Fucking Client!

To the left, to the right…

pixeleando — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:17:29 +0000

It is not a salsa lesson, not even close to it. It is that heavenly synchronized move between two bodies that takes part over a never ending chain of e-mails in which all we can read is left, and right. They say right, I move it right, they say more, but then I have already moved it to much, and as much as I would love for this to have some kind of sexual connotation, I am not speaking about any noble body parts, Im talking about the logo, the headline, or even sometimes the little registered trademark symbol next to the brand. Its a game of opposites, of increments, of diminishing that kinda makes you feel like on that very uncomfortable night you lost your virginity: your over experienced and dominant counterpart tells you what to do, and even if you follow her instructions to the rule you just don’t seem to get it right. Up, higher lower or smaller, bigger fatter separate of together, the only truth is is once you changed you’ve gone too far, you have to start over again. The tragic thing is that at the end nothing changed… it remained the same, just one uninspired orgasm after the other and least with less instruction it would not be so painful to get there. Somehow in that recked place where clients come from they teach them that millimetric placement of layout objects are crucial or directly proportional to the amount of income that is going to be derived from the ad. So they spend their time really looking for that sweet spot, the spot thats going to bring on the bacon, roll in the money, letting us bore to death in the frustration you get when you realize that this idiot not is not only telling you what do create, but also how to create it. As I write this I sit and wait, cause after 30 e mails of left in right I already waiting for the next stage: the hand drawn layout. But we are gonna leave that one for latter.

On the limits of imagination

pixeleando — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:41:36 +0000

Hey! If anybody on the client side has not noticed, we are dealing with ideas. Ideas that require time and money to be executed, both of which we lack 99% of the time. Money that the client never has and time that he never gives just for the sake of making our job far more interesting that it could actually be (thnxs!) That’s why here in the old ad business we depend on layouts for two reasons: To illustrate our vision and to prove once again that all clients were obviously late to the neuron give away. In the past it was quite straight forward: an illustrator would draw something, paste it on a board and write the headline with a marker. The client would have an idea about how it would look like (if they where lucky) and then the casting process and location etc would go underway to give birth to a really cool ad (yeah right…) Now technology has come to bite us in the ass (big time) by giving us options like Photoshop and stock photography. We cut a model from here (the one we found moderately acceptable after days on stock imaging websites) … paste it there (that location from another web site from which we tried to find an angle that would fit to the other picture) slap a typo and then send. Where’s the happy ending? No where cause of course the client, highly educated in visual culture from watching local tv channels and his own discoveries in Power Point, will say that the angle is a little odd (ugh!) and that the lighting seems a bit off… for a picture he knows we are gonna have to shoot anyway!! If they would be transported to the past and had to judge a hand drawn layout the would say that that line in the middle of the face does not look like a nose and they would like their spokesmen to have one. Seriously. Sometimes the agency does not have any money for an illustrator of course the client wont have the money to pay for full production just to “show how the idea feels like”. “Excuse me mister Ridley Scott, I wanna show this commercial idea to my client but he is lacking a little bit in imagination, could you please shoot this film for me? I promise we will consider you if he accepts it… oh! I almost forgot, the clients little brother jacks off to Scarlet Johansen… can you just snug her in too?” Illustration, story boards, they are all just a bunch of lines in a frame. What were these people doing in pre school? being constantly molested? where did their imagination go? Sorry, I gotta kill this post sooner than expected, the client needs eight different model heads illustrated… its gonna be fun finding these fictional women in living flesh. Then again, we do have plastic surgery…

“I showed it to my friends…”

pixeleando — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:30:07 +0000

This might be the biggest piece of client bullshit cliche, but it happens so often that one entry about it might not hurt… so much. We all faced the situation, the ever eager account comes to you with those deer-in-the-lights eyes and you just know what the dreaded email she got five seconds ago contained. Every now and then you apply all your taste and knowledge to a task, out of pure stupidity and masochism you take of the client provoked thick skin and try to do something acceptable to your own standards. You send it out feeling like a million bucks, life gods gift to the design industry only to wake up next morning to your accounts pity infused watery eyes. “The client showed it to her friends…” Ohh yes… her friends… how could I forget! the bastard children of Picaso, Gondry and Corbijn. The ones who were born with composition and proportion pre-installed in their retinas. How dare I submit my mundane design to their exquisite sense of visual taste! Im done for, I’ve committed the unspeakable sin, I have dared to offer god a better alternative of his own creation. The account’s face does not change, with the same expression she says: ” they don’t like the color, they would like something cheerful, like yellow, and also they said that that pattern is way too much, it confuses the idea…” Damn me! How could I dare slap their knowledge in the face. I only hope that they will find in the hearts a place to forgive me. I am sorry to have forsaken you. I turn to my account, with tears almost dripping from my screen-blinded eyes, and say: “ten minutes, I will pull myself together, open the .psd file and put together the crap that they crave and they deserve”.

Bring on the guns

pixeleando — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:07:07 +0000

There are no limits in the oh mighty clients quest to make the consumer feel like the first step in the evolutionary process of the species. Maybe in some little dark corner in of their all powerful mind the realize the fact that consumers in deed must be stupid if for some mistake they buy the crap they produce… But we will leave that thought for some other entry. Today we are going to talk about the fact that clients swear by their mother that people who fall into the trap of ads cannot read a paragraph even if their lives depended on it. Bring on the guns cause we are gonna shoot that body copy to death with bullet points! Yes, bullet points. Grammar’s resource specifically created for the buying machines of today and tomorrow. Who would want to read a compelling and convincing set of tied ideas that would somehow move my brain into making a rational decision when I could just shoot up a bullet point, followed with no more than three words that generally consist of free, bigger, new, exclusive (or any other combination of the ever so limited advertising lingo) in full 72 points? there is nothing more compelling and in your face than a word written on “impact” (maybe we could write it with yellow?). What else does the average buyer need to know? that your product may cause anal leakage? no! that repetitive use may result on addiction and may cause cancer? no! Just write free on it as big as you can and we are done! automatically 300% increase in sales. Brand message, awareness, loyalty? who cares! we got rid of those excess units, time to produce some more crap!

Look at what they did in New York…!

pixeleando — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:59:47 +0000

Wait a minute, not New York. Just fill in the gap with any mayor advertising Mecca and the sentence works the same. “look at what they did in London, Paris, shanghai, Tokyo…” This is what your client will spit out of his ignorant mouth whenever his 8 hour youtube marathons at work guide him towards some kind of case study film about that cool, groundbreaking, edgy campaign that his under nourished brain-cell has always dreamed of doing and showing off to his regional manager sitting in a desk far far away. Suddenly with a fresh breath of proactivity and hope, he sits in front of his keyboard and starts to do what every cell of his body was made to do, write a brief from hell that will cleverly make you feel like a looser and “inspire” you at the same time to reach the never imaginable level of advertising that goes on on the G8. He will say “we can do it too”, “it doesn’t matter if we are a small market” “creativity does not depend from the money”. It’s in that moment when I would like to have him front of me so I can hang him from his Chinese market brown tie. Because somehow down deep inside he does not understand that that same “case study” video he saw costs more than his entire investment on ATL for the past four years, and that’s not counting the actual cost of the “advertising masterpiece”. You want skydivers to drop from the sky and sample your product from airplane to airplane on the way down? Sure! we are on it!… wait! what about filling the floor of the main square of the city with LEDs that will portray the logo in a glorious way? or even better! lets hire ten thousand chinese slaves to light it up with choreographed sequences of candle movements. You little narrow minded short sight pice of client! I would hate to bring your five seconds of inspiration to the ground but lets be honest with each other: my idea wont interest you, no matter how awesome it is, just because it is not already made and canned in a video. oh… and add that to the fact that me not being from (please insert here a metropolis name) would make you think that I am incapable of such consumer communication driven bliss. Even if its awesome, you would hate yourself and cry yourself to sleep, because you could not come out with something like it (it hurts right? to realize that you do need creatives), and use the little sand grain worth of power that you have to blame it on us and say that it is “not on brief”. Thank you, you just saved me ten days of suffering and for that Im gonna give you some credit: even if you like it (and have to gust to admit it) you cant make it come true cause by the time your little inner calculator starts gets all busy with adding and multiplying, you will realize that you are not (Insert the name of an advertising heaven on earth) either.

God forbid I become 50!

pixeleando — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:22:58 +0000

Yes, that dreaded age in which, according to clients, the human race is destined to become brain dead. Lets put it this way: It basically equals you to a rotting vegetable. I am very grateful that theres no biological possibility of me becoming a woman, cause that automatically will degrade me to simple amoeba. It turns out that in the no name school that all clients seemed to have graduated from and from which they apparently seemed to have learned nothing they learned one thing, don’t overload your customers only brain cell with what they call, in a rather patronizing way, a complicated mechanism. Yes, right now one of our every day tasks in advertising is to come out with ways to make the poor little brain dead consumers buy more, tossing some kind of bone which will make them salivate. It is in our luck that salivation is triggered by instinct, no brain activity required. So you sit down with that bunch of age-ophobic bastards and they start describing the very sharp mirror reflection image of the person they want to sell to, person that, in most of the times, only exists in their petty little heads. They talk about dear old mom, yes, the same mother that we all have, that our wives and our daughters will become and for no good reason they seem to forget all that they did to get their sorry little asses in a brand manager chair. The awful truth, not to mention indirect insult, steps in: those relentless beings filled with love seem to have no space left in their care taking bodies for a brain. Under no circumstance make them come close to a computer, their wooden spoon stirring hands will not be able to take it, making them send an sms or by any means driving them close to a cell phone will cause a massive stroke that will certainly ruin tonights dinner, not to mention the christmas cookies, and please never, ever, say the word email because she will slap you so hard shell screw your face off, the same way she did when you swore for the first time in front of her. Heres the daily lesson: send them to the post office. Its obvious, they have so much time it’s actually a delight for them to escape the eternal rounds of cleaning, making those kids ready to face society single handily while they are cooking instant food with the tips of their toes and sowing that overused sweater with their bare tongues. That they can handle, no hassle included, they just love every opportunity they get to play with scissors (it makes them feel smart to cut around the barcodes) and leave the house, husbands seem to have not trouble granting them permission, who in their correct mind would not want to win that shinny new car, Im sure their lovers are gonna love to fuck in it while she reads the bedtime stories to the future clients of tomorrow. Successful mature bussines women? Mothers that relly on email to communicate with their children who study abroad? please! its starting to sound like science fiction. Women for some reason forget to use the computer once they leave their offices and regarding their phones: who needs them? they get screamed at anyway for being so stupid. Long lines at the post office, thats what they like to do, their lack of intelligence has even rendered them masochistic.

Yes, from a clients perpesctive you are dead after fifty, thank god for the fact that being an imbecil still makes you capable of buying something that might come with a frying pan for free.

Squeeze that URL

pixeleando — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:48:32 +0000

The digital ticker in the tinny watch on the top right corner of my screen was closing towards six o’clock. I know, it’s naive for me to still believe that with this job I have a right to leave at six, but one can never loose hope. It came as no surprise for me to hear that nerve wrecking sound that my e-mail program makes, always carrying the will of the all powerful client. What would it be this time? as if moving the logo 2 centimeters to the right would sell another two million units. Silly me, that would have actually made sense. Of course the idiotic client wanted to change the pack shot of a commercial that by the way, has gone now through three sound recordings, two demo re editions and a gut blistering 11 round pack shot approval process, sorry, I mean now 12. “Squeeze that URL there somewhere”. God forbid I ask where, theres lots of room between those gigantic monolith-like miracle filled cardboard boxes and the bible length legal mandatories, you know, the ones that people just cant wait to read, recite, memorize and analyze for the mere pride of just being able to say it in mere seconds (ohh yes, the miracle of the human tongue). I guess those brainless idiotic bastards just sit around their meeting rooms trying to fill people’s life with even more daring and inspiring challenges. The brightest of them all just stood up and said “lets squeeze that url”. Yeah, go ahead, ruin the last minutes of my day on something I thought was long gone. Thank you very much and don’t worry, Im already physiologically prepared for when you see the layout and feel that the white font does not reach an optimum level of contrast against the black background. (what would we do if the lord had not graced us with the “drop shadow”?)