Originally published by Imperica. I have decided to re-post it here as Imperica has announced it will be shutting down on 31 July 2020.
Bravery has come to mean something entirely different in the world of advertising. It’s not like rescuing a child from a burning building, or savings lives by delivering food to isolated villages in a war-torn country.
Yet, everyone wants to be brave. They aspire to do ‘brave’ work. They rarely do.
This is because ‘brave’ is a synonym for many other things in Adland. Mostly, it means good. Because those agencies that actually do brave work – or as the journalists will have you think, the brave clients that go along with an idea – care about the craft, they fight for the work, they spend hours outside of their allotted work-time, making sure that it’s better than ‘best’.
That’s not brave, that’s passion!
What about those brave clients I mentioned?
Clients, as most Adlandians will have you believe, are terrible. They like to cut away the best bits of the work, to scupper the beauty and deliver something that’s barely lowest common denominator. And the account teams and the creative and planners, they let this happen. They accept it. More often than not, the client won’t even see this kind of work.
“The client isn’t brave enough for this!”
How would they know if they aren’t prepared to even show the client?
Perhaps, it’s because work is done in isolation – client writes a brief and signs off a scope of work, then they are shown some hand-drawn ‘scamps’ along with loads of charts talking about mobile this and Facebook that. A deck, presented by someone who may have preconceived opinions of their own about how the client will respond.
“Clients find it hard to understand creatives,” we’re told.
I disagree.
As a creative, I’ve fought hard internally to work with clients, which has latterly led to me being called a strategist. But good work requires a creative to truly understand what’s driving the business decisions, why the client might say no to something – although I have found it usually leads to having a solid argument as to why it’s the right route to take. And if you can get collaboration – even once – you’ll often find the creative reins are loosened for the next brief. True bravery is rarely achieved by one person alone.
Of course, good work is always possible when the account person works with and for the agency, when they don’t refer to themselves as ‘the client in the building’ and always say yes without consultation. It should never be them and us. It’s bolder to behave as a ‘we’. This isn’t art, after all. They are not there to be a filter for what gets shown – that’s where the creative director comes in.
Clients have a real role to play here
It’s an important role they play.
It’s worth clients – as well as their chosen agency partners – remembering that good work doesn’t require bravery: it takes trust. If you’ve posed a question, be prepared for a brilliant agency to respond with something that provides the right answer. If it’s not necessarily the one you were thinking of, you’ve failed to exercise that trust. This will lead to mediocre and forgettable work that will ultimately fail.
Trust should drive your business relationship – the best agencies know this, which is why they mostly do good work (every agency has accounts that don’t rely on trust, let’s not pretend otherwise). A relationship built on trust will allow creative work to be different, to attempt things that haven’t been done before, to oppose conventional choices when it’s right to do so.
Postscript
Don’t do brave work. Just do good work. Not just for yourselves, but for your clients. Build that trust. Throw out the ego and work with everyone who has a vested interest whatever their job title or position in the agency hierarchy – a lesson I took a while to learn. It will probably be the bravest thing you’ll ever do in your creative life.