If you’ve ever left a client meeting, shut your laptop and screamed out loud — this is for you.
Fact: Some clients are just really stupid.
It’s cliche to complain about clients — hell, it’s practically part of the job — but feel helpless about it will eat your soul. Let’s see what we can do.
First, let’s narrow the definition of ‘stupid.’ Let’s remove clients who bully or are intentionally/maliciously stupid (both which are real, but a whole other ball of wax).
Let’s just talk about the kind of stupid clients that seem to be acting in good faith but consistently make the dumb decisions, give ridiculous feedback and simply don’t understand how advertising works. Like objectively stupid.
Then let’s breakdown the approach into two halves.
The first half is about you and what you need to accept.
Accept that clients will never care as much as you do about the work. They can’t. Talking about ads is probably less than 10% of their day — squeezed between a budgeting meeting and a legal meeting with Bob.
Accept that clients wants to avoid the risk, uncertainty and the sheer amount of additional work required by principle to make great ads. What they want the most is to be left alone by their bosses, get stuff done and spend more time with their family (can’t blame them). Their natural incentive is not to help you make better work, it’s to help themselves make easier work (that they can reasonably justify to others as better).
And the hardest one: Accept that 80% of your work really doesn’t matter. As strategists and planners, 80% of your slides (the unfortunate currency of our discipline) are not meant for human consumption, they’re meant for your clients, your clients’ bosses and the other inane machinations of the creative process. Buzzwords, charts and all.
Don’t get me wrong: the remaining 20% is super valuable (i.e. the core rationale, strategic bet, its practical implications and the stuff that truly helps the creatives) — but the you must always know what’s actually important (worth fighting about) and what’s just ‘strategery’ (necessary evil). Many souls have been destroyed confusing the two. In fact, all the best parts of your experience, training, talent, brilliance, research should be focused on creating that 20% and knowing that it’s the 20%.
The second half is about what you to do when your stupid client is being stupid. Let’s talk tactics.
The first is to master judo-ing stupid client requests back as asymmetric choices.
When you get asked “can you rewrite the whole strategy by tomorrow?” — your response should never be binary (yes/no), it should always be framed as a choice with only one stupid-proof client answer.
Like, “I can do it by tomorrow, but it won’t be the quality you want to show your boss.” Or, “If I do it by tomorrow, it’ll be missing an important chapter about how it comes to life which may confuse the rest of the team.” Basically, I can do it well or I can do it fast — one of which will make you/client look bad and I wouldn’t want that, but you choose.
The second is to consistently make your idea, their idea and their idea, your idea.
If there’s one Achilles’ heel of all clients, it’s their fundamental inability to disagree with…themselves. For whatever reason, they hate to backtrack — even if it was clearly stupid what they said or asked for before.
So, quote them. Quote their feedback, quote what they asked you to do, quote comments they made that ‘helped revise the strategy.’ Always be connecting your response to what they said previously — even if your response is opposite to their feedback, it makes them feel, at least, you consider it. Exploit their inability to admit stupidity as a mechanism for continual forward progress.
And lastly, maybe most effectively, is to simply run out the clock.
Nothing creates more problems for clients on their side than missed deadlines. It becomes a matter of face.
Your job is to do whatever necessary to make better ads, so just keep strategerizing until production must start. Because once production starts, (1) clients typically have less ‘expertise,’ (2) creatives usually have more freedom in the crafting and (3) you can point to ‘new,’ unexpected factors the client will find harder to dispute (the Oscar-winning director/editor had an idea, the talent/celebrity couldn’t say the line correctly, etc.)
Also, as you get closer to the deadline, some clients typically turn over more power in the effort to ‘just get it done.’ Here’s when you can reintroduce some of the 20% you strategically parked (but didn’t forget about) early in the process.
Just one last thing. And this is serious…
If you do use any of these tactics, you must do it together with your teammates. Stupid clients are a team problem and must be addressed as a team. At some point, you must directly tell account person and/or creative, “look guys, I think we need to run out the clock to get to the best work” or “I’m going to do some strategery to address the client’s comments.”
If you attempt to do it alone, the only thing you will achieve is looking like a feckless, late, irresponsible perpetually ineffective strategist/planner.
And then you look stupid.
