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.
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8 comments:
you think the key to what you're saying is that it's a "growing agency" mentality?
the whole "customer is right, we do trash for cash" attitude always seemed to me to stink of senior management not giving a fuck about the employees and/or too many overheads and just needing to pay the bills. it's a sign of something unbalanced.
think you'll also find the "client is king" rule applies to any agency that expect it's staff to work back every night.
agency should be king, and in this kingdom we should all be going home on time.
We have a bloke at work. A good guy. But yesterday I heard him say "the client is the most important thing. We wouldn't exist without our clients".
What a curious logic.
"We wouldn't exist without our clients."
We wouldn't exist wihtout gravity either.
We wouldn't exist without water
Or, to be less facetitious, we wouldn't exist without our computers. Our staff. Our office. Our stationery.
It's such a fucking truism it makes me sick. Yes, we wouldn't exist without our clients. But that's no reason to fuck every other aspect of the mix.
Including the staff.
And, junglebook, you've never once gone home on time. You could be doing a statement stuffer for fucking LoanGiant.com and you'd still work till midnight making it into a potential award winner.
ahhhh but tonight i'm back late practicing guitar!
oh and to your suits point: We wouldn't exist without our clients. i quote Alan Rosenspan...
...As a creative person, you are the most important person in your company. You may have suspected it, but you've always been told that the list is
ten times as important as the creative; and nothing will ever be accomplished without the account people; and of course, it's the production managers who really get the job done.
It's all true, of course, but I still insist that the creative people are the most important part of the entire process.
There are people who can critique your work, improve your work, suggest ways to change your work, evaluate your work, and even build on your
work. But as one great writer said to his critics, "Where the hell were you when the paper was blank?" It's a fact that nothing happens without
the creative people. In most agencies, there are probably 10 of them for every 1 of you. But without you, and your ideas, the agency grinds to a
halt...
and i have to agree with him, sure we need the clients, we need their products, we need their money, but we don't need suits telling us the client is always right.
anywho, how to play a Cadd9...
Fuck chords.
Learn the basics and then start twatting around with blues solos.
sorry.
learn the basic chords.
learn to barre them.
and then fuck around with blues solos.
the rest just happens.
aggggggggggggggh
i'm even more rubbish at barre chords, these delicate-never-done-any-manual-labour fingers can't press the strings down proper.
they will
your legs couldn't walk, once.
ohhh you sounded just like Yoda then.
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