Learn the Client's Corporate Culture

Spend some serious time with the client. Talk to the quiet guy from R&D. Tell jokes with the product managers. The more they know you, the more they're going to trust you. The more they trust you, the more likely they are to buy these strange and disgusting things you call ideas.

But you're going to learn something about them, too. You're going to get a feel for the tone of this company. How far the executives will go. What they think is funny. You'll save yourself a lot of grief once you understand this. Remember, they see you as their brand ambassador. They're trusting you to accurately translate their corporate culture to the customer.

This doesn't mean doing the safe thing. It means if your client is a church, you probably shouldn't open your TV spot with that scene from The Exorcist where Linda Blair blow-chucks pea soup on the priest.

Present Your Own Work

Nobody knows it better than you. Nobody has more invested in it than you. And if you screw up, you have nobody to blame but you.

Two addenda: (1) If you are a truly awful presenter, don't. At least not the big campaigns. Better to have a skilled account person or creative director sell them. (2) Learn to present. It's a skill, and like any other skill, the more you do it the better you'll get. Start small. Sell a small campaign. Present to the account folks. Just do it. Creatives who can brilliantly present work go a lot further and make more money in this business than those who cannot. Not being able to present your own work (or the work of other people) will handicap you throughout your entire career. Pilots can't be afraid of heights. It just doesn't work.

Practice Selling Your Campaign Before You go in to Present

Don't just wing it. I used to think winging it was cool. But that was just bravado. As if my ideas were so good they didn't need no stinkin' presentation. Wrong. Practice it.

Don't Memorize a Speech for Your Presentation

Trying to memorize written material will make you nervous. You'll worry you're going to forget something and you probably will. Write out a speech if it helps you organize your thoughts, but toss it when you're done. All you need to do is establish what marks you have to hit along the way and then make sure you hit them. (“I need to make Points A, B, and C.”) Once you see the light go on in a client's eyes regarding A, move on to B.

Don't be Slick. Clients Hate Slick

You know all those unfair stereotyped images we sometimes have about clients: uptight, overly rational, number-crunching politicians? They've got a similar set of incorrect images about us: slick, unctuous, glad-handing, promise-them-anything sycophants. Is it fair? No, but that's the thing about stereotypes. You're a little behind before you even start. So don't be slick.

But if you're not slick, what should you be?

Be yourself. Be smart. Be crisp, be to the point, be agreeable. Don't be something you aren't. It never works. You will appear disingenuous, and so will your ideas.

Keep Your “Pre-Ramble” to an Absolute Minimum. Start Fast

That doesn't mean start cold. It's likely you'll have to do some amount of setup. But make it crisp, to the point, and fast.

In a book on the art of good presentations called I Can See You Naked, author Ron Hoff said the first 90 seconds of any presentation are crucial. “Plunge into your subject. Let there be no doubt the subject has been engaged.”¹

In those first 90 seconds, the client is unconsciously sizing you up, making initial impressions, and probably deciding prematurely whether or not they're going to like what you have to say. So don't wade into the water. Dive.

Don't Hand Out Materials before You Present

Stay in command of the room. The minute you hand a piece of paper to a client, you're competing with that piece of paper. Clients are human and will want to read whatever it is you've just handed them. Don't hand out anything until you've finished presenting. Remain in control of the room's attention.

Don't Present Your Campaign as “Risk-Taking Work.” Clients Hate That

In the agency hallways, it's fine to talk about work being risk-taking. But it's just about the worst thing you can say to clients. They don't want risk. They want certainty. Whether certainty is possible in this business remains in doubt, but clients definitely do not need to hear the R word.

Find other ways to describe your campaign. For instance, “It goes against the grain,” or “It's interesting; it's memorable.” Anything is more palatable than risk to a client with a job on the line, a mortgage to pay, and two kids to put through reform school.

Okay, before we go on to the next paragraph, I just want to say that it is really good. I worked on it a long time and it may in fact be the best paragraph of this whole book. I think you're going to love it.

Before You Unveil Your Stuff, don't Assure the Client that They're “Going to Love This”

This is known as leading with your chin. Somebody's gonna take a swipe at it just to keep you humble.

As they say in law school, don't ask a question you don't know the answer to.

Same thing in presentations. Anticipate every objection you can and have a persuasive answer in the chamber, locked and loaded.

Never show a Client Work You don't Want Them to Buy

I guarantee you, second-rate work is what clients will gravitate to.

The reasoning I have used to allow myself to present so-so ads goes like this: “Well, we gotta sell something to get this campaign going, and time is running out. So we'll present these five ideas, but we'll make sure they buy only these three great ones. The two so-so ones we'll include just to, you know, help us put on a good presentation. They'll be filler.”

But what happens is, the client will approve the work they feel safer with, less scared by, and that is almost always the second-rate work.

Conversely, don't Leave Your Best Work on the Agency Floor

“Oh, the client will never buy this.” How do you know? The client may surprise you. Maybe not. But don't do the work for him. Hall of Fame copywriter Tom McElligott once told me: “Go as far as you can. Let the client bring you back.”

At the Presentation, don't Just Sit There

No matter how right your campaign may feel to you, it's not going to magically fly through the client approval process. Even if the client appears to buy it outright, sooner or later someone will start taking potshots. “Little changes” here and there, here and there.

You need to learn to be an articulate defender of your own work. Don't count on the account person to do it. Don't leave it to your partner. Pay attention in the meeting. Try to understand exactly what might be bothering your client. And then take the initiative to either fix the problem to your satisfaction or come back with the most articulate defense you can.

As you form a defense, your first instincts may be to build a bridge from where you are to where your client is. (“If only I could get them to see how great these ads are.”) Instead, get over to where your client is and build a bridge back to your position. With such an attitude, your argument will be more empathetic and more persuasive, because you are seeing the problem from your client's perspective.

Base Your Defense on Strategy

Your client is not sitting at his office right now twiddling his thumbs, waiting for you to bring in your campaign. Marketing directors for consumer products companies may spend as little as 5 percent of their time on advertising issues—the balance on manufacturing, distribution, financing, and product development. In fact, the managerial strengths that got them to the job position in the first place likely had nothing to do with an ability to judge advertising.

Keep this in mind when you go in to present: It isn't a client's job to know great work when they see it. They're generally numbers people.

Copywriter Dick Wasserman put it this way: “Corporate managers are inclined towards understatement. They value calm and quiet, abhor emotional displays, and do everything possible to make decisions in a dispassionate and objective manner. Advertising rubs them the wrong way. It is simply too much like show business for their taste.”² I liken it to “Selling Invisible Unicorn-Powered Poetry Machines to Scientists.” They can't see these imaginary machines, they sound expensive, it all feels so magical and weird, and they're pretty sure they don't like poetry anyway.

To prevail with an audience like this, Alastair Crompton says, “Think like a creative person, but talk like an accountant.”³ Don't defend the work on emotional grounds or on the creativity of the execution. (“This visual is, I'm tellin' you; it's monstrous. It kills.”) Instead say, “This visual, as the focus groups bear out, communicates durability.” Base your defense on strategy.

You must be able to strategically track, step by step, how you arrived at your campaign. That means having all the relevant product/market/customer facts at your fingertips. There's no such thing as bulletproof, but your ads might be able to dodge a few rounds if you can keep the conversation on strategy alone. After all, that's something the client had a hand in authoring. It's a scary thing to do, but let the work's creativity speak for itself.

“They May be Right”

According to ad legend, Bill Bernbach always carried a little note in his jacket pocket. A note he referred to whenever he was having a disagreement with a client. In small words, one sentence read, “They may be right.”

Here's my advice, and it starts a few rungs further down the humility ladder: Always enter into any discussion (with clients, account executives, anybody) with the belief there is a 50 percent chance you are wrong. I mean, really believe in your heart you could be wrong.

I think such a belief adds a strong underpinning of persuasiveness to your argument. To listeners, it doesn't feel like you're forcing your opinion on them.

I often think it's analogous to the two kinds of ministers I've seen. The quiet and anonymous minister at a small church who invites me to explore his faith. And the noisy kind I see on TV, sweaty and red-faced, telling me the skin's going to bubble off my soul in hell if I don't repent now.

Which one is more persuasive to you?

Listening doesn't Mean Saying “Yes”

Listen, even when you don't want to. It doesn't cost you anything to listen. It's polite. And even if you think you disagree, by listening you may gather information you can later use to put together a more persuasive argument. (As they say: “Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ long enough to find a big rock.”)

I think our culture portrays passive postures (such as listening) as losing postures. But I think listening can help you kick butt. Relax. Breathe from your stomach. Listen.

You do not Have to Solve the Problem in the Meeting

When a client asks you to make a change, you aren't required to either fix it or refute it there in the meeting. Be like that repair guy you see in the movies. Blow your nose, scratch yourself, and say, “Well, looks like I gotta take 'er back to the shop.”

Seriously. It's tempting to want to alleviate client concerns by fixing something on the fly right there in the presentation. If it's an easy and obvious one, well, go ahead. But resist the temptation to do any major work there in the room.

Listen carefully. Write down their issues. Play the concerns back to them so you know you have it right and they know you heard them. And then say, “Let us come back and show you how this can work.”

In The Creative Companion, David Fowler put it this way:

For now, listen to the input you've received and solve the problem on the terms you've been given. Your anger is beside the point right now. Once you've proven you're a trooper by returning with thinking that follows the input, you can bring up your original idea again. It may get a better hearing the second time. Then again, it may have been a monkey [of an idea] all along. Or, most likely, you'll have forgotten all about it, because you're onto something better.⁴

Choose Your Battles Carefully

No matter how carefully you prepare your work, no matter how impeccable you are about covering every base, crossing every “t,” dotting every “i,” the red pencil's gonna come out. Clients are going to mess with your visual and change your copy.

H. G. Wells wrote, “No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone's draft.”

We need to pause here for a minute so I can make this point as clear to you as I am able. It's an important one.

Millions of years of evolution have wired a network of biological certainties into the human organism. There is the need to eat. There is the need to sleep. And then, right before the need to procreate, is the client need to change every idea his agency shows him. This need is spinal. Nothing you can do or say, no facts you lay down, no prayers you send up, will stop a client from diddling with your concept. It's something you need to accept as reality as early in your career as you can.

It didn't start with you, and it'll still be going on the day some Detroit agency presents its campaign for the new antigravity cars. The fact is, we're in a subjective industry—partly business and partly art. Everybody is going to have an opinion. It's just that the clients have paid for the right to have their opinion. Advertising, ultimately, is a service industry.

Consider the drawing reprinted in Figure 19.2 of a client making changes to an ad as a frustrated copywriter looks on. I found it in a book called Confessions of a Copywriter (published in 1930 by the Dartnell Corp.). That date again—1930.

They were doing it then, and I suspect they've been doing it since earliest recorded history. I have this image of a client in Egypt, 3,000 years before Christ, looking at some hieroglyphs on the walls of the pyramids, saying, “I think instead of “ ” we should say, “ ”

Get used to it. Even some of the writing on this page about rewriting was rewritten by my publisher's editor. Nothing is safe.

I say, if they want to mess around with your body copy, let them. If they want to change the colors from red to green, let them. Any hieroglyphs they want to change, let 'em. Protect the pyramid. If you get out of there with the big idea intact, consider yourself a genius.

Tom Monahan says, “Squabbling over body copy and other details is not where the advertising battles are won. Ideas—big, differentiating, selling ideas—are what win. And anything that takes away even an ounce of energy from the creating or selling of those ideas is misdirected effort.”⁵

The moral: Don't win every battle and lose the war.

Research isn't Science

Here's how advertising works: You toil for weeks to come up with a perfect solution to your client's business problem. Then your campaign is taken to an anonymous building on the outskirts of town and shown to a focus group—people who've been stopped in the mall the previous week, identified as target customers, and paid a small amount of money for their opinion.

After a long day working at their jobs, these tired pedestrians arrive at the research facility and are led into a small room without windows or hope. In this barren, forlorn little box, they are shown your work in its embryonic, half-formed state while you and the client watch through a two-way mirror.

Here's the amazing part. These people all turn out to be advertising experts with piercing insights on why every ad shown them should be force-fed into the nearest shredder fast enough to choke the chopping blades.

Yet, who can blame them? They've been watching TV since they were kids and have been bored by a hundred thousand hours of very, very bad commercials. Now it's payback time, Mr. Madison Avenue Goatee Man. And because they're seeing mere storyboards they think, wow, we get to kill the beast and crush its eggs.

Meanwhile, in the room behind the mirror, the client turns to you and says, “Looks like you're workin' the weekend, idea boy.”

Welcome to advertising.

A committee, it has been said, is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and quietly strangled. The same can be said for the committee's cousin, the focus group. But this research process, however wildly capricious and unscientific, is here to stay.

Clients are used to testing. They test their products. They test locations for their stores. They test the new flavor, the packaging, and the name on the top. And much of this kind of testing pays off. So don't think they're going to spend a couple million dollars airing a commercial based solely on your sage advice: “Hey, business dudes, I think this idea rocks.”

Used correctly, research can be very useful. What better way is there to get inside the customer's head and find out what people like and don't like, to understand how they live? The thing is, the good research isn't done in those beige suburban buildings, but right downtown in the bars, asking drinkers about their favorite booze, asking shoppers how they choose a product, eavesdropping on real people as they talk about a category or a brand.

Of course, there's another place you can hear all this conversation. This marvelous place has reams of up-to-the-minute real-time research and customer verbatims and it's all free. In Pete Barry's The Advertising Concept Book, Mike Troiano of Holland Mark Digital, reveals a secret: “Introduce your clients to better, faster, cheaper, and more reliable feedback about their category, brand, and competition. Let them know they can ask questions and get instant answers. Or listen in on ongoing conversations.” It's called Twitter and Facebook. It's called the customer reviews on Amazon or in the blogs. You know, the Web.

The thing is, the best people in the business use research to generate ideas, not to judge them. They use it at the beginning of the whole advertising process to find out what to say. When it's used to determine how to say it, great ideas suffer horribly. Should your work suffer at the hands of a focus group, and it will, there isn't much you can do except appeal to the better angels of your client's nature.

What follows are some arguments against the reading of sheep entrails—or the subjective “science” of copy testing.

Testing Ideas doesn't Work

Testing, by its very nature, looks for what is wrong with an idea, not what is right. Look hard enough for something wrong and sure enough you'll find it. (I could stare at a picture of Miss November and in a half hour I'd start to notice, is that some broccoli in her teeth? Look, right there between the lateral incisor and left canine, see?)

Testing assumes that people react intellectually to advertising, that people watching TV in their living rooms dissect and analyze these interruptions of their sitcoms. (“Honey, come in here. I think these TV people are forwarding an argument that doesn't track logically. Bring a pen and paper.”) In reality, both you and I know their reactions are visceral and instantaneous.

Testing is inaccurate because customers simply do not know what they'll like until they see it out in the world. It's like what William Goldman said about movies and Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” Meaning, nobody knows what works. If we did, every movie would be a blockbuster.

Testing rewards advertising that's happy, vague, and fuzzy because happy, vague, and fuzzy doesn't challenge the viewer.

Testing rewards advertising that's derivative because a familiar feel will score higher than advertising that's unique, strange, odd, or new—the very qualities that can lift fully executed advertising above the clutter.

If testing the tone of a video or commercial is important to a client, testing is inaccurate because 12 colored pictures pasted to a board will never communicate tone like the actual film footage, voice-over, and music.

Testing, no matter how well disguised, asks regular folks to be advertising experts. And invariably they feel obligated to prove it (see Figure 19.3).

Finally, testing assumes we really know what makes advertising work and that it can be quantifiably analyzed. You can't. Not in my opinion. It's impossible to measure a live snake.

Bill Bernbach said: “We are so busy measuring public opinion, we forget we can mold it. We are so busy listening to statistics that we forget we can create them.” This simple truth about advertising is lost the minute a focus group sits down to do its business. In those small rooms, the power of advertising to affect behavior is not only subverted, it's reversed. The dynamic of a commercial coming out of the television to viewers is replaced with viewers telling the commercial what to say.

These arguments, for what they are worth, might come in handy someday, especially if you have a client who likes the commercial you propose but has to defend poor test scores to a management committee.*

Extensive Research has Proved that Extensive Research is Often Wrong

From a book called Radio Advertising by Bob Schulberg, I bring this research study to your attention:

J. Walter Thompson did recall studies on commercials that ran during a heavily-viewed mini-series, “The Winds of War.” The survey showed that 19 percent of the respondents recalled Volkswagen commercials; 32 percent, Kodak; 32 percent, Prudential; 28 percent American Express; and 16 percent Mobil Oil. The catch is that none of these companies advertised on “The Winds of War.”⁶

In the mid-1980s, research told management of Coca-Cola that younger people preferred a sweeter, more Pepsi-like taste. Overlooking fierce customer loyalty to this century-old battleship of a brand, they reformulated Coca-Cola into New Coke, and in the process packed about $1 billion down a rat hole.

“We forget we can mold it.”

Research people told writer Hal Riney that entering the wine cooler category was a big mistake. Seagram's and California Cooler had it locked up. Then Riney began running his Bartles & Jaymes commercials, and a year later his client had the number one wine cooler in America.

“We forget we can mold it.”

Research people told writer Cliff Freeman when he was working on Wendy's hamburgers, “Under absolutely no circumstances run ‘Where's the Beef?’” After it ran, sales shot up 25 percent for the year and Wendy's moved from fifth to third place in fast-food sales. The 20,000 newspaper articles lauding the commercial didn't hurt, either.

“We forget we can mold it.”

And what some call the greatest campaign of the twentieth century, DDB's Volkswagen work from the '60s—none of it was subjected to pretesting. The man who helped produce that campaign had a saying: “We are so busy measuring public opinion, we forget we can mold it.”

Because Focus Groups can Prove Anything, do They Prove Anything?

British ad star Tim Delaney, in a famous article on the value of intuition, wrote:

Have you noticed what happens when five agencies are competing for an account? They all come up with completely different strategies and ideas—and yet, miraculously, each of them is able to prove, through objective research, that their solution is the right one. If nothing else does, this alone should devalue the currency of focus groups.…Researchers think that if you spend a lot of time analyzing a problem beforehand, it will bring you closer to the advertising solution. But the truth is, you only really begin to crack advertising problems as you get deeper and deeper into the writing. You just have to sit down and start writing on some kind of pretext—and that initiates the flow of ideas that eventually brings a solution. In [my] agency, we start writing as early as possible, before the researchers have done their analysis. And we usually find that the researchers are always trailing behind us, telling us things we've already thought of.⁷

The writing itself is the solution to the problem. It's in the writing itself the answers appear, when you're in there getting your hands dirty mucking about in the mud of the client's marketing reality. The answers are right there in that place where there's direct contact between the patient and the doctor. And if the doctor has a question about how to proceed, whom would you want him to ask for advice? A focus group of grocers, lawyers, and cab drivers? Personally, I'd want it to be another doctor.

I have a friend who walks around the agency trying to find out if a concept he's done is any good. He keeps going around until the “it's cool” votes outnumber the “it's not.” Sometimes he doesn't get the answer he wants and keeps working.

You know what? In my opinion, it's the only pretesting that works—the agency hallway.

Science cannot Breathe Life into Something. Dr. Frankenstein has Already Tried

David Ogilvy once said research is often used the way a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination. It's research used to protect preconceived ideas, not to explore new ones.

Another way research can be used poorly is what I call permission research. Permission research happens when agencies show advertising concepts to customers and ask if they like them or not. (“Man, it would be really great if you guys all say you like this, 'cause then we can put it on TV. C'mon, whattaya say?”)

What's unfortunate about permission research is that it's often used by clients and agencies to validate terrible advertising. Yes, it all looks and sounds like science, but as prudent as such market inquiries appear on the surface, the argument is specious—because the very process of permission research and all its attendant consensus and compromise will grind the work into either vanilla or nonsense.

As an example of what the process of permission research can do, I cite an interesting and very funny study done in 1997 by a pair of Russian cultural anthropologists—Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid.⁸ With tongue firmly planted in cheek, these two researchers set out to ask the public, “What makes for a perfect painting? What does a painting need to have in order for you to want to hang it in your home?”

They did massive amounts of research, hosting hundreds of focus groups all over the world. Their findings, meticulously prepared and double-checked with customers, were as follows: 88 percent of customers told them, “We like paintings that feature outdoor scenes.” The color blue was preferred by 44 percent of respondents. “Having a famous person” in the painting got the thumbs-up from a full 50 percent. Fall was the preferred season. And animals! You gotta have some animals.

All this research was compiled, and an actual painting was commissioned. The final “art” that came out of the lab (to nobody's surprise) was very bad, as you can see in Figure 19.4.

The point? Research is best used to help craft a strategy, not an execution. As journalist William F. Buckley once observed, “You cannot paint the Mona Lisa by assigning one dab each to a thousand painters.”

To end on a positive note? These research companies make money by selling fear to clients. But as advertising campaigns evolve out of traditional media and into forms that can't be presented to focus groups, this may change. They won't be able to “measure a live snake” and they'll begin to hold less sway over clients. Knock on wood.

Educate Your Client

Your clients did not go to a portfolio school, or an art school, and probably never read one book on advertising. This is not a failing because this is not their job. You got your job by being a good at using words and pictures to make something interesting. But your clients likely achieved the position of brand manager by being good salespeople in the field.

The question I hear most from students and audience members is, “How can I get my client to start buying better work?” The answer: Educate them. Show your clients what great work looks like. Buy them a One Show annual or a subscription to Communication Arts. Take them to your local American Advertising Federation awards show. Share your excitement about what brilliance in advertising looks like.

Your Client Asks You to Sell More Than One Product or Benefit

Clients often ask for an ad to tout their full line of fine products. Who can blame them? The page they're buying seems roomy enough to throw in five or six more things besides your snappy little idea, doesn't it? But full-line ads are effective only as magazine thickener, nothing else.

The reason is simple. Customers never go shopping for full lines of products. I don't. Do you? (“Honey, start the car. We're going to the mall to buy everything.”) Customers have specific needs. It stands to reason that ads addressing specific needs are more effective. There's that old saying, “The hunter who chases two rabbits catches neither.”

Smart companies know this. Coca-Cola owns nearly 80 brands of soft drinks, but they've never run a commercial for all of them with some catchall claim like, “Bubbly, sugar-based liquids in a variety of vastly different tastes for all your thirst needs.”

So if your clients say they have three important things to say, tell the account person they need three ads.

If that doesn't work, perhaps you'll just have to convince them there's a certain part of the audience they're just not going to reach. Filling their ad with extraneous claims or peripheral products may attract some of this fringe audience, but the dilution will be at the cost of the main audience they need most.

It's this simple: You can't pound in a nail that's lying on its side.

Somebody Says “Negative Approaches are Wrong”

Well, you can start by pointing out that what they just said was negative but communicated their position quite respectably. But there are some other rebuttals you can try.

Take a look at the photograph reprinted in Figure 19.5. It's a very positive image, isn't it? There's happiness and cheerful camaraderie all around, and everybody's enjoying the client's fine product. It's also so boring I want to saw off my right foot just so I can feel something, feel anything.

It's boring because there is no tension in the picture. No question left unanswered. No story. No drama. And consequently, no interest.

Perhaps you could begin by explaining to them all that stuff we talked about in Chapter 8: Why Is The Bad Guy Always More Interesting? About conflict and storytelling. The most basic tenet of drama (and we are indeed in the business of dramatizing the benefits of our clients' products) is conflict. The bad guy (competition) moseys into town, kicks open the saloon door, and Cowboy Bob (your client) looks up from his card game.

Conflict = drama = interest. Without it, you have no story to tell. And consequently, no interest.

“Humorists have always made trouble pay,” said E. B. White.

The brutal truth is that people don't slow down to look at the highway; they slow down to look at the highway accident. Maybe we're ashamed to admit that, but trouble and conflict are always riveting.

The thing to remember about trouble and conflict in a commercial is this: As long as your client's product is ultimately portrayed in a positive light or is seen to solve a customer problem, the net takeaway is positive.

As Tom Monahan pointed out, “The true communication isn't what you say. It's what the receiver takes away.”⁹

Here are some other arguments you might try on intransigent clients.

Remind your client that one of the biggest success stories in marketing textbooks is Federal Express, a tiny outfit in Memphis that became an international commodity. This company owes its success almost entirely to a series of television commercials featuring terrible conflict—things going wrong, packages arriving late, nitwits getting fired.

Tell your client about a small classified ad that ran in 1900. (This is another story stolen from Neil French.) The ad read: “Men wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success—Ernest Shackleton.”

When the famous explorer placed this ad looking for fellow adventurers to trek with him in search of the South Pole, he received many responses. Should it instead have read, “Happy snow bunnies needed for Popsicle Party”? Probably not. It worked because readers were piqued by the honesty of the ad and the challenge of the imminent journey.

If that doesn't convince your clients, try this one from copywriter Jim Durfee: “Would you call the following statement positive or negative: ‘Don't step back or you'll fall off the cliff.’”

Negatives have power. Try writing the Ten Commandments positively. If you did, I bet it wouldn't all fit on two stone tablets. Negatives are a linguistic construction we're all familiar with, one we've been hearing since we were caught dangling the cat over the baby. They're neither good nor bad; they are merely an executional detail.

So try to keep clients from focusing on the details. It isn't the details customers remember anyway. If you look at most day-after testing results, you'll find that customers may not remember a single word of a commercial. Just the main idea and what's good about the product—which is all that matters.

Somebody says, “Our Competitors could Run that Same Ad!”

They'll usually go on to say, “If you cover up our logo, this could be the other guys' ad.”

“We said it first” is the simple answer. “Their logo isn't down there. Yours is.”

Sometimes clients need to be reminded that their product isn't substantially different from the competition's. All that may distinguish the two is the advertising you propose. Nothing else.

Your clients need to see that although there's no explicit claim in the ad different from what their competitor might be able to say, the ad and its execution have many implicit messages the clients can call their own. Whether it's the strategy, the concept, the tone, or the look of the campaign—together, they are giving the client a personality like no other.

Don't force your hand, though. If you can get clients to find in their product a unique selling proposition, all the better. Agree to start over if any significant difference can be found.

If not, you need to get them to see that execution can be content and personality can be proprietary. They're called preemptive claims—claims any competitor could've made had they moved fast enough. Your clients may see that it's simply a matter of which company's going to get first dibs on the ground staked out by your concept.

It comes down to “we were here first.” Reebok could've said “Just Do It.” Nike got there first.

Somebody asks, “Why are You Wasting 25 Seconds of My TV Spot Entertaining People?”

Other ways clients ask this is, “Can we mention the product sooner?” Or “Can't we just get to the point?”

This happens because many clients mistakenly believe people watch television to see their commercials. (“Honey, get in here! The commercial's almost on!”)

There is no entitlement to the customer's attention. It is earned.

And make no mistake, we're not starting from zero with customers. Thanks to Whipple, Snuggles, and Digger the dermatophyte nail fungus, we're starting at less than zero. There is a high wall around every customer. And every day another brick is added.

You need to get your clients to see that those 25 seconds of “wasted” time in the commercial are in fact the active ingredient in a good commercial. You're not welcome until customers like you. And they won't like you until they listen to you. And they won't listen to you if you open your pitch with bulleted copy points of your product's superiority.

To visit the door-to-door salesman analogy again, you can't just dispense with knocking on the door. Clients who say “let's lose all that entertainment stuff” are really saying: “Forget the introducing ourselves at the door. Forget that doorbell crap, too. In fact, let's just jimmy the lock with a brochure and barge into the kitchen with a fistful of facts. We'll make 'em listen.”

You can't. You're not welcome until they like you.

Your Client Takes Your Concept Literally

This is a hard one.

As an example, let's look at an old commercial from Cliff Freeman's hilarious Little Caesars pizza campaign (Figure 19.6)—the ones featuring the famous “stretchy cheese.” In these spots, goofy-looking customers pull slices of pizza out of the box and attempt to carry them away to their dining table. The cheese, connecting the slice with the pizza still in the box, stretches like a rubber band, snaps them back, usually causing some sort of cartoon injury along the way.

“Well, I don't know,” says the client. “Our cheese doesn't really stretch that far. And if it never breaks, doesn't that mean it's kind of rubbery?”

The client is taking the storyboard literally. It'd be nice if pointing that out would make the client say, “Oh, my mistake. By all means, produce the spots.” This is known as a hallucination.

Someone needs to shift the client's perspective so they can see the commercials as an average TV viewer, not as a product manager.

Again, this is about educating your clients. (Remember, judging creative is not what they were trained for.)

Is it agreed the job of advertising is to dramatize the benefit of the product? (In this case, the extra helpings of cheese.) Not to show the benefit, but to dramatize the benefit? If showing the benefit is the goal, we need only picture someone holding a slice of pizza and saying, “Look at all this extra cheese. Now that's value.” We could also throw our money down the middle hole of an outhouse and achieve the same effect, since no one will watch or remember Smiley Pizza Man.

So it's agreed dramatizing the benefit is our goal?

“Yes, but the cheese never breaks,” says the client. “Maybe the stretching part is funny, but rubbery cheese is no good. I'm telling you, I've been in food services for 15 years, and I've watched focus groups and heard customers say those very words.”

Here's where the client needs to take a leap of faith. Take your client's hand. Lean out over the precipice and say this: “In TV-Land, the rules are different.”

And jump.

The rules of acceptable logic are different in TV-Land. Not only do viewers know the rules are different, they expect them to be. If the rules aren't different, they might as well be watching the news. TV-Land is not reality. It is entertainment. Television is watched by tired people needing escape from reality.

In reality, cops don't catch the bad guy. In TV-Land, they do. In reality, coyotes kill roadrunners. In TV-Land, coyotes end up under the big Acme-brand anvil.

And while rubbery cheese isn't appetizing in reality, in TV-Land the comic device of stretchy cheese that's both rubbery and delicious is perfectly acceptable logic. The device, one the viewer tacitly knows is created for entertainment, transcends all reality-based concerns about edibility, leapfrogs all taste issues of rubbery/nonrubbery cheese, and lands with a big, welcome splash in the mind of the customer with its intended message—this pizza has lots of yummy cheese.

The rules are different in TV, but they're still rules. You must obey them as long as you wish to retain the attention of your audience. Stretchy cheese, rubber logic, and other dramatic devices are the accepted currency in TV-Land. They are the only way to communicate what is often a bland corporate message.

In fact, that rubbery cartoon cheese is a bland corporate message (“Our pizza has more cheese”), but one seen through the fun house prisms of TV-Land. At a certain level, all corporate messages that show up in TV-Land are bland because they weren't invited. In order to come to the table, the ante is entertainment.

But the chasm between the cool fluorescent lights of America's corporate meeting rooms and the play-school colors of TV entertainment is deep and wide. It takes a client who's either imaginative or brave to make the leap. Clearly, Little Caesars was both.

In a wonderful book for clients called That's Our New Ad Campaign? Dick Wasserman takes on this sticky issue:

When [clients] evaluate advertising executions, they do not understand that consumers react to ads in a generalized, unanalytical, emotional way.…People are much more imaginative than many advertisers are willing to give them credit for. Readers and viewers do not have to be led by the hand to understand what a client's advertising is getting at. All they need is a couple of key verbal and visual guideposts, and they are quite capable of filling in the blanks.¹⁰

Your clients will be uncomfortable in TV-Land. Once you get back to the safety of the conference room, you need to convince them the literal approach is actually riskier than obeying the wacky rules of TV. A literal approach, where you simply tell the client's story is, as Wasserman says, a speech; what viewers want is a play.

Your clients may be agreeing with you at this point, but they're not going to like it. They're going to be like that one guy in every disaster movie, up to his knees in mud but still checking his hair in the mirror. He is out of his element.

Remind them this discomfort is natural. This isn't Wall Street. But it isn't Sesame Street either. It's the intersection—that place where the odd bedfellows of business and advertising meet. The corner of Art and Commerce.

Your Client Says (As Federal Law Requires), “Can You Make the Logo Bigger?”

Clients are about their logos like guys are about their…you know.

They love talking about them. They love to look at them. They want you to look at them. They think the bigger they are, the more effective they are. And they try to sneak looks at other guys' logos when they can.

But as any woman will tell you, nobody cares.

Just the same, when you swagger into a client's boardroom with a full-page newspaper ad punctuated by a logo you could cover with a dime, fur's gonna fly.

I remember we had one client who called the agency, very angry. He had just seen an outdoor board our agency had done for his company, and he couldn't see the logo very well.

“Uh-oh,” said the account executive who fielded the call. “Where did you see this billboard?”

From a plane.

The client was angry because he couldn't see his logo from a plane as it circled LaGuardia airport.

But let's back up a little. If it's agreed the ad successfully stops readers and engages them with an offer that intrigues, what do you suppose the readers will look for next? It's doubtful they'll look at the logo of some other ad. It's doubtful they'll take their attention off the leash and let it wander into the park like a stray dog. There's a dynamic involved here. The readers have just seen something they want. Where can they get it? The logo. Unless you're using a watermark, readers will almost certainly find it, no matter what its size.

“But why can't you just make it a little bigger? What does it hurt?”

It's a matter of taste. The Latin saying is De gustibus non est disputandum. “Taste cannot be disputed.” But, forget Cicero; let's dispute.

In every ad there are explicit and implicit messages, both equally important. The explicit message is what the headline and visual are saying. But implicitly, the layout of the ad is sending many messages about the quality of the product, about the class, the demeanor, the personality of your client. They are all subtle. And although explicit messages can sometimes be adjusted with a wrench, implicit messages need an expert's touch.

Your client needs to know the art director's decision to make the logo the size it is was arrived at after careful consideration of these implicit messages. Too much logo and the ad becomes a used-car salesman. Increase the size of the logo a little more, and the lapels on his suit become wider; increase it again, and the plaid of his coat becomes louder.

The biggest logo I've ever seen towered 20 stories over Times Square: a giant Prudential logo, easily 30 yards square. No sales message, no headline, just yards and yards of blue logo. When people look up and see this giant logo, what are they to do with the information? Would it be more relevant or more persuasive if it were 50 yards square? Ooooh, what if we made it 100 yards square?

Where is it written large logos increase sales? When introducing yourself, do you say your name in a booming voice? “Hi, my name is

Do the large bottles of Coke with bigger logos sell faster than the cans? Are your business cards the size of welcome mats? If cattlemen heated immense brands and seared the entire sides of cows, would fewer be rustled?

Ads without any logos at all are often the most powerful. I know clients aren't likely to buy this argument, but it's valid nevertheless. A logo says, “I'm an ad!” and an ad says, “Turn the page!” But an intriguing message without any logo to defuse it can be a riveting interruption to a magazine. It doesn't say, “This message brought to you by…” It says, “This message.” Some of the most effective ads I've ever seen worked without the benefit of a logo. Three of them are in this book.

The reason they worked is customers don't buy company logos. They buy benefits. If an ad successfully communicates benefit, logo size is relevant only in terms of quality of design, something best left to the art director's well-trained eye—his intuition.

Find a way to give your clients a gentle reminder that this intangible thing, this intuition, is your specialty; your business. Ask them if they would presume to tell their doctor what diagnosis they want. Or if they'd instruct a lawyer in the nuances of contract law. I know I wouldn't.

I won't even tell the trash man not to lift the garbage cans with his back. I figure he knows what he's doing.

Your Client Gets a Few Letters from “Offended” Customers and Pulls the Campaign

Many clients worry their ad may offend somebody, somewhere. And they begin yanking commercials off the air after they receive one or two phone calls about the commercial. Or they begin telling their ad agencies to write everything in such a way that not one soul in a country of 250 million will find a scintilla of impropriety.

This is advertising by fascism, pure and simple. The marketing plan to the many, overruled by the pious sensibilities of the few. It is a form of political correctness, which is itself a politically correct word for fascism. It may be Fascism Lite, but it's still book burning—only we're burning them one adjective, one headline, and one script at a time.

Don't give in. Tell the truth and run.

In the next ad you craft, say what you think is the right thing. Remember, your job is to sell the client's wares to as many people as you can. To appeal to the masses, not the minority. Tell the truth and run. And let the chronically offended pen their lugubrious letters. Let them whine.

The trick will be to get your client to see what a quark-size minority these Kleenex-dabbing, career whiners are. The way I put it: “The letter flooded in.” Dude, it's a letter, not Omaha Beach.

I say: B-F-D. The letter flooded in. Fine. Even if it's a hundred letters, big deal. Savvy clients know they'll get angry letters just for hanging out their shingle. You build a factory; you get a letter. Sell a product; get a letter. I'll wager you could publish the cure for AIDS in tomorrow's paper and by Friday you'll get a missive scribbled in crayon on the back of a Burger King place mat from someone sniveling, “Why didn't you cure cancer first?”

Advise your client to run the ad. The world, amazingly, will not stop. In fact, 99.99 percent of the people who see the ad will somehow manage to get on with their lives. The other 0.01 percent will turn down the volume of whatever wrestling show they're watching and reach for the nearest number 10 envelope. Fine. Let them mewl.

To soften the ad in advance or pull the ad once it's run is to surrender your company's marketing to some consumer group you could fit in a phone booth—an angry clutch of stamp-licking busybodies with nothing better to do than go through magazines looking for imagined slights to their piety. Ask your client, “Do you want your company being run out of a church basement? Do you want to give every purse-lipped, pen-wielding, moral policeman with a roll of stamps free rein to sit on your board of directors and dictate marketing plans?”

Really?

Outlast the Objections

I hope that having one or two of these counterarguments tucked away in your quiver helps you save an idea one day. But the reality of this business is sometimes nothing you can do or say is going to pull a concept out of the fire. If a client doesn't like it, it's going to die.

The reasons clients have for not liking an idea often defy analysis. I once saw a client kill an ad because it pictured a blue flyswatter. Why the client killed it, he wouldn't say. “Just consider it dead.” When pressed for an explanation months later, he implied he'd had a “bad experience” with a blue flyswatter as a child. The room grew quiet, and we changed the subject.

So get ready for it. It's gonna happen, and I wish I could tell you why but in this world full of all kinds of phobias (fear of germs, fear of spiders), there's no fear of mediocrity.

All is not lost, though. You have one last weapon in your arsenal: persistence. I once read the definition of success is simply getting up one more time than you fall.

To that end, I urge you to simply outlast the clients. I don't mean by digging in your heels, but by rolling past their resistance like a stream around a rock. I once did 13 campaigns on one assignment for a very difficult client. Thirteen different campaigns over the period of a year, and each one was killed for increasingly irrational reasons. But each campaign we came back with was good.

They kept killing them, but they killed the campaign only 13 times. The thing is, we presented 14.

There's Always Another Ad

Instead of fighting, here's another idea. After you come up with an idea, do what Mark Fenske told me. “Pat it on the rear and say ‘good luck, little buddy’ and send it on its way.” Mark believes you shouldn't make a career of protecting work. Alex Bogusky has said the same thing. He says the agency is an idea factory. “You don't like this one? Fine. We'll make more.” Maybe they're right. In the end, perhaps the best way to work is this: Come up with an idea and then walk away. There's going to be another opportunity to do a great ad tomorrow.

Don't Lose Vigilance When Work is Approved

I find when I have sold an idea I didn't think I'd ever sell, I become so happy I lose my critical faculties and blithely allow the idea to go off into production unescorted. I forget to keep sweating the details.

Moral: Don't fumble in the end zone.

Don't Get Depressed When Work is Killed

The work you come back with is usually better. And when you're feeling down in the dumps, remember nothing gets you back on your feet faster than a great campaign.

Sometimes the playing field changes when a campaign is killed. For one thing, you know more now about what the client wants. Also, you'll probably be left with a shorter deadline. A curse, but a blessing, too. If the media's been bought and time is running out, the client may have to buy your idea. So make it great.

A short deadline also has remarkable motivating properties. Someone once told me the best amphetamine is a ticking clock.

If the client doesn't buy number two or three or four, hang in there. The highs in the business are very high and the lows very low. Learn not to take either one too seriously.

James Michener once observed, “Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”

After You've Totaled a Car, You Can Still Salvage Stuff Out of the Trunk

Okay, so the client killed everything. (I actually had an account executive come back from a meeting and say, “They approved the size of the ads!” Yaaaay.) But you know what? You can still get something out of the deal.

If you're part of the presentation, you can at least improve your relationship with the client. I don't think there's any client who actually enjoys killing work. Ask any creative director; it's easier to say yes and avoid the confrontation. The client knows you've worked hard on it. But remember, most clients really do know their products well.

If you can take the loss like a professional and still sit there and be your same funny self and ask, “Okay, so what the hell do you want?” you can build rapport. Clients will like you for it. And they'll trust you more the second time around.

Even If Your Work is Killed, Produce It

This is another piece of advice from Mark Fenske. If you're working at an agency where most of your stuff is fed to the paper shredder, you need to begin worrying now what you're going to show at your next interview. (“Well, see, the client made me do this one.…And this one, too.…Yeah, but I had this other idea, no really, you shoulda seen it,…Hey, why are we walking to the elevators?”) If you can somehow get to tight comps, even on the dead campaigns, at least you'll have something to show a prospective creative director what you're capable of.

If You're not Producing Agency Work, do Freelance

Some agencies don't like it. They figured they invited you to the dance, so you should dance with them. But you do have to watch out for yourself. You need to keep adding to your portfolio. So if you find yourself in an agency that's producing only meeting fodder and rewrites, maybe it's fair to flirt with a small client who needs a few ads. Just don't pin them up in the company break room.

Not only will doing the occasional freelance campaign keep your book fresh, it can keep your hopes alive and keep you excited about the possibilities of this business.

Keep a File of Great Dead Ideas

I've referred back to mine many times and have reanimated lots of old ideas, sometimes for the same client who originally killed them. I know many creative people who do all their writing in big, fat, blank books that they put on the shelf when the books are full. Nothing gets thrown away. Except by clients.