Over at the blog for Campaign Brief, the Australian ad-industry trade mag, there’s an excellent essay on what can be learned from looking at a job from a client’s point of view. It’s sort of a confessional piece, almost a mea culpa, by Jason Rose, who worked for a long time as a creative and is now a business owner with a very different perspective on what’s at stake when a campaign is being conceptualized.
“During my decade as a creative, I strode into countless client meetings convinced I knew more about the client’s business and customers than they did. My job was to convince them, not to listen to them. And if, in the end, I just couldn’t get them to buy an idea, my job was to spend the entire cab ride back to the agency deriding them,” he writes, describing this approach as “misguided.”
“I used to believe that effective work had to be edgy, original and innovative,” he goes on to explain. “It had to make you feel uneasy, move you out of your comfort zone and be the result of smashing your head against the brick wall of cliché. I still believe that, sort of.
“Since going out on my own, I have executed countless ideas to market my business. Some of them have been edgy and ‘creative’ and others have been super boring, conservative and safe. Scarily, there has been little to no correlation between edginess and effectiveness. Some of the dullest things we have done have produced the best results and certainly vice versa.”
Rose concludes that if he could do it all over again, he would still be passionate when selling his ideas, but “I’d just do so with a lot more humility and generosity towards the people I was trying to sell them to.”
It’s an illuminating read. Find it here: “Jason Rose confesses that being a client is hard.”
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.
Looking at a job from a client’s point of view
Over at the blog for Campaign Brief, the Australian ad-industry trade mag, there’s an excellent essay on what can be learned from looking at a job from a client’s point of view. It’s sort of a confessional piece, almost a mea culpa, by Jason Rose, who worked for a long time as a creative and is now a business owner with a very different perspective on what’s at stake when a campaign is being conceptualized.
“During my decade as a creative, I strode into countless client meetings convinced I knew more about the client’s business and customers than they did. My job was to convince them, not to listen to them. And if, in the end, I just couldn’t get them to buy an idea, my job was to spend the entire cab ride back to the agency deriding them,” he writes, describing this approach as “misguided.”
“I used to believe that effective work had to be edgy, original and innovative,” he goes on to explain. “It had to make you feel uneasy, move you out of your comfort zone and be the result of smashing your head against the brick wall of cliché. I still believe that, sort of.
“Since going out on my own, I have executed countless ideas to market my business. Some of them have been edgy and ‘creative’ and others have been super boring, conservative and safe. Scarily, there has been little to no correlation between edginess and effectiveness. Some of the dullest things we have done have produced the best results and certainly vice versa.”
Rose concludes that if he could do it all over again, he would still be passionate when selling his ideas, but “I’d just do so with a lot more humility and generosity towards the people I was trying to sell them to.”
It’s an illuminating read. Find it here: “Jason Rose confesses that being a client is hard.”
.
.
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