The original title of this post was missing the word creative. Then, as I started to write more, I realized that any dipshit can sell crappy work to a client. That’s easy. And it happens every single hour of every day, which is one of the reasons why so many bad ads are soiling our environment right now. (I said “one of the reasons,” trust me, I know great work can become a shadow of its former self by the time it gets out. That’s a topic for another rant.)

No, it’s not hard to sell any old work to a client, other than getting over the fear of standing up in a room and talking. And if you’re in the ad game, you’ll have to do that sooner or later. Probably sooner. As the mighty Luke Sullivan said in Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, "you can’t be a pilot who’s afraid of heights."

Of course, there are some amazingly creative people who would rather die than present work. Public speaking rates higher on the fear scale than death! Like Seinfeld quipped, and I’m paraphrasing, “if you were at a funeral, most people would rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy.” I certainly don’t have the skills to get you over that fear in one or two pithy bullet-points. See a shrink, take pills, use hypnosis, just get to a point where you can stand up without throwing up.

There is one addendum to this though; if you’re completely, utterly, disastrously bad in front of clients, stuttering and sweating and forgetting everything, you need to hand over the selling of the work to someone else so that you don’t sink the campaign. But that’s a temporary measure until you get more comfortable. No one knows your work better than you do, so make it a point to practice whenever you can.

Now, saying that, I should add that I’m no Luke Sullivan when it comes to presenting. I’ll just never be that charismatic. I do fine, I get laughs when I need them, and I get awkward silences, too. I have sweaty palms on occasion. But there are some people who are just born to stand up and shine in front of a client. Rory Sutherland comes to mind. So too do David Abbott, Trevor Beattie, Bill Bernbach, Donny Deutsch, Alex Bogusky, Leo Burnett, Rosser Reeves, Lee Clow, Hal Riney, John Hegarty, Dan Weiden, and too many more to mention. I bow down to them all.

However, just because you don’t have the chops of the greats, that doesn’t mean you can’t sell work. It just takes a few fundamentals. Here is some advice I have collected over the years from those giants, as well as great account people and creatives I have worked with. May it serve you well. And if you have more advice, please add it to the list. If you disagree with any of it, tell me why.

1: The work MUST be on brief
There’s no getting around this one. If you have a genius idea that is way off brief, the client has every right to shoot it down. You would, and so would I. So make sure everything is buttoned up long before you ever get into that board room. Remember, the client has already signed off on the creative brief weeks (or even months) ago, so you can’t change that fact. However, when the work is on brief you have a fantastic weapon in your arsenal. This is the solution to the problem the client gave you. This is what the client asked for. Sure, judging any creative is subjective, but you can at least definitively say that the creative you’re presenting meets the objectives of the brief. And that is half the battle right there.

2: Practice your presentation
I know some creatives who can walk into a room completely unprepared and sell absolutely anything. They are rare beasts and should not be considered the norm. Most of us need to practice this stuff, at the very least with the account team working on the job. Practicing helps you work through any possible stumbling blocks, and it brings up questions you may not have thought of. It also helps you streamline the presentation. Be concise, you may love hearing the sound of your own voice but most people don’t.

3: Know the work inside-out
One of the most important reasons for creatives to present their own work is that they are the most familiar with it. They came up with the idea. They fashioned it. They made it what it is. But if you’re a creative about to step up and talk about your work in front of a room full of people deciding the fate of your wonderful idea, you better be damned sure you know that work back-to-front. If someone asks you why you chose a specific word or phrase for a headline, know why. If someone asks you how you arrived at the concept, know how. You did this work for a reason, hopefully. If you pulled that shit out of thin air or copied it from a One Show annual, you’re on shaky ground.

4: Pick the work apart first
Now, by saying this I am not giving every account team, owner, planner or production director the green light to shit on the work from a height. There is a time and a place to play devil’s advocate. But once everyone is on board with the ideas, and you have a killer concept, it’s ok to ask questions that the client may ask. Bring up those doubts, without being a buzz kill, so that you can fully prepare a response that’s watertight. The last thing you want is the client throwing a curveball at you and having no way to counter it. A stuttering, sweating, dumbfounded creative gives the client no confidence in the work at all. Congratulations, you’ve just helped the client shoot your killer idea down.

5: Be ready to fight for your ideas
Great ideas should be able to stand alone, but that doesn’t mean they can stand up for themselves. If the client is taking potshots at your hard work, defend it. Often, the client is asking questions that they genuinely want answers to. But remember to defend your work without getting too defensive. The kind of arrogance I’ve seen some creatives display when clients dared to question their work, well it only hurts the cause. Fight for the work, keep your cool, give considered responses and remind the client that you have their best interests at heart. Because if you’re a good creative, you do.

6: Have genuine enthusiasm for the work
Have you ever been to a presentation where the guy at the front read monotonously from a script or autocue? Have you ever been to a restaurant where the waiter seemed more interested in the ceiling than the menu? It makes a difference. You pick up on the enthusiasm (or lack of it) from that person and it actually affects the decisions you make. If you ask how the steak is and the reply is a lackluster “it’s nice” you probably won’t order it. But if the waiter replies with gusto, and tells you they never order anything else because it’s so damned delicious, then you’ll probably be ordering steak. The same goes for your work. Be excited to show it. Let the whole room feel that positive energy. Because if you aren’t thrilled about this work, why on earth would the client care about it?

7: Believe in what you have done
If you have doubts about the validity of the idea, you can bet your ass the client will. You may have questions or concerns about the creative, even as you present it, but you cannot let the client see anything other than complete confidence in the work you are selling. I have seen some people start a presentation with this gem: “So, we’ve got some work to show you today, it’s a bit out there and is probably too risky for you but we wanted to show you it anyway.” How do you think the client’s feeling after hearing that? I’ve also heard phrases like “well this is a bit off brand” or “this one is way over budget and you probably can’t afford it, but we love it.” All of those phrases only make your job even harder. Don’t sow any seeds of doubt. The work is as good as it can be. So you have to get behind your ideas with all the conviction you can possibly muster.

8: Take a few tips from HSN and QVC
I’m not saying you need to get your teeth whitened and have a personality transplant. But these guys are good at what they do. They convince millions of people every day to buy an awful lot of complete crap. And they do it by employing a lot of the tips in this article. They’re enthusiastic; they know the product completely; they believe in the product; they work well with the production team; in short, it’s a very tight ship. They may come across as saccharin and overbearing to you, but you’re not really the target. To those people who sit watching this garbage every afternoon, they’re spot on. And while we’re on the subject of overbearing salesmanship, infomercial pitchmen (and women) also have a few tricks up their sleeves. I bought a set of knives once from one of these guys doing a demo in the store. Me, the cynic, actually got sucked in. As it turns out, we still have those knives some nine years later, and they still work, but I wouldn’t have given them a second look if they were on the shelf in a box. This guy was magnetic, I believed in what he was saying and I believed in the product. You may laugh at the work of the late Billy Mays, but that man could sell bread to a guy with a gluten allergy.

9: Get to know your clients before you present
As a junior writer, I feared many of the clients I worked on. It was something that was fostered by the account teams. “Oh, you’re presenting to Don? Man, he hates us, he shits on everything.” As it turns out, Don isn’t such a bad guy at all, once you get to know him. And that’s the problem. As a junior, I had the most impossible time getting to know him because the account team was very protective of him. They didn’t think the creatives needed to have any kind of relationship with him; that was their job. Not so. If you get the chance to meet with your clients, whenever they are in the agency or whenever the account team is meeting them, tag along. If there are lunches, get yourself invited. If there are after-hours shindigs, be there. The more often you’re exposed to the client, the less of a mystery they are, and the less fearsome they will appear. When you next go to present your ideas, you will have a rapport. And that rapport will help you sell in an idea that could have be rejected by a cold room.

10: Bring the client into the creative process prior to the presentation
“It’s hard to kill something if you helped birth it.” I’m not sure who said that, but damn it, it’s true. I recently watched a fantastic documentary called “Tales From The Script” which is a fascinating insight into the lives of Hollywood scriptwriters. Steven E. de Souza (48 Hours, Die Hard) talked about leaving gaps in his script for the producers of the movie to fill with their own ideas. Of course, these gaps were either not important to the movie at all, or needed something blatantly obvious that he was happy for the producer to take credit for. If you can, in some way, bring the client into a few tissue sessions, you will have them on your side when it’s time to present the work. If it’s a potential client, say in a pitch situation, it’s still possible to involve the client. Ask questions, get feedback, use nuggets from them as part of the creative work. When the client is involved, even in the smallest way, they are more likely to give your creative work the green light. And that’s because it’s their creative work as well.

11: Work closely with the account team to prepare
A good presentation of the creative work needs a good foundation. The account team can give you this, setting up the meeting in a way that makes your work the answer to all of the client’s problems. The account team can go through the creative brief, hitting on all of the points that your creative addresses. The account team can tell you what to expect from the people who will be in the room, and what approach to take that will have the best reception. Good account people are worth their weight in gold, and if you work closely with them you are far more likely to turn those ideas on paper into ideas that get printed or aired.

Wrap your brain around these points. I'll be back in a few days with the remainder of the list (which happens to now be live).

Felix Unger is a site contributor, ranter and curmudgeon for The Denver Egotist. He's been in the ad game a long time, but he's still young enough to know he doesn't know everything. He'll give his opinion, you can take it or leave it. If he uses the f-bomb from time-to-time, forgive him. Sometimes, when you're ranting, no other word will do. In his spare time, he does not torture small animals. He has been known, on occasion, to drink alcohol by the gallon. Do as he says, not as he does.

Sterling Rice Group made a fun video for their new hires intended only for internal use. The video got leaked, hit The Egotist, and some people said some unflattering things about it. I'm thinking this might be one of the reasons David Snyder called Denver claustrophobic.

If this video were made in New York, Chicago, or LA, no one would pay any attention. But the Denver Advertising/Design scene is pretty self-conscious. We want to make sure every little thing we put out is top shelf because we don't want to be seen as a second-tier creative city. Unfortunately, these collective obsessive-compulsive tendencies make it hard for people to feel free, and feeling free is pretty necessary for making baller shit.

There are a couple takeaways here. First, everything gets out. You can't create even the smallest piece of content without imagining it being seen by the world. I sent an email that was intended for the creative team at CP+B and it ended up in Israel. It also got me fired.

Second, if you're one of the criticizers, realize your criticism might be counter productive. If your intent is to make sure nothing but badass creative comes out of Colorado, elevating our stature in the creative world and bringing high profile clients and assignments to the greater Denver area, alienating people and creating a suffocating atmosphere of criticism isn't going to further your cause.

When I look at the SRG video through the lens of its intended audience, it's awesome. If I worked there, I'd be stoked that my agency took the time to create a welcoming piece for new hires and get people working together on something fun. It sucks that they did something with good intentions and ended up catching flack from an audience they never anticipated.

The Egotist is a powerful tool. It gives us the ability to connect as a community and help each other build a creative industry we all love to work in. I'd like to see more people use this blog with that kind of thinking driving their actions.

Faithfully,
Fernando

Fernando is a passionate defender of advertising. He blogs at www.bigfuckinglogo.com.

Or your PC. Or your iPad, iPhone or any other hi-tech gadget you cannot live without. If there’s one thing I have learned over the years, it’s that a computer is a tool, and it should be used in that way. Just like a carpenter wouldn’t use a table saw to formulate ideas for a new table or stool, you shouldn’t use a Mac to create new ads.

I’m not saying they should be outlawed. If you want to do some Photoshopping or retouching for your chosen ad, great. If you need to create a vector logo, cool. If you’re roughing a storyboard, more power to you. Macs are perfect tools for creating and honing the finished product. But when it comes to having ideas, the only hi-tech device you need is a pen, a sheet of paper and your brain. You can argue all you want with me on this, but you’ll lose.

When I first started out in this industry, the computer was a shared commodity. The copywriters used it to write a final draft of the copy. The art directors would get on one of the Macs in the design room and put together a rough comp of the chosen ad. But that was the extent of the screen-gazing. The rest of the time, our desks were filled with marker pads, pens, pencils, coffee cups, annuals, the occasional tattered stock photo book, and candy bar wrappers. Oh, and a dictionary and thesaurus (which were used for reference only).

Well my desk was like that anyway.

After I received the creative brief, I would read it several times and ask questions. My art director would do the same. Once we were clear, we’d take a walk or pop down to the local boozer for a beer and a chat. On other occasions, we’d put the brief to one side and finish off another job.

But when we were ready, we reached for the marker pads and the Sharpies and got to work. We wrote word lists. We sketched. We threw out ideas. We berated those ideas. We hit our heads off the walls. We played basketball with the rolled up pieces of paper that littered our desk. We prayed to the mighty ad gods for an idea. We sacrificed chickens to those gods (in the form of a KFC bucket and some hot sauce).

However, at no point did either of us go to the computer and start mocking up ads or trawling the Internet for ideas. It was taboo. It was something the hacks did in production shops and other design warehouses. You would actually feel embarrassed if you presented an ad to your counterpart that was anything more than a sketch.

Why?

Because in advertising, you go big on ideas and small on technology. At first, anyway. You throw down as many ideas as you can, as quickly as you can, and to my knowledge no one has invented something that helps you do this that’s better than paper and a pen/pencil.

Once you had covered the desk, or the wall, with pages and pages of ideas, you would condense, eliminate, merge and shape them into ideas worthy to present to the CD. Those ideas would get presented to the account team in the same state. Most of the time, those ideas would get boarded up as-is and shown to the client. Sometimes they would be redrawn by an illustrator…but not often.

Your big ideas stay big by being loose. They have endless possibilities. The sketch does not paint you into a corner. There is no elaborate work that people are afraid to comment on, because it’s finished already. The client feels like part of the process too, because they are along for the ride to help shape that big idea into the finished ad. And as several great designers and advertisers have said, it’s hard to kill a baby if you birthed it. And it’s in production, when the final idea is being formed, that the computers have a place. Now they come into their element. This is where a Mac shines. Here, your big idea becomes a finished idea, ready to send out into the world for all to see and praise. Hopefully.

Today, I’m sad to say, it’s a different story. Creative teams everywhere are staring at Mac screens the second after the account manager has finished the brief. A few hours later, polished comps start shooting out of the printer, and most of them are style over content. There is no depth of thinking in that process. There is not a natural progression of ideas. There is no quantity of ideas. And sadly, the quality is lacking as well.

If you’re a “modern” CD, you have no doubt become accustomed to seeing work that’s of a more finished level in the initial stages. You may even like to get it that way. Why? I have no idea. But saying yes to anything with that level of finish, even if the idea happens somehow to be killer, is dangerous. Because after you’ve dazzled the account team, next up is the client.

You know as well as I do what happens when you present something that looks like a finished ad to the client; they comment on the intricacies of the ad. They don’t like the color, they don’t like the texture on the background, they think the smile on the guy’s face is off brand, and they have an issue with the size of the logo. They can’t see the big idea because you’ve hidden it under technique (and if the technique IS your idea, I hate you and everything you stand for).

I’m not going to delve any deeper on the subject of presenting highly-finished work to a client; that’s a slightly different argument. Here, the emphasis is on thinking. And if you want to be thought of as someone who has great ideas, you need to cut the cord between you and your Mac when you’re concepting.

Blow the dust off those Prismacolor grays. Break out the bleedproof marker pads. Buy a big box of Sharpies (my preference, as a writer, is for Ultra Fine or Extra Fine) and write down ideas until your pens run dry.

All of you, some more than others, are no doubt guilty of thinking on a Mac. I’ve done it. And when I look back, it shows. I never go straight to the machine now, I am surrounded by paper and pens and every idea gets spilled onto the page before it ever sees a Mac. Even when I’m writing copy, I put my outline on paper first. If we want Denver to suck less, we have to start working the right way. So, sorry Steve Jobs. As much as I love your products, they should be banned from the thinking process; even in 2010, the pen is mightier than the Mac.

I just popped down to my local dollar theater (hey, I’m an intern earning shit so gimme a break) and caught a turd of a movie called “Crazy People,” which purports to be a movie about advertising. Most movies about advertising suffer from a complete lack of truth, but some of them do it with class. For instance, “How To Get Ahead In Advertising” is completely bizarre and I thank everyone involved for it (especially Richard E. Grant). This is neither truthful, nor bizarre, preferring instead to drag around in the dirt and pull out every rampant cliché in the book.

I got into advertising for the exact opposite reasons highlighted in this movie. It takes the very radical approach that everyone in the business is a two-faced liar who dreams up more and more scurrilous ways to con people. Wow, advertisers are the bad guys…dangerous territory guys. What next, German terrorists?

Anyway, it’s a comedy so I’ll let that go. But as it’s a comedy, I was hoping for something funny. But I’d already seen The Hunt For Red October, and I would rather eat my own cold vomit than watch Pretty Woman or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So, I plumped for this one. Hey, it’s only a dollar. Out of the 90-ish minutes on the screen, I laughed maybe two or three times. 33 cents per laugh. Think I got robbed.

Here’s the premise. Dudley Moore (if you’re a comedy philistine and don’t know his work with Peter Cook, then he’s the drunk guy in Arthur) plays a guy called Emory Leeson, an advertising creative who has got tired of lying to people and wants to produce ads that tell the truth. You know, the ads that we all create daily, or at least try to. The ads that DDB, under the leadership of Bill Bernbach, pioneered for clients like VW (Lemon, Think Small), Avis and Levy’s.

The kind of horseshit ads being produced here, most haven’t seen the light of day in decades. Remember, it was over six years ago that Chiat/Day wowed us all with the 1984 spot. We’re hardly in the realm of “smoke cigarettes, they’re good for you” here.

So, these “truth in advertising” ads get shown to Emory’s boss and his reaction is natural. “Emory has clearly gone insane, we need to commit him to a lunatic asylum.” Of course, the bad ads somehow all get sent to press, and people go nuts for the true statements and start buying the products! It turns out people respond to the truth more than bullshit headlines with fantastical claims. I’m shocked.

(Quick aside, if I had been locked up every time I presented a crazy idea in college or to my boss, I would have spent my formative beer-drinking years licking the wallpaper with the real crazies).

What are these “far out” ads?

They’re actually pretty good ads. Headlines like:

Porsche. It's a little too small to get laid in, but you get laid the minute you get out.

Forget Paris. The French can by annoying. Come to Greece. We’re nicer.

Volvo – They’re boxy but they’re good. (This could be an old VW ad.)

The FREAK (horror movie) – It won’t just scare you, it will fuck you up for life.

Sure, you can’t say “fuck you up” in an ad, but you say the same thing in other ways. The strategy on that ad is fine. In fact, the strategy behind all of the ads Emory presented would have been at home in a modern agency.

That doesn’t stop the makers of the movie painting this Emory guy as some kind of a genius living in a world of devils and backstabbers. The rest of the movie is as formulaic as the ads Emory despises in the movie, with most of it being set in the lunatic asylum. And to add insult to injury, the really good ads start being produced by the drooling imbeciles in the asylum. See that? Our job is so easy that your average nuthouse inmate can write better ads than we can.

Sorry, this may seem like a soft target but fuck this movie, and anyone who thinks advertising is anything like the shady world within. I may only be an intern but I’ve spent time studying ads and working with real pros. Great ads are everywhere, the truth sells and we are all following in the footsteps of Bernbach, Ogilvy, and now Lee Clow. Ads are based around the dramatization of a truth, or several truths. It’s not lying, it hasn’t been for a long, long time. Can we stop demonizing the ad guys and aim Hollywood’s giant scope at the real villain of today – Windows 3.0. Bill Gates is trying to take over the world, and only Steve Jobs can stop him!

Care to comment on this World Wide Web article?
Fax: 877.389.7964
Phone: 877.389.7965