Ten tips from a copywriter to a client

I’m writing these things based on my personal experience so please take them “as is”. Also, this post doesn’t adress a specific client but is rather a sort of wish-list, something I’d love to see in each and every client that I’ve worked or will work with. So here it goes:

1. Please read a book and watch a good movie from time to time. No matter how busy you are, you can still make time for such a thing. I’m not saying you should know about Larry Clark or Harmony Korine, but for the love of God you SHOULD know who is David Lynch and what type of music Beastie Boys make / made.

2. You have no excuse for bad spelling. Take a class, I don’t know, do something about it. You have no right to tell me HOW to write a headline and WHAT WORD I should use as long as you’re incapable of writing a correct phrase in your native language.

3. NEVER do what I call “let’s make the copywriter work and then do what we wanted to do anyway” maneuver. If you already have a headline that you know you’ll use no matter if it’s shitty or not, just go ahead and tell that to the agency. No need for the copywriter to come up with hundreds of headlines that you know you’re gonna turn down.

4. Please don’t write a brief with specific instructions on what image to use, where to use it, what the text is and exactly how the ad should look. You’re talking to an advertising agency not a production shop. You do your job, let us do ours.

5. If you’re not sure that you’ll actually do an ad then please don’t waste the agency’s time by making them do a final version just so you can say: “Yeah, it’s very good, but we’re not gonna do anything. Yup, we’re not doing the campaign. You just worked for nothing.”. You’re wasting your time, you’re wasting the agency’s time. AND IT’S FRUSTRATING.

6. When you kill an idea, kill it with arguments. Even if you don’t have any arguments just pretend that you have and make something up. It shows you respect the agency’s work. Even if the agency knows you’re bullshitting they’re still respect that you at least pretended. Nobody likes an asshole. Especially a rich one.

7. Never fire an agency without any reasons. Word tends to get around and you’ll soon end up working with the lowest of the low since all the other agencies will refuse your account.

8. Treat the agency exactly as you want to be treated by it. An agency is a client’s partner (it could even be its best friend), not a client’s slave. I’ll go ahead and repeat that one: AGENCY = PARTNER.

9. This one is pretty important. Never ask the agency to do an ad exactly like the one you saw done by some other agency for some other client. That’s not the agency’s job. It’s offensive even to think that an agency will copy some other agency’s work just to get your account. Would you like it if we’d tell you “Hey, we like your product, but how about you make it just like your competition’s product?”. Didn’t think so.

10. The last tip is this: LISTEN. Listen to what the agency has to say. It’s our job to make great ads for you, ads that work, ads that sell, ads that awe. So listen to what we have to say. Trust us. We know what works and what doesn’t.

Bonus tip: You have no need to talk to the copywriter or the art-director. You have the accounts, you talk to them. They know best how to tell us what you want.

There you have it. I might or might not publish a list of tips for the client service department some of these days. Feel free to add to my list of tips if you have any that aren’t there.

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