Opinion

CBC – Cry Baby Clients

By Pierre Monké at 7:23 pm on Sunday, August 15, 2010 // 7 Comments

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Dedicated To All Our Agency Friends.

The benefits of being small and feisty is that you get away with shit every once in a while. – At least, more often than the big boys. I remember an ad campaign gone wrong at the last agency I was at. The campaign was not in our office but in our Canadian prairies branch. It was a small ad campaign that played with a bit of a risqué and criminal theme. The client was livid while the media ate us alive!

Another harsh reality when working at bigger agencies are that there seems to be a larger percentage of CBCs. CBC, aka Cry Baby Client is a term we invented referring to clients that have very little expertise in the field of advertising, marketing, art direction or plain design, but has an inverse and abundant supply of opinions.

Not that we have any of those clients -but we know you do.

So what’s your favourite client request? Dare to speak up agency people?

Tags: Advertising • Controversy • Culture • Fun

http://www.pixeldreams.com Lannie Le

Thankfully our clients are awesome.

I gotta say the most frequently requested revision in my decade of design is “Can we get rid of the white space? I feel like we’re wasting so much real estate”. I’d had to deal with clients who wanted to cramp EVERYTHING above the fold.

Managing clients expectation and educating them on the world of strategic design early on in the production cycle are crucial. Having creative accounts people on the team also helps too.
http://www.netfuel.ca Mike

To be honest, I have a few CBCs on my roster. It’s tough dealing with them at times because you always want to make sure your clients are happy. When clients come across as Mr Know It All and start making requests because they think they are 100% right, I don’t feel like making any more suggestions that would help improve their company because what do I know. It’s not like I do this for a living. Usually what ends up happening is as the project progresses, the client keeps changing his/her mind and costs their company more money in the end compared to if they would have just listened in the first place.

One of the reasons I feel CBC exists is because they need to learn the hard way. Studies show that most successful business owners were C students or complete drop outs. I guess they needed to learn the hard way too and carried that trait into their business.

To all you CBCs out there, this post is for you and I’m telling you like your father should so listen to us or learn the hard way.
http://www.pixeldreams.com Digital Agency

Focus: Sometimes clients want you to focus on this, that and the other in a design. Before you know it, you have 14 Call To Actions (CTA) in one piece. “Focusing” on several elements defeats the purpose.
Majid

Gain the client’s trust before you do anything, if they don’t trust you that is what will make them scared and adverse to change.
Laura J

3 months into a 4 month long project to redo a corporate site the client gets a new marketing director

New Director: We need to start from scratch I don’t like the creative or the site flow
Agency: Everything was signed off on. That will have a serious impact on timing.
client: No we still need to launch in one month
Agency: Yes Sir

I quit that job within two weeks
http://topsy.com/www.pixeldreams.com/share/blog/2010/08/cbc-cry_baby_clients/?utm_source=pingback&utm_campaign=L2 Tweets that mention PD Blog » CBC – Cry Baby Clients — Topsy.com

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lannie Le, Pixel Dreams. Pixel Dreams said: PD Blog » CBC – Cry Baby Clients http://t.co/CvXCmSH via @AddThis [...]
http://www.pixeldreams.com Lannie

Laura, that’s exactly the kind of attitude we appreciate here

Opinion

CBC – Cry Baby Clients

Dedicated To All Our Agency Friends.

So what’s your favourite client request? Dare to speak up agency people?

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