Good is adequate. Good is acceptable. Good is everywhere.
A lot of the work we have done is good.
But a few times we have helped create something great.
Nothing feels like great. Great is heroin. Great changes everything. Great exposes good as the feckless pussy it is.
“So my pretentious friend,” you ask, “What is great?”
For Nail, there are two kinds of great. There is Creative great and there is Business great. Accomplishing either one is very difficult. We, for better or worse, must do both.
We can do brilliant communications that win awards and are the envy of every agency around. But if we annoy clients with missed deadlines, blown budgets, bad attitudes, whatever; that party ends quickly and cruelly.
However, we can be a well-oiled, client-service machine—call reports as long and detailed as Moby Dick, clients’ birthdays remembered and celebrated with vigor, schedules followed as rigorously as the Nazi train system. But if the work we are ultimately generating is forgettable and ineffective; that party ends slowly and permanently.
But, as luck would have it, the forces of creative greatness and business greatness are in an almost permanent state of tension:
Business thinks the client’s request is perfectly reasonable.
Creative thinks it’s a bullet in the head of their beautiful idea.
Creative wants more time to concept, polish, perfect.
Business doesn’t want the hours to blow past the estimate.
Business wants clients to be comfortable, relaxed, confident.
Creative wants to surprise, challenge, push.
We are under no illusion that we can—or even should—try to end that tension. But as Nail moves into its second decade, we have come to relish that instability and let it push us past our collective comfort zones. And the best client relationships we’ve had have been built on the understanding that this is a never-ending balancing act that requires transparency, patience and trust on both sides.
Or maybe we’re making this more difficult than it has to be and you’ve already cracked the code for doing brilliant work that makes everybody loads of money? If so, for God’s sake please tell us…
Yes! This is achievable!
Now’s the part that I say something that sounds totally irritating and obvious and you’ll probably roll your eyes and delete this comment, muttering “behhhh” under your breath, but hear me out.
The client wants to be heard. And you have to listen. To every single word they say. They came to you because they want to be pushed, but they also want you to know that the VP of Marketing is under a lot of pressure from the executive committee to get this campaign launched right away and Brand is going to freak out if there’s not equal space on every side of the logo and the in-house designer really doesn’t think that font does the creative justice and maybe you should consider a sans serif? Please?
And you have to listen. Deeply. The client-facing person has to be a miracle worker–a therapist and a business adviser and a Lamaze coach and a friend and a marketer and a super-ultra-superb translator/communicator. Because it’s their job to translate those needs to the creative team and then take their brilliance back and translate it back to the client. You have to explain in a powerful way how it will meet their business goals by driving traffic, how it will get the viral attention they are seeking to build their new brand, how it will be worth *every penny* they’re spending on you. And then you have to repeat back to them everything you’ve heard, every concern they have, and show them that you approached your work for them in this way because you heard them. It also helps if you bring in a carnival hypnotist and/or ply them with grain alcohol. Haha! Not funny!
You have to work directly alongside them, every single day, and guide them to make the decisions you were hired to help them make. You have absorb so much about their business that you are able to trick them into thinking you actually work at their organization, just down the hall. That, finally, they have a creative team of people who *get* them.
It’s not about fancy dinners or Red Sox tickets (eh, no one can accept that crap anymore anyway). It’s about being there, day in and day out, listening. And, over time, that listening turns to deep trust. Trust in your creative product, trust in your intelligence as creative people and in your capacity as business advisers, too. Because really, at the end of the day, they’re the same thing.
Fondly,
Forever an Account Director
Great observation Katie. I’m actually going to email this to all our account people. I think it is true, but more importantly it has a passion in it that you hear quite commonly from creatives but not so often from AE’s. It’s inspiring. Thanks.