Globalcorp.

Client is king. I've never heard a good small agency utter this maxim. I suspect this is because nobody is driven to start a creative business simply to give someone else an easier life. I suspect you start an agency because you believe you have a way of doing things. You have a theory about our industry and you can sell this theory to clients who can pay for it and who will, ultimately, reap the benefits of doing so.

Giving the client what they want is necessarily an impediment to doing what the agency wants. And you work for the agency, not the client. Client is not king. Agency is king.

I've known many client services people who might as well work for the client. They are like spies, fucking the agency over at every point in order to be popular and have friendships with the client.

But the truth is, if we follow the ethos of client servicing through to its natural conclusion, then we do all of our work for free.

The client doesn't want to pay us for our work, not ideally. So if we give the client what they want, then we should wake up every morning and make big corporate companies rich and accept nothing in return.

Very happy client. (They'd still fuck with the work though).

That, to my mind, would be the definition of a futile existence: making the rich richer out of the goodness of your heart.

Bollocks to it. A waste of a life.

I haven't got anything to say right now

So I'm just keeping quiet.

Cheers.

Spend the afternoon with a genius

I was going to post about the Government trying to stop companies getting access to the electoral register and how it will lead to more unsolicited mail rather than less.

I was going to question why people give such a fuck about unsolicited mail.

I was going to say how the BBC using pejorative terms such as "junk mail" is against their ethos of unbiased reportage. I do not pay my license fee to have my livelihood criticised.

And then I realised that I was guilty of the cardinal sin: namely, TAKING DM SERIOUSLY.

So instead, if you're quiet at work, why not enjoy one of the greatest geniuses of the last century talking about his life and his pursuit of ideas. This is a man who on the one hand had equity in the destruction of Hiroshima but, on the other ,helped us make more (or less) sense of the universe we live in.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us bask in the presence of a genius - a real one (not one of those M&C Saatchi pretend ones). For once let us ignore the daily banalities that put food on our table and celebrate the capabilities of mankind.

Richard Feynman:

"When you doubt and ask, it gets a little harder to believe"



Part 2



Part 3



Part 4



Part 5



Intelligent stuff.

Nearly as clever as that fucking fuzzy felt mailing.

Burn Your Bridges

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Mailing bills.

I'm never paying a bill again.

I'm going to claim that I thought it was junk mail and threw it in the bin. And that I had no way of telling that it was something I had to open. Readers' Digest tell me they have "important information" enclosed. Therefore, everyone who mails me can get to fuck. I refuse to open the envelopes. It may be Oxfam...it may be Council Tax. I have no way of telling.

Would this land me in trouble?

Are we legally obliged to open all of our mail?

Has anyone ever used this excuse to the authorities before?

Falling in love again.

I've been spending most of my time working on websites of late.

I'm finding it infinitely more fun than mail. So much more of a challenge. So much more opportunity to actually earn your money.

There's the rich media components - which are the equivalent of tv ads with their scripts, directors, concepts, and shoots etc.

There's the HTML stuff. Which is your standard (copy)writing job. Information well told and made accessible.

There's the SEO stuff. Which is where your flogging skills and wordsmithery come to the fore.

And then there's the design. Which, while not the copywriter's job, is so closely related to your work that it reminds me of the the wonderful interplay between words and pics that you used to get in press and poster ads.

It's all the things I like about work rolled into one.

It's also good to know that words are a crucial component of most interfaces, so to be a copywriter has a professional relevance again. If a website has to be 'built', then we are the plasters and the decorators.

Websites are fucking boss.

And you can't throw them in the bin.

The wisdom of Brian Clough

"Football is a simple game made to look complicated by idiots"

***

Thus spake the legend that was Brian Clough. Now if ever there was a quote that drew parallels with what we do, then there it is.

The Creative Insinct

I'm a big believer in the creative instinct.

That invisible element that underlies our talent, or lack thereof.

The creative instinct is only found in the good creatives. And if it doesn't exist in someone, all the writing and art directing skills in the world amount to piss in the wind. The creative instinct, in my view, is the element that separates artists from admen.

It's that thing that makes you say "trust me, it will work".

I'd back the instinct of one brilliant creative to beat all the research, learnings, graphs and charts in the world.

This instinct is often hated, because you can't learn it. You've got it or you haven't. That annoys ambitious people who don't have it. So they try to kill it and ridicule it to level the playing field. they create their false gods of planning and formulas etc.

That doesn't change the fact that it remains the killer element that gives an agency a competitive edge. ATL example: Cabral at Fallon.

You can see the creative instinct at work wherever you look. One of my favourite examples is the product name "I can't believe it's not butter." I can picture someone coming up with that idea, and every other person saying that it was a shit idea and that the product should be called "Fat-lo" or something like it. I can also imagine the response: "Look, I know it sounds weird, but trust me, I just think it will stick in people's minds and resonate with them."

Good non-marketing examples are Noel Edmunds and Paul McCartney. A pair of cunts, I grant you, but that's beside the point. They have the creative instinct in abundance.

Imagine Noel Edmunds sitting at the dinner table with Mrs Edmunds.

Noel - "I've had a brilliant, idea, darling"
Mrs Edmunds - "Another one, darling?"
Noel - "Yes, darling. Tell me what you think....It's a great big blobby man. Covered in big pink blobs. All he ever says is "blobby blobby blobby". And his name is Mr Blobby! Good eh?"
Mrs Edmunds - "Darling, I'm phoning the nurse now...."
Noel - "I'm telling you, they'll love it. He'll even get a Christmas number 1."

Old Tidy Beard knew what he was doing. Same with Paul McCartney when he wrote Mull of Kintyre and We All Stand Together. Both charted at number 1....WTF?

These were all, ostensibly, shite ideas. But the creators knew their market. They understood their audience. They knew that what seemed risky was actually the safest thing in the world.

The problem we face in creative departments is that people want certainty, not hunches. And people who don't have hunches don't trust them. They want graphs and plans and damage limitation. They want to be as important as you. More so, even. They don't trust your instinct like you do.

But the creative instinct isn't a shot in the dark. It's developed through years of exploration and sensitivity. It's developed through conversations with old men in pubs. Talking to the woman behind the counter in Tesco. Making jokes at bus shelters. Summers spent working on building sites. It's developed through nights in prison. Getting beaten up. Getting your heart broken. Breaking someone else's....

The creative instinct is real. The problem is that we never took notes when we were developing it. So no-one trusts it.

It's like Einstein arriving at a conference and saying "E=MC2" and expecting everyone to understand it. "But it's the theory of relativity" he'd say. "It's one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time."

He would have been told, point blank, to fuck right off.

It's only when he showed the workings that people believed him. But the fact that he showed the workings to people didn't make E=MC2 less true. It just justified it.

There is no justification for the creative instinct. We're just right. We forgot to take notes when perfecting our understanding of humanity.

Trust us.

Or get rid.