BreakAway Digital

I am just coming off the good laugh about the video I just posted about The Process. Then I realized “wow, yeah I know that pain very well.” Clients always have the best of intentions but really they don’t have their own best interests in mind.  

That is why they hire agencies to think for them. Sure I might be a little biased barely having the experience of being on the other side of the table, but a client need to try to trust their agency. Going through the motions of analyzing the target market, coming up with the creative direction, delivering a product and finally determining how success is measured. All key steps in the process none of which should be overlooked.

I can think back to a number of times where you start showing mock-ups to a client and they love it at first. THEN someone shows it to their kid, their boss and BAM they discover it’s not what they wanted. If you’ve been in the industry I know it’s happened to you. How do you stop that from happening? Sometimes you can’t. That is why you have to make a process that makes the client sign off so you can go to the next stage of the process. Still it’s sometimes unavoidable that you have to go back to the drawing board and come up with something very different from your original vision. I wish I could show you some work that I’ve done for large clients where the original product was very different from what the public saw. The corporate machine just happens to beat the fun out of some cool concepts. 

With all of that being said it makes agency lifestyle sound pretty bad. All of your best ideas get beat down. This might be true but it is also true that it is the agency’s challenge to keep selling in the best ideas. If your idea wasn’t good in the first place it might be why it didn’t see the light of day. Or maybe you were being setup for failure because of the box we were put in?

So this is our challenge that we face everyday. Create something that can follow your own design process but if you can’t convince the client that you have their best interests in mind you will end up like this video. Even though that video made me laugh at my own life I still love the challenge of coming up with innovative ideas.