How to be a rock'n'roll client

It’s hard to meet a young graphic designer who doesn’t want to design record sleeves. Having spent the early part of my career working on record campaigns, when designers ask me about getting into the field I usually try to put them off. The main reason being that recording artists (and their record labels) for the most part are lousy clients.

It’s a lot to do with them being (or at least considering themselves as) ‘artists’. Many of them have been dreaming about what their album cover should look like as long as they have been dreaming about making their album. They feel it’s their album and hence — with some reasonableness — that it is their sleeve. They also tend to be quite young and ‘sensitive’.

Worst of all, in delightful Spinal-Tap alignment, they often have girlfriends who are at art school, or who like to paint...

I’ve triggered more than one rock’n’roll hissy fit in my time by politely suggesting that, while we all agree that they are very talented musicians, it might be best to listen to another talented professional when deciding on the look of their sleeve. We wouldn’t, after all, tell them how to play guitar etc, etc.

Unfortunately, most designers’ romantic vision of working on record sleeves is built on a skewed image. The kind of record sleeves they aspire to being able to create often come from labels such as ECM, 4AD, Mowax or Rune Grammofon where the label has their own favoured designers and is not contractually obliged to have the artist's approval on sleeve artwork. These opportunities are graphic design Nirvana but they are few and far between and tend to be labours of love rather than rent-paying gigs.

As long as you are not in it for the money, there are great graphic design jobs to he had in music but they tend to come from the older and more experienced players. One of the best clients I’ve had from any field, was Primal Scream. I worked with them on the Xtrmntr campaign. By this time they were in their early 40’s, off drugs and starting to have kids, so you could argue I got them at a mellower stage than others before me might have experienced. But it would be hard to find a more directed, decisive and pleasant client than Bobby Gillespie. It helped that we were working with Julian House for whom the Scream have enormous trust and respect as well as a vast terrain of shared influences. It also helped that they know a lot about about design and visual culture in general. Bobby would come to meetings with books and other reference materials under his arm. He gave directed but open briefs, clear and concise feedback at every stage and was free with praise and appreciation when a job was well done (hear thick Glaswegian accent: “Yer, that’s fookin’ brrrilliant.”)

In this, Bobby (perhaps unknowingly, perhaps not) shares some graces with one of his heros. I was delighted to come across this piece of rock-n-roll ephemera the other day (via my former colleague, the very talented Xiaofei Zhang).

There are so many things to love about this letter — the delightful, well-brought-up politeness of Jagger’s tone, the typewriter on yellowing paper — but my favourite thing is Jagger’s one (hastily qualified) piece of direction about avoiding ‘complicated’ formats because we now know Warhol so flagrantly ignored it.

The album that this letter was sent to commission was Sticky Fingers, the one with the tantalizing openable jeans-zipper set into the cover. Besides Motown Chartbusters vol. 7 with its revolving die-cut cover and the imitative Led Zepplin III, Sticky Fingers was probably most elaborately constructed 12 inch sleeve made at that time. 

The sleeve, of course, is a classic and in my opinion far exceeds Warhol’s other more famous effort with the Velvet Underground.

As with most design projects, great album sleeves usually happen when there is mutual respect and like-mindedness between two well-qualified and talented parties. Think Storm Thorgeston and Pink Floyd, Ben Drury and Dizzy Rascal, Peter Saville and Joy Division, Sex Pistols and Jamie Reid... the list goes on.

Mutuality

Highly underused and greatly underestimated, mutuality is an important concept in business and even more so in the relationship between creative agencies and their clients. Mutuality means building a working relationship which is of mutual benefit to both businesses. And it requires having an understanding of the inner workings of each other’s organization that goes beyond the project at hand...

This piece was written for the Design Management Institute. You can read the whole piece here.

I *heart* clients

Everyone has moments of hating the people they work to serve. Waitresses, bank tellers, and sales assistants all have days when customers get on their nerves. Doctors, lawyers, accountants and dentists all have certain clients that they dread picking up the phone to.

But few professions have practitioners as poorly equipped for managing relationships with those who pay them as Graphic Design.



This piece was published in good old fashioned print by Process Magazine and online by Design Assembly. You can read the full article here.

What’s like got to do with it?

When it comes to design for communication (branding, advertising, graphic design etc) whether or not you like something is irrelevant.

This one is a little counter intuitive so it takes some practice and it also warrants a closer look at what exactly we mean by ‘like’.

To like something is a fairly mild, non-contentious sentiment. It doesn’t require the energy, commitment or depth of feeling implicit in love, hate, adore, despise, respect or admire.

It is also fairly passive. To like something is to not really require anything of it. You don’t expect it to affect or motivate you in anyway and you don’t look to it to impart any meaning as you might from something that you have a deeper form of appreciation for.

A person you like is someone you might enjoy a drink with every now and then but you wouldn’t necessarily go to them for help or advice in a time of need. This involvement is generally reserved for people we have much stronger feelings for.

‘Like’ is also acceptably subjective. You don’t have to explain much about why you like something. But if you claim something is clever, wonderful, moving, scary or complete rubbish people would be more likely want to hear your thoughts on it.

For these reasons, like is a useless concept in communications.

I like Budwieser commercials but I have and will never, drink their beer. I like the Cadbury’s drumming gorilla but it never inspired me to buy chocolate.

When you are commissioning creative work. It is very important to leave your likes out of the equation. For a start, it is not created for you. It’s created for your customer. And beyond that, if your creative agency are factoring what you like or dislike into the equation then they are not casting the idea net wide enough and will likely come up with safe, predictable and derivative solutions.

So what do we replace ‘like’ with? I’d like to think we replace it with ‘good’. And to get to a verdict as to whether a communications solution is good or not ask yourself two simple questions:

Does it answer the brief you set?  And, do you trust and respect your creative agency?

If the answer to both of these is yes, then run with it.

Tell me how it's done

In my list of all-time stupidest things a client ever said to me, I think near the top must be “I wish you would stop telling me that my changes are causing delays!”.

That’s kind of like saying “don’t tell me banging my head on this wall is going to give me a headache!”

As insane as that client may sound, I actually blame myself.

The client was new to their job, had never commissioned this kind of work before and knew very little about how the project would unfold. Their own lack of expertise and my neglect in explaining things better was very frustrating for them. 

I should have recognised this early on and spent some time explaining the way things were going to work before we got close to the deadline and panic set in.

I used to worry about clients feeling patronised if I explained process to them. But I now realise that all projects need to be managed according to the level of experience and expertise of the client you are dealing directly with. Asking a few questions at the beginning of a project to assess this and taking the time to help fill in any gaps in their knowledge makes it so much easier to discuss problems with them rationally down the line.

In my experience, the risk of teaching your grandmother to suck eggs in this situation is pretty slim. Most agencies don’t share enough process information with their clients. Which means that chances are even very experienced clients may have spent years commissioning work which they have very little insight into the making of.

Be nice!

I came across this quote recently from David Ogilvy on what matters to clients:

“It is not enough for an agency to be respected for its professional competence. Indeed, there isn't much to choose between the competence of big agencies. What so often makes the difference is the character of the men and women who represent the agency at the top level, with clients and the business community. If they are respected as admirable people, the agency gets business—whether from present clients or prospective ones.”

I can’t help but feel that this is true for all business relationships. We all prefer to be around people we like and respect. Both at work and at play. So it’s no great secret that people tend to do more business with people when they enjoy their company.

Agencies, for the most part, are nice to their clients. We kind of have to be. But I don’t think many clients truly realise how important it is to be nice to their agencies.

Things always start out amicably. But it’s when pressure mounts, things go wrong, bad news needs to be delivered, that temperaments change. I have seen even the mildest mannered of clients turn nasty when they feel things are not going the way they planned.

The problem is that the client/agency transaction is ultimately viewed (by clients) as a service relationship. And if you are of the mindset that you don’t particularly have to be nice to waiters, bank tellers or shop assistants, then at some point you are going to decided that you don’t have to make the effort to be nice to the people at your agency.

Nobody thinks they are that person. But I am always amazed by how often that person is lurking underneath just waiting for the right circumstance for their outing to be acceptable.

I am of the opinion that losing your cool in a professional situation is never acceptable. No matter what the circumstance or perceived provocation. Aside from the fact that it is embarrassing and erodes respect, it is highly counter productive.

Account handlers and agency managers, to some extent, are built to withstand client outbursts. Creatives are not.

At This is Real Art, like many agencies, we had an open plan office. No matter how much I tried to protect my team from the worst client behavior, everyone could tell when I was on the receiving end of a nasty client call. And I was always astounded by how much it affected them. The general reaction would be that despite our best efforts the client was still not satisfied and therefore unreasonable and will probably never be satisfied, no matter how hard we try. This level of defensiveness, right or wrong, is the sign of a close-knit team and thus, difficult to discourage without babies going out with the bathwater. 

Once resentment toward a client sets in, it doesn’t go away. And it makes it difficult to elicit from your team the extra puff needed to solve the tricky problems that probably lead to the client’s discomfort in the first place.

The flipside to this is that a small amount of kindness and consideration can go a really long way when it comes to motivating teams to pull for your cause.

If it doesn’t come from the natural goodness of your heart and the depths of your winning personality, think of it strategically. Management expert Tom Peters calls it R.O.I.R.—Return On Investment in Relationships. He says, “regardless of stakes or subject matter it's the collecting of allies and the maintenance and nurturing of supporters that determines whether or not things you care about get done.”

If you’re a client, you want the team at your agency to be working late nights and weekends on your project. You want them to be sweating blood and putting the full force of their passion behind your cause. This is how creative people work best. When they care.

There will always be moments when tensions run high and outbursts will happen. But clients, realise this: there is a very simple way to get harder work, longer hours and better quality from your agency. Be Nice.

Ditch the pitch

As reported in Ad Age recently, US retail giant Sears has had written into their NDA that any ideas presented to them by agencies during the pitch process will belong to Sears, irrespective of whether or not the agency wins the pitch.

This announcement has, understandably, caused a bit of a ruckus. Ad agencies are opting out. The American Association of Advertising Agencies wrote a letter calling the clause ‘unreasonable and unfair’.

Sears and their review consultancy have declined to comment but the unofficial reasoning that has begun to surface seems to be that they feel uneasy about the amount of information that agencies get to know about their business in the pitch process and have concerns about this information being used to the advantage of their competitors by losing agencies. They also argue that they are often pitched similar ideas by rival agencies and don’t want to be accused by losing agencies if the winning agencies ideas are similar to theirs.

Honestly, I can’t be bothered looking into the minutia of these arguments on either side. The whole thing is just screaming proof that this process is broken beyond repair.

Agencies have always found pitching to be morally ambiguous territory. Now it’s clear that clients are not comfortable with it either. Why would any of us want to participate in a process that breeds this much mistrust and resentment? And how can it possibly be seen as a good way to start off such an important business relationship?

In tweaking the parameters of a tradition that is so clearly faulty, Sears are just making the whole structure even shakier.

It’s not hard to tot up the time and money – not to mention the erosion of trust and respect – that would be saved by dropping the creative pitch process and reviewing agencies in a more rational way. So why does the tradition persist in it's present form?

I can't help wondering what we (as agencies) are doing wrong to make clients have so little courage in their convictions when it comes to employing us. That we have to do the job to convince them that we can do the job.

Or maybe it's about keeping Heads of Advertising and CMOs busy and powerful. Egged-on by 'review consultants' that really shouldn't exist at all if everyone else knew how to do their jobs properly.

With a bit of luck Sears will have broken the camel’s back with this one and we can start experimenting with something closer to James Cooper’s ideal of Zero Waste Creativity.

Choosing an agency is an employment process and should be handled as one. Look at the candidate’s past experience and references. Interview them extensively. Get to know their attitudes and principles. Then decide if they are capable of doing the job and if they have a character that you can work with.