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Via Steal Our Ideas

A Client Services girl has just come in and said to a very senior Art Director in the office I’m working in - ‘The clients don’t really know what they want but they’ll know it when they see it’. I want to kill her.

Isn’t the job of the Account Management to interpret the client’s marketing problem, write the brief, come up with the proposition and get it signed off by the client? This way, the client has bought the work before they’ve even seen it so long as the creative matches the brief… Simple, isn’t it?

Tell you what love, we’ll do 100,000 ideas so your client can pick the one that tickles his fancy.

Give me strength.

Is there less work or is it just moving around? Are the nature of projects changing? What’s your experience of direct marketing and creative in a recession?

Reuben Turner

Creative Director

The Good Agency

Ctrl-F Account Handling says: ‘my job is to forward emails from the client on to the relevant people’.

Ctrl_F Account Handling adds no value.

And when the client has the relevant person’s contact details, it makes the Account Handler redundant (sometimes literally).

Can you afford to be Ctrl_F’ing right now?

Reuben Turner, the Good Agency

Does anyone know which agency produced this poignant and intelligent interactive banner for Amnesty International? A good old Google search draws a blank, as does speaking to Amnesty themselves. A friend of mine wants to feature it in a book he’s writing but needs permission. Please let me know ASAP – chris@chriscatchpole.com

Chris Catchpole
Creative Consultant
Chairman of The DMA Creative Forum 

Check out this post on the Osocio blog for a classic reaction to successful charity DRTV.

Yes, we’d all like charity DRTV to be groundbreaking, challenging, new and different. But I’ve never heard of anything succeeding that doesn’t follow the same formula as all these ads. Problem: solution. Eye contact. Rousing music. Earnest voiceover. Repeat the number. Repeat the number. Repeat the number.

Have you?

Reuben

The new Times outdoor campaign strikes me as everything that’s wrong with mainstream advertising. Overblown, impersonal and, worst of all, irrelevant. We are facing financial meltdown – and they are running (very expensive) ads featuring fat kids and Jordan with her horse. I bet it cost millions — and it could cost them a lot more yet.

Reuben Turner, creative director, the Good Agency

This is the newsletter from my local organic veg delivery scheme (you can see the mud). I love being talked to like a person, and from a person, not a company. Trouble is, when was the last time you read copy like this? Because we’ve turned writing copy into a trade, we’ve lost the ability to write like this.

It reminds me that Helmut Krone often used to write or amend copy for Avis ads, because he said copywriters couldn’t write like he wanted them to.

Reuben Turner, creative director, Cascaid / The Good Agency