I came across an article from a designer, Debbie Millman, who lost it with a client and basically told them off. For creatives, it’s usually something we think about, but almost always save for later and take out on the nearest victim, in most cases, that would be the account group of course. I don’t mean a heated discussion between people trying to make the work better either. That’s different and it happens a lot.
What I mean is really let the client have it, even though it could result in the loss of client.
I’m partly curious if that’s something in the PR world that’s just as taboo, or does it happen more frequently. Reason I ask is that my view of PR is that clients either come to you for ways to promote themselves ahead of time, or for damage control when something goes wrong after the fact, and your advice may mean the difference between public accolades – or a public hanging.
It’s that latter situation of damage control that would seem to me to be the more stressful time where tempers may flare depending on that situation. Things such as lives being at stake after a food tampering scare, political fallout from a scandal or Barry Bonds refusing to work with puppies. Things like that.
So for PR folk, (and anyone else), ever lose it and tell a client off?
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The interesting thing is that I do part-time work as a creative and full-time work as a PR major in college. I’ve been doing creative work such as ad design, web design, a general graphic work for a really long time, and over that course of time I’ve wanted to tell off a number of clients. The main reason usually is that most clients don’t understand the costliness of creative work. They think they can get a cutting-edge website for $50. I’ll give them something for $50, it might be their name and email address on a white background.
As for PR, i’m not their yet as far as dealing with clients enough to want to tell them off. I can see it being a possibility though. I can certainly see my response being something along the lines of, “YOU DID WHAT????????” Or maybe, “YOU WANT ME TO PROMOTE THAT STUPID EVENT?????”
You’ve made some good points. And in my opinion, I think it’s just worth it sometimes to lose clients. Especially clients who want something for free.
Scott,
Actually “yelling” at a client is part of something we do with our Israeli tech clients. It’s not always yelling per se, but it’s more in the vein of one’s will against another.
I just came back from seeing clients in Israel as well as seeing propsective ones, and many times you are judged not only on how good a job we do, but how strong your convictions are about how something should be done.
We do, on occassion, having yelling matches on conference calls, but at the end of the day, it’s all meant to work together.
Great fun, actually.
Alan Weinkantz
Sorry Alan, I can’t take credit for being Scott as part of my guest-hosting duties. Interesting observation regardless.
As a creative, I will always be defending a concept one way or another and sometimes it can get heated.
Never yell at a client. Just leave your invoice as you back away. Then later, chase them up for payment.
Sherrilynne, I definitely add in a PITA* tax when the client earns it.
;-p
*Pain in the ass
Well, except for the X-ed out hotlinked image, you and Andrea are doing a fabulous job. I have just checked traffic figures to determine how expensive a gift to buy each of you, and it looks like I am going to have to go back to currency exchange to get more money.
In response to the post by Rohit referencing Media Orchard’s efforts to extend brand value through guest bloggers, I am officially upping MO’s asking price… to a 12-pack, no longer settling for 40 oz.
To anyone who bet that I couldn’t go two weeks without looking at the blog … you won, but only by technicality. The wife is a little under the weather today and taking a nap, so I have a little time to kill. But please … nobody tell her I was on the Internet!
Ciao…
The Real SB.
I’ve actually worked on the client side of the PR equation, and we had a pretty good PR guy working for us. We looked to him as the expert so we’d frequently tell him our upcoming news that we’d like to do a press release about, and he’d let us know whether or not he thought it was newsworthy, or whether we needed to change the angle of the story. He was very matter of fact about it; he told us up front when we hired him that he’d do any story if we asked him to but he would be blunt about it if he thought it was a waste of our time and money. And he was helpful that way because he was almost always right. Granted though, it wasn’t usually damage control.
He never yelled at us, but he used to get really pissy with me if we made changes to his work because he couldn’t take criticism AT ALL. He’d often send us drafts with errors in sentence structure, grammar or spelling and try to defend his errors when we asked him to correct them or heaven forbid, corrected them ourselves.
I don’t know if that’s because it’s not considered appropriate to make changes to the PR work, but I don’t really care… I wasn’t going to send out work with errors in it and if that meant fighting with him, so be it!
A client of mine did something bad to me and did it in a way that made the problem much worse. I didn’t yell at them but I did send an email which was, arguably, designed to provoke a reaction more than it was intended to solve the problem.
The film director Richard Attenborough claims to deliberately lose his temper on the first day of every shoot to make sure people knew it was possible and to counter his reputation for being a bit of a luvvie.
On reflection, I wish I hadn’t sent the email. It seems to me that professional consultants (like me in the copywriting / marketing world) need to be exactly that – professional. This means working through persuasion, best practice, influence, courtesy and diplomacy.
If something is so intolerable that you can’t do the job, quit. I almost wish I had had the courage to quit the assignment rather than get cross and then have to repair the damage.
I posted about this obliquely on my blog which is a very roundabout non-apology apology: http://www.badlanguage.net/?p=105