​Whether you’re a creative professional, have creatives under you, or simply need to hire other creatives, you face a common challenge: You want to get the most creative bang for your buck. 
 
Or your client’s buck. Same thing, here. 
 
This is easier said than done. Creative professionals know what they’re doing; that’s how they’ve managed to carve out a career in professional services. So shouldn’t you simply trust them to do the right thing? 
 
Of course you should. But if it were that simple, there would be no need for this article. 
 
Direction... give or take
 
Every single creative assignment begins, necessarily, with direction. That creative person needs to know what to do. Where to go. How to proceed. They can’t work in a vacuum. 
 
And this—right at the first step—is where it gets tricky. Do it right, you get great stuff, and big bang for your buck. You can guess the other half of this equation. 
 
Or maybe not. It’s not just that you won’t get great creative out of your creative person(s), but you’ll waste time, energy, and effort. You’ll get frustrated, as you receive deliverables that don’t meet your expectations. Importantly, your creative person will get frustrated, too. And that’s not good. 
 
We hate to generalize, but we’ve been in this biz forever, so here goes: Creative people are higher-strung, and thinner-skinned, than most people. We like to say that “’creative professional’ is an oxymoron.” In other words, their fuses are shorter. They’re like professional athletes: They like to perform. But if you, as their coach, keep calling the wrong plays, they’ll not only fail, but they’ll burn out. And they’ll resent you, since they won’t respect your judgment. 
 
So the direction that you give is everything. 
 
Just as important, if not more important, than the direction you give... is the direction you don’t give. 
 
And this, by the way, was the impetus for this entire article. 
 
Setting the stage
 
As we’d noted above, creative people like to perform. Which points up a convenient analogy, beyond, say, athletes. 
 
Know who else likes to perform? 
 
Yep. Performers.
 
As in, actors. 
 
If you’ve never directed actors before, or even if you have, there’s a cardinal rule—or perhaps cardinal sin—when it comes to directing them, and that is: “Never give your actor a line-reading.” 
 
Huh? What’s that mean? And how does any of this translate to, say, getting a good layout or web page? 
 
A line-reading is when the director actually acts out a given line of dialogue, telling the actor, “Do it like that.” It’s an easy knee-jerk reaction for a director to make when he or she doesn’t hear the right phrasing or intonation, but doing it is the kiss of death. 
 
Why? 
 
Not only does a line-reading “talk down” to your actor (“You don’t know this as well as I do, so let me explain”), but it also “pollutes” their process by planting an impossible-to-ignore version in their head from the get-go which makes them utterly miserable. It short-circuits their own, internal creative process. They will hate-hate-hate you for it. 
 
Same thing goes for creative people who work for you. Never tell them: “Use this font” or “Add a six-point black border.” It’s tantamount to giving them a line reading. 
 
So what do you do? 
 
Do the opposite. Talk around what you want. Describe it aspirationally. “Here’s what we’re looking to accomplish, in broad strokes.” Stay out of the weeds. 
 
And challenge them: “Think you can figure out a creative way to solve this?” Thin-skinned though they may be, creative pros like to show off, in their own way, and tossing down the gauntlet, appropriately, plays to their sense of pride and entices them to rise to the challenge, to outdo themselves. To show off. 
 
All of this is hard to do, but boy is it ever worth the effort. You’ll get better results, and improve your working relationship with the talent at the same time. 
 
Need help with interpreting, and giving, the appropriate creative direction? Contact us. We surmount these kinds of challenges, for our clients, all the time. 

​This sentence is in English. You understand it perfectly. And you take all of that for granted. 
 
Stuff like this goes out the window when your client’s first language isn’t English. It certainly makes things harder for you. 
 
And for them. 
 
In this article, we’ll give you some pointers, based on our experience, for making life easier for you and your clients whose English isn't as good as yours. 
 
Bash the bias
 
Here at Copel Communications, we’re native/first-language English speakers. We’ve had additional schooling in English. We speak, think, and dream in English. It all comes very natural. 
 
(Or would that be “naturally”?) 
 
(LOL!) 
 
The “bias” we’d mentioned above is kind of a knee-jerk reaction that you might have when you first encounter someone whose English isn’t very good. They’ll struggle with common phrases and idioms; we have one client who, when they give us input, will typically say, “Let me know how you think.” 
 
It’s cute. It’s kind of funny. And it invites a brutal bias.
 
Because, face it, who else talks like this? Little kids. Little kids who are also struggling to learn English for the first time. So their brains aren’t entirely formed, they’re not as smart or experienced as we adults.
 
And that’s the bias that rears its ugly head when you first hear, “Let me know how you think.” 
 
That particular client of ours is Korean (we have lots of Korean clients; more on that in a minute). Know how much Korean we speak? 
 
Try “zero.” 
 
So on the one hand, this puts us in an advantageous position for non-English-native clients who need to communicate to their prospects in flawless English; they can count on us. 
 
On the other hand, however, it obscures the fact that their English is better than our Korean, any day of the week. That’s the conundrum: Someone who sounds less intelligent than you is actually more intelligent than you, because they’re not only getting across difficult concepts, but they’re doing it in a second language. Holy mackerel! It’s humbling. 
 
So always bear that in mind in situations like this. Even when all those cute phrases keep popping up. 
 
Ways to work better with non-English-speaking clients
 
We have clients with lots of different first languages. As we’d mentioned above, we have lots of Korean clients. But we have others whose first language is German. Japanese. Spanish. 
 
Mind you, we don’t speak any of those languages. But we have successful ongoing relationships with these clients, sometimes for decades.
 
(This gets back to the Korean clients of ours. Once we establish a relationship at one client company, they all know us there. Then, invariably, someone from that company joins another company, and essentially brings us along. This gets so convoluted that we recently got a project for a major Korean enterprise based in Seoul, from their in-house agency in London. They told us they got our name from So-And-So at Such-And-Such Company. Thing is, we’d never even heard of So-And-So or Such-And-Such!) 
 
So how do you do it? Here are some pointers: 

• Allow for overages. If it takes you, say, an hour to process the input for a typical given project, figure on two hours for an assignment like this. There’s going to be back-and-forth, because the input won’t be clear, and your own queries may require clarifying, and all of this takes time and effort, which you need to factor into the project, including turnaround time and pricing. Otherwise you’ll simply set yourself up for frustration, undue deadline stress, and lost margin. 

 

• Email often is best. You can chat on the phone or Zoom, but lots of times your client’s accent will be so thick that you’ll simply drive them nuts asking them to repeat or clarify. (And if you think you’re “being polite” by not asking, guess again. You must persist.) This is why we generally prefer email. Just like when a friend emails you that they “kust went someplace,” and you can look at your keyboard and see that the “K” is right beside the “J” and deduce that they’d meant “just” and not “kust” and it was a simple typo, you can do the same kinds of things with your clients. Plus you can quickly Google unfamiliar phrases. Email works well in both directions; you don’t need to speak slower or rephrase things; your client can simply look up anything in your email that they don’t understand. 

 

• Lean on tech. Speaking of Google, we and our clients use Google Translate a lot. It’s very helpful for a basic pass on something originally created in another language. So we’ll get, say, website pages or press releases written in another language, and either we or the client will simply pop the text into Google Translate, and it typically lets us understand 95 percent of the intended input. 

 

• Don’t be afraid to ask. This gets back to our earlier point. Don’t ever assume that that five percent of stuff you don’t understand can be simply figured out by context. Ask. Be specific. 

 

• Be prepared to give tough love. It might seem funny, to you, to think that a client whose English, well, sucks, would have the audacity to “correct” verbiage that we create on their behalf, but it actually happens all the time. So you need to be patient; you need to clarify and substantiate your points; and sometimes you just need to give tough love. We had a client, years ago, who insisted that we use the word “beautiful” to describe the people in their company (a global enterprise that you’ve heard of). We had to explain how that would be interpreted by American audiences, as a mark of vanity, conceit, or shallowness. It turned out to be a very tough sell; the word “beautiful,” in that other country’s language, described their intent perfectly. But it just didn’t translate. Time for tough love. 

 
Get help
 
We can offer you all of this advice because, as we’ve mentioned, we’ve toiled in these trenches for years and years, and we actually enjoy the assignments. There’s a huge degree of faith at work here: If we, say, employ wordplay or distinctly American cultural references in our work, our clients simply have to trust us to get the right message across. But they find out, soon enough, whether our deliverables score or not: they’ll get firsthand customer response. Which only helps to bolster the faith, and cement the relationship. 
 
Need help crafting messaging for a client whose English isn’t perfect? Contact us. We’d be happy to discuss your needs with you.