What came first? The bad client or the bad creative.

I was wondering about this the other day after seeing a mindless piece of work from a place that normally rocks. To be sure, this wasn’t the norm for them, but it got me thinking about the reverse situation: those places that hack it out day after day and manage to occasionally pull a gem out of their, well, you know. Who’s to blame. The Client? The Agency? Both?

In a way, I think it’s a lot like the Yankees and how they always expect to win, and how fans of losing teams hate them for it. Well, win more then, gang. The Yankees win more because they expect to win. That’s their attitude. And others gravitate toward that attitude too.

Others lose because, well, they expect to. And they likewise attract similar talent. They’re used to it, and so it becomes self-fulfilling and routine for them. And I suspect it’s much the same for agencies.

You play up or down according to the level of those around you. Period.

Average agencies beget average clients who walk all over them, all because they’re afraid of ‘losing the biz’ and then lamenting after a lousy meeting why they don’t have better clients? Well, because shit work begets shit work for one. Always saying yes when maybe you should put your foot down is another.

If as an agency, you haven’t done anything to break that catch-22, why should any new client with half a brain (and half a brand) take a chance on you? I see the same agencies making the same mistakes. In their regular work, and in their pitching. And as far as new biz goes, they just don’t get it – literally and figuratively.

It’s like watching a plane trying to take off, but never quite getting above the tree tops. Of course the plane is overloaded with too many passengers, cargo and fuel, but the pilot keeps on wondering: “why haven’t I gained altitude?”

Jettison some of that dead weight chief. Watch the billings, moral of the staff and quality of your work improve.

There is nothing like watching bad creative happen. You need a neck brace for all the rubbernecking going on from watching that car wreck. (Preferrably a neck brace with the company logo on it – after all, you have to promote.)

There’s also nothing like watching a bad account team high-five themselves over work that your Intro to Design instructor would step on in front of class. They convince themselves that they ‘nailed the creative’ and ‘man, won’t the client be impressed!’

Shhhhh. Listen. You can hear branches hitting the fuselage.

Better agencies know how to say no. They know bad creative not only reflects on the brand, it reflects on the agency. And they’re better because well, they are aware enough to know this. That’s the difference between good and bad. It’s not just that big agencies have the best clients and that small agencies don’t. You hear a lot from small shops about how they have ‘real-world clients who need real solutions - not pie-in-the-sky creative from Madison Ave shops with mega-budgets.’

Maybe.

But you owe it to any of your clients to show your best stuff, regardless of their size – or yours. Sometimes they may surprise you. Not always, but sometimes. Because otherwise, one day you wake up as agency to find your client went somewhere else because you stopped giving a shit.

They went on to an agency that showed them some new thinking. An agency that cared. But hey, you keep telling yourself it’s the client, not us, and “Man, he was a pain in the ass to work with anyway. Now we can go get some real clients.” But that’s ok.

There’s still a lot of tree tops left out there.