Some twenty-three years on I'll never forget the look on her face when I pulled the cover visual we had been forbidden to present out of the bag. But sometimes you just have to do what's right even if your immediate client won't. It's called doing your job.
We were presenting the concept for a brochure, which was ground-breaking in its sector (as verified by the subsequent awards, plaudits and plagiarism) for a client who could be described as the original blue-chip company. At the time it was such a departure that our immediate day-to-day client was in a permanent tizzy. Smelling Salts at the ready, we had read the brief back to her on more than one occasion with increasing emphasis on the pivotal words and we had pressed the point that you can't say you're different unless you showed it. That, at least, she understood. But when it came to the cover – the element that would signify real in-your-face change – she wanted some dreadful bodge; new and different inside and old and corporate on the outside. The fact that no one would give it time of day and thus negate all we were doing (and spending) passed her by.
She wasn't a stupid woman by any means. We liked her. She just wasn't thinking about the brief or the job. She was too busy trying to second guess what her boss would think of both it and her. So when the day of the big presentation arrived we knew that we couldn't let the bodge happen. And so the cover went into the bag and off we went.
Our ultimate client was old-school personified; no one's fool and a 'name' in his sector. Longevity, was his middle name. She was bricking-it. Her anxiousness was palpable, you could smell it. And so we started our very expensive bout of show and tell and he 'got it' straight away. From the very first board the positive affirmations and comments came thick and fast until he was almost selling it to us. We looked at each other and knowing what the other was thinking I pulled the cover visual out of the bag. Her face went on FF from disbelief, panic, horror and finally to cat-got-the-cream, as she heard him say, 'superb', many, many times over.
She got the adulation she craved.
He got the solution both he and the company needed.
We got the response and result we knew we'd get.
Everyone got what they wanted.
But it took an act of insubordination to make everyone happy.
Clients and their companies are like sandwiches.
At the base there's the support, admin and junior staff. At the top, the CEO, the board and the heads of this and that. And then there's the middle bit, middle management, and generally speaking they're the ones who don't or won't 'get it', because having got to where they are their focus is on staying there or advancement, which means that they won't rock the boat or make waves. They stifle creativity and innovation. Like a failed Vaudeville act, their days are spent trying to persuade the likes of you and me that their powers of telepathy are such that "they know what they will go for".
Not that our side gets off lightly either.
There are those who will just roll over even when they know that they'll end up with a piece of work they'll be less than proud of and a client they'll eventually lose because a competitor or someone will point out your errors and you'll be asked why you didn't 'see it'.
It's a real problem and I'm sure that you have one or two of your own at the moment, so don't roll over.
Instead, visualise my client bounding on-stage to pick up his award with applause ringing in his ears and remember that being bad made it good.
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