On the record

I was rummaging through my record collection at the weekend, and it inevitably got me thinking about album artwork.

For me, part of the romance of records is simply a question of size – 12 square inches have always trumped the compactness of the compact disc. And from Factory Records and the work of Peter Saville to the team at Stylorouge at the height of Britpop, I've forever been fascinated with this pivotal point at which music meets design.

In the 60s, Warhol led the way with his multimedia aesthetic and the help of the band he was managing at the time, The Velvet Underground. And by the time 1969 rolled around, it made perfect sense to Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones to ask Warhol to design their next album sleeve.

And so he did. In fact, here's the letter he wrote Warhol to brief him on the project.

Do whatever you want.

Please write back saying how much money you would like.

Take little notice of the nervous requests to "Hurry up".

Not exactly your typical brief, but then Jagger wasn't looking for your typical response.

And here's the result, complete with working zipper for that added touch of sexual tension (not that you can quite tell from the visual, sorry).

If it's true that you do your best work for your best clients (have a read of this post for more on that matter), then I'd certainly say everyone could do with a Jagger or two at some point in their career.

Death on a whiteboard

If you want to get something done, I've learned you don't write it on a whiteboard.

Over the years, I've had a number of clients with whiteboards mounted on the walls of their offices. Without exception, not much changed from one week to the next. Any scribbles were usually just that – scribbles. One client had even gone to the trouble of marking out a section for his kids to doodle, and I was always intrigued by the idea of holding serious business discussions as Laura woz 'ere would catch my eye across the room.

When it comes to workshops, whiteboards take centre stage. However, it usually doesn't take too long before they start to interrupt rather than illuminate the discussion. There's rarely any pens to hand that work for more than four words, after a couple of lines you start to realise that you're writing on a ridiculous slant that makes everything trail off into the bottom right hand corner, and it's only once you've riddled the board with a sheen of half-baked ideas that you discover you've been writing in permanent ink.

Technology doesn't make things any easier. If you have a whiteboard from which you can make prints, one of three things usually happens: there's no paper, you write on the one screen that doesn't print, or you fail to use the only colour that reproduces with any degree of legibility. And if you're lucky enough to have one of those whiteboards that saves everything to a central hard drive, you can be certain that it will be saved to the hard drive never to be seen again.

Unfortunately – and in spite of my better judgement and past experiences – I recently learned this the hard way.

Our studio is now the proud owner of a brand new, shimmering whiteboard. A breeding ground for cartoons and caricatures, it produces little in the way of insight or efficiency. To make matters worse, it has been hung (professionally, I might add) at the perfect height for anyone below 5 feet tall. Now and then, I stare longingly at the whiteboard, in the desperate hope that it will spring into life, but I'm also slightly worried that it will instead crash to the floor, pinning any nearby designers to the ground.

But then, it could always be worse. We could be having one of those brainstorms where there's no such thing as a bad idea – like buying a whiteboard.

The art of persuasion

Persuasion is a fine art.

I know this because, like many of us, I spend a large part of my day trying to persuade people. At work, I’m trying to persuade clients to stay true to a particular strategy, even when the going gets tough. At home, I’m hoping to persuade my sons that sliding down the slippery-dip is actually much more fun than hurling themselves off the top.

But the common mistake I often see people make is that they think the art of the persuasion relies solely upon how persuasive you can be. When in fact, it relies largely on how much listening you can do.

And I mean really listening.

With all your senses, skills, faculties, and anything else you can muster to help you understand what people are really telling you – and what they really want you to hear.

Earlier this week, I spent a couple of hours listening to a friend of mine. Now this is a guy I really respect, and I would love to have join the agency. While some of what he said may not have been music to my ears, I did all I could to absorb everything he communicated – physical, emotional, rational, the lot. And to be perfectly honest, I did everything I could to try not to persuade him to do anything. What was I going to say? – I didn't know what he was thinking or how he felt, let alone what he might want.

And I see it happen all too often when someone flies into the discussion straight off the bat, only to discover halfway through their monologue that they have delivered the perfect argument for what they've now realised is in fact a non-existent issue.

It even happened this week on a project we were pitching. While we aimed to persuade the client of our insights, our two competitors pitched their cost-effectiveness. We ultimately won the pitch because the client didn't want to hear about price (cost-effective or otherwise), they only wanted to hear about how we could solve their business problem. And what shaped our response for the pitch was not what we wanted to tell them on presentation day, but what they wanted us to hear when they first issued the brief.

It's also worthwhile making another slight digression to introduce the fable of the North Wind and the Sun.

According to Aesop's fable, the North Wind tried to prove his strength by blowing the traveller’s cloak from his back, however, this only led the traveller to pull his cloak tighter around him. On the other hand, the Sun shone so brightly that the traveller removed his cloak in the heat of his own accord. What the Sun proved was that persuasion is a far stronger ally than brute force when it comes to achieving your ends. Not only is it vital to spend your time listening for what someone really needs, but it's equally important that you allow them to make the decision for themselves.

When it came to winning the pitch I mentioned earlier, it was the client who made the final decision, not us. Our arguments might have been persuasive, but the winning factor was our ability to listen.

And the same is true for the friend whom I hope will become my colleague. Listening for what he needs will get me much further than trying to persuade him of what I want.

So next time you want to persuade someone, don’t do it. Or at least not until you've had a good listen to what they have to tell you first.

Agencies get the clients they deserve

If it’s true that you do your best work for your best clients, then it’s also true that agencies generally get the clients they deserve.

As in life, like-minded people gradually build a pool of like-minded friends, and the same is true in any service-based industry like ours.

Businesses that value creativity gravitate towards agencies that put creativity at the heart of their own business. People who thrive on collaboration and partnership will work with agencies where close relationships are high on their agenda. And, clients with a firm focus on operational excellence will seek out an agency with a strong track record in heavy duty implementation.

So it came as a massive surprise to me this week when I discovered that one of our competitors was seemingly happy to undercut us by 75% to win a pitch.

Maybe it’s a sign that desperate times call for desperate measures, but I don’t envy any agency in a position where it’s building a portfolio of low-revenue-high-discount clients.

And, what sort of a client does an agency deserve when it offers 75% discounts to attract their business? 

To be perfectly honest, it scares me even to contemplate what that must be like – so I’ll leave it to your own imagination.

Every agency wants to win every pitch, but sometimes you have to be careful what you wish for.

Heads or tails?

Managing relationships is always an important factor when it comes to doing great work – and I've always found that I've done my best work for my best clients. However, whether or not you have a great relationship with your clients can often seem like a lottery. As with most things in life, there's two sides to every story, but there are things that you can do to ensure success does not come down to the flip of a coin.

So it pains me to write that I managed to find myself at the whim of fickle fortune only this week. Developing creative work without a clear brief for a company where the key decision maker felt unable to explain exactly what was expected – I think the notion of "something abstract" was as far as we got. Juniors were sent to review progress on the decision maker's behalf, each of whom had only a limited handle on their manager's expectations. And, of course, we had barely enough time to crack the idea.

To make matters worse, we weren't actually the first team to get this non-existent brief. We were the fourth. But no one had thought to consider whether the way in which the relationship was being handled was the real issue, not the quality or character of the creative work.

Unsurprisingly, it seems we didn't crack the idea. Although, I think it would be more accurate to say that we didn't crack the relationship.

To use a sporting analogy, developing any solution for a client is always a combination of playing both the man and the ball. The world's finest sportsmen are not only incredibly skillful but they are also well versed in the nuances of their opposite numbers. And they will not only play to their own strengths but also to their opponents' weaknesses.

It's slightly different in our arena in so far as we need to play to our strengths and then also to the strengths of our clients, ideally with a cumulative effect rather than one where they cancel each other out.

All of which points to the simple fact that you need to understand your client in as much detail as you understand their brief.