You know how it is: clients give you business, and so they’re always right. Even when they aren’t. And sometimes, they just give such unexpected but firm demands that you don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. AdVerbatims has an excellent collection of amusing exchanges and idiosyncrasies exchanged between clients, art directors, copywriters, account executive etc. in the colorful world of the advertising business. It seems like all these exchanges could only happen in the advertising world too.
Here are 10 of my favorites:
#200- “Can you make the design 17% better?”
(Client, giving feedback to Account Executive)
#191- “Can we make the whites whiter?” – “Not really, its NTSC white is 255 255 255.” – “Yes, but can we make the Whites Whiter?”
(Client)
#179- “We need to send the client a .jpg of the image as soon as possible.” – “Sure. Do you think the .jpg will fit in this size envelope?”
(Agency, Intern to another intern, who was holding up an actual 6×9 envelope)
#171- “I went into photoshop, I just bought a copy, and I increased the image size to say 300 dpi, what do you mean it’s not high res?”
(Client, after beeing asked for 5th time for a high res version of the image)
#162- “What we give you is what you get.”
(Agency, Manager of graphic department, to a client)
#156- “This sky is too much of a dusk and too little of a dawn. Are we sure this is the dawn we saw yesterday?”
(Client, Brand Manager who was present on a shooting at 4 o clock in the morning)
#152- “If you can’t tell me exactly what you want the poster to look like, how am I supposed to design it?”
(Design House)
#118- “It’s amazing how well you interpreted the brief. This piece is exactly what we wanted, you could not have made it any better, I love it. But I also think it’s too good. This is for a bigger client, a more international one. We’re not like that. See if you can do something shittier that we can use.”
(Client, same Marketing Manager)
#116- “Can’t you make that dog smile? Don’t you have a smile filter on this expensive machine?”
(Agency, Owner)
#113- “We need your help. According to what I understood from the client, we have to put subtitles on the radio spots. Is that doable?”
(Agency, Account Assistant)
