 Great photo by Grok. “Blend word”?? What the heck is that?
More importantly, how can you make money off of one of these things? Let’s dive in. As is the case with lots of our articles here at Copel Communications, this one is based on a real client story. And as is the case with all of the real client stories we use as inspiration for articles, this one, like the others, has been anonymized for privacy purposes. But you’ll still get the gist. And the takeaways. Here’s the story: Recently, a client of ours wanted us to develop some pitch materials for a new business they were developing. Excitedly, they told that they’d already come up with a name for this new business, and were looking forward to registering a domain for it. The name of this new business (we’re modifying/anonymizing/making this up) was “Asset Protect.” “Asset Protect.” Hmmm. Well, you can guess, pretty accurately, what they do. So that’s good. But boy is that name ever generic. Which is not good. Can you guess where this story goes? Of course: Our client had one tough time registering that “unique” domain. “Asset Protect” had long been taken, by someone else, in an equally straightforward/uncreative foray. Portmanteau to the rescue To us, the solution to this problem was super simple. Employ a portmanteau or blend word. “Portmanteau” is about as funny a term as “blend word,” and you may not have heard of either. Not a problem. Because you know zillions of examples of these things, and you’ll say “Ohhh!” as soon as you read ones like:
We could go on forever. Applying this mashup concept to branding is equally well established and, we think, effective. Consider:
Need we go on? One of the reasons we mention this is because our frustrated client had considered inventing a totally new made-up name. That certainly comes with benefits: For example, if you invent something completely new, there won’t be any competition for it when it comes to registering your domain, and you’ll have rock-solid IP protection in the potential case of infringement. Still. The drawback is that that’s hard to do, for a basic small-to-midsized business. It takes a ton of (expensive) impressions for the whole world to know what you do. Consider:
Honestly. Would you have any idea what those companies do without their having invested zillions of dollars to inform you? So. The portmanteau/blend-word is a nice middle ground between the uninspired “Asset Protect” and the what-the-heck-is-that “Wazzibobo” or whatever. It’s not perfect. Because great minds think alike. If you’re launching a new brand and come up with what you think is the perfect portmanteau word for it, brace yourself. There’s a decent chance that someone else already came up with that one, and registered it, too. Not to worry. Keep on plugging. Or get help. Like us. Contact us for that next marketing assignment. We do things like this all the time, and would be delighted to help.
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 Great photo by Yan Krukau. We can’t count how many corporate videos we write here at Copel Communications. That’s because video is simply a killer medium, however you look at it:
But video can be a killer in other ways, too. Like production budget. Turnaround time. And keeping the project on track as it goes. In this article, we’re going to explain a way to keep your next corporate video on-track, using a technique we’ve developed, honed, and proven over the years. Note that we say “corporate video.” The technique we’re about to describe doesn’t work for narrative films, home movies, or Hollywood blockbusters. But it’s great for videos you need to make quickly and cost-effectively—and which, more than anything, sell. The old-school approach A video script is formatted in two columns: one for audio, and one for video. Very straightforward. (And wholly different from, for example, the WGA format for screenplays, which is structured to support dialogue being delivered by actors within a given scene.) But if you ever looked at a video script, you’ll know, without even reading it, that it’s hard to read. It’s like looking at the blueprint of a jetliner and trying to figure out what makes it fly. There’s stuff all over the place: Indications for on-screen titles, transitions, sound effects, music cues, suggestions for stock footage, directions for layering of motion graphics, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a very useful tool for a video editor. Or a voice-over artist. But for you (or for your client), it’s pretty indigestible. The old-school approach is straightforward: Start with that script. And that’s the rule we’re about to break. Going rogue There actually is somewhat of an analogy for the work-around we’re about to describe. And it’s based not in corporate video, but in feature films. In Hollywood, it’s known as the “treatment.” For our corporate purposes, we’ll call it “the spine.” It goes something like this: A Hollywood screenplay is typically just over 100 pages long (with the rule of thumb being one page for each minute of on-screen time). The treatment is a short narrative description of what happens in the finished movie. Like a synopsis. It could be a page; it could be five pages. Regardless, it’s quicker and easier to read than a 100-page screenplay. And it can be useful in getting people with limited time to wrap their heads around the movie-to-be. The treatment, as we’d noted, is a narrative, third-person account of the story and its characters. But a good creative treatment should be fun to read, and typically will include some choice snippets of dialogue, to help convey the mood and “sell” the piece. The ”spine,” for your corporate video, is similar. But it’s even simpler. The original name we’d given it was the “audio spine,” and that should tell you a ton. Think about it. Your corporate video doesn’t feature, say, two characters toughing it out in an argument or bar-room brawl. It shows stuff that you do, and a voice-over narrator is your guide. Ta-dah. That’s where the “audio spine” comes from. If you can write that announcer track, you’ve cleared a huge hurdle. Plus, you have something that, unlike a two-column video script, is incredibly easy to digest, regardless of the reader/audience. Hence, the “spine.” On your way So the trick is to write that “spine” first. Iterate and improve it via review and revision. Then get sign-off on it. From there, you can paste the approved “spine” into the “Audio” column of your to-be video script. At that point, it becomes straightforward—although of course, not simple—to populate the rest of the script with visuals, sound effects, and all the other elements we’d mentioned above. The nice thing about starting with a “spine” is that it’s fast and easy. It locks the most important element of your video script early. Which keeps all the subsequent steps on-track, and thus faster and better cost-contained. We use this approach a lot. So should you. Need help with video scripting? We’d love to come to your rescue. Contact us today to get started.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. Zoom! And another year goes screaming past. Are we really ready for our year-end round-up of best-practice articles, written for our beloved creatives audience, here at Copel Communications?
The calendar doesn’t lie. Here’s your chance to catch those ones you’d missed, and/or revisit those that helped:
Have suggestions for an upcoming post? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!  Great photo by Mikhail Nilov. From time to time, we at Copel Communications are invited to make a presentation, via Zoom, to a business or networking group, to talk about what we do and how we do it.
When the time comes for us to present, the Zoom host invariably asks us, “Would you like control of the screen so you can show your deck?” Imagine their surprise when we say, “No thanks. No deck.” So do these presentations, pardon our French, suck? We don’t think so. The feedback we get afterward generally says otherwise. So what’s our secret sauce? Why do we hate PowerPoint so much? What’s going on here, and, most importantly, how can you benefit from this approach? We don’t hate PowerPoint That line above (“Why do we hate PowerPoint so much?”) was pure bait. We don’t hate PowerPoint, simply because we shun it for our own presentations. Truth be told, we make a decent chunk of our income here at Copel Communications from writing PowerPoint decks for our clients! But our business is all about communicating. It’s in our name. And we can communicate this, quite well, thank you very much, without the crutch of a deck of slides. It’s been said that no one wants to hear a sales pitch, but everybody wants to hear a story. So the trick is to frame the pitch as a story. Have a hook. Use teasers. Sure, we’ll toss in a visual (not a deck), when it’s appropriate, such as the cover a brochure we’d written, or simply a photo of our long-suffering dog, just because. There are times when PowerPoint is unavoidable. If you’re a CFO presenting sales trends and forecasts to the board, you’ll need those line graphs and bar charts. If you’re presenting on demographic distribution, a scatter plot is de rigueur. But most of the time, if you do opt to use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, or Apple Keynote, or whatever), go for the minimum. Speaking of Apple. Watch any old keynote presentation by Steve Jobs. He used slides. (Trivia: the in-house app which Apple created to make his slide decks is what morphed into the app called, appropriately enough, Keynote.) And those slides are minimal. An entire slide would say something like “Lightest Mobile Phone on the Market.” And that’s it. Take a page from that playbook. Put the onus on your presenting skills (including writing, practice, and polish). Which segues, quite conveniently, to our next topic: Cognitive dissonance How many times has this happened to you: You’re sitting through some presenter’s PowerPoint, and they say, “There are three big things our company specializes in.” And at that point, they bring up a slide with four Big Things. And the first three don’t even match what the presenter is describing. So you’re forced to decide, on the spot: Which is more important? What I’m hearing? Or what I’m seeing? Because you can’t really do both at once, unless they’re verbatim. Meaning, you either 1) ignore the text that’s staring at you on the slide, and close your eyes, shifting your attention to your ears to listen to the presenter, or 2) you cover your ears (or mute your speaker) and read what’s on the slide, effectively ignoring the presenter. Gee. This, to us, is the all-too-common hallmark of PowerPoint sloppiness. If you’re going to show your audience Three Big Points, then have them match, on screen, what you’re saying, aloud. Even better: Have each bullet appear when you mention it. Don’t bring all three up on screen at once; when you do that, people don’t know whether or not to read ahead. You’ve already lost them. It sounds simplistic—heck, it is simplistic—but have your audience “follow the bouncing ball,” like a sing-along video. We think that many presenters are afraid to do just that, because it seems like it’s dumbing-down or pandering. But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s respectful of your audience. And it makes your points drive home. Where they belong. Our favorite quote from Jeff Bezos, who never allowed slide decks in his “six-page memo” executive meetings: “PowerPoint is easy for the presenter. But hard for the audience.” To recap: You can, and should, use PowerPoint, when it’s appropriate to do so. But use it sparingly. And if you can avoid it—if you can captivate your audience without it—by all means, do so. Need help with that next presentation, regardless of modality? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by ThisIsEngineering Everyone’s heard of the 30-second elevator speech. But sometimes, it’s a much taller building.
We were recently asked—and this will happen to you, too, soon, if it hasn’t already, so brace yourself—to present our pitch before a business group, with a six-minute time allotment. Quick: How do you present your business, to a target-rich environment like that, in six minutes? Follow-on question: How do you carve up those six minutes? Do you spend all of them, well, presenting? Audience first If you’ve read any articles from us here at Copel Communications, you’ll know that we take a near-religious approach to taking a customer-back approach to everything we do. Start with the customer. What do they want and/or need? Then work back from there, i.e., “customer-back” approach. Same thing applies for your six-minute preso slot. Know who’s in that audience, in advance. Do your homework. Are they like-minded businesspeople in a similar or adjacent vertical? Or—as was the case for us—are they perhaps members of a networking group, looking to lubricate the two-way process of referrals? Get your best possible grasp on who they are. What they need. How many will be in the room. The type of room: real or virtual. How much time will there be for Q&A? Is that baked into the six-minutes? Or is it additional? And if so, how much? Rule of thumb: The more annoying you can be with preliminary questions like these, the more you’ll succeed. Working backward So. We were going to be facing a business networking group—a common venue. What kinds of businesses? All kinds, with the distinction that they, like us, all operated in the B2B space. How did they differ from us? Oooh. That’s a good question you should ask yourself. In other words, how can you differentiate yourself and your offerings? That’s how you’ll cut through the clutter, make your presentation interesting and engaging, and increase your odds of successful business development. For us, fortunately, the answer to the “how do they differ” question was easy. While we toil in marketing, and many of the others in the audience either do, too, or certainly have exposure to it, we were unique in that our background is 100-percent based in creative services. So that made for a neat way in. Outline, outline, outline Turns out, for us, the six-minute allotment included the time for the Q&A. That’s a huge detail. So our outline went something like this:
Close, close, close Odds are, your business doesn’t do anything like what we do here at Copel Communications. Yet we’ll bet that that outline above is easily 90-percent useful to you. Some things are just universal. A speaking opportunity like this, is just that: An opportunity. Seize it. Work the room. Book meetings and calls. Send follow-up emails. Need help prepping for a six-minute presentation, or other similar opportunity? Contact us. We help our clients with challenges like these all the time.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio Here at Copel Communications, we’re proud to have a diverse clientele. Sometimes it’s so diverse, it can be challenging—to the point where successfully addressing these challenges generates some teachable moments. Hence, this article.
We recently worked on a social-campaign assignment for a very big global brand; while we can’t name them in this article, you certainly know who they are. To be more specific (about the assignment, and not the brand, LOL! we need to be delicate here), we were brought on by one of this brand’s multiple ad agencies. This agency specializes in addressing a certain ethnic market in the U.S. and overseas. And their specialization derives from the fact that they, themselves, belong to this same ethnic group. (It’s really hard to tell this story while protecting identities!) So. They handed us some creative, which they had developed, and the Big Brand had approved, for a social campaign touting one of the brand’s products. And the creative—the visuals, and the ideas—were really thoughtful and inspired. The campaign consisted of different little multi-panel vignettes that would tell the story of a certain person, depicted in them. It went something like this: Imagine there are five panels that will go by, almost like a little slide-show of memes. The first four establish this likeable person—whom the target audience can easily relate to—and their situation. Their situation, mind you, is aspirational-yet-flawed. They aim high, but there are constraints on their dreams. Guess where this is going? Of course. Panel Five introduces Big Brand’s Great Product, which, you guessed it, organically solves all of Hero’s problems in one fell swoop. We’ve over-simplified this a bit here, but you get the gist. Lost in translation Now why on earth, you may well be wondering, was Copel Communications brought in for this assignment? It certainly seems like it’s a wonderful campaign, neatly tied up with a bow. Well, almost. The problem here—and it was a big one—was the copy. Remember: Each “slide” in each of the campaign’s hero stories was effectively a meme: A photo with a quote, title, or caption. And while the ideas for all of these were great, the original copy had been written in Ethnic Audience’s Homeland Language, i.e., not English. Oh. So the Google-translated-to-English copy was clunky and needed help. On its surface, this seems like an easy, straightforward, and fun assignment. It was neither of the former, and hardly the latter. Why? Because, as easily as we could see where each of these panels (and there were tons of them, effectively five for each of the numerous “heroes” selected) needed to go, that didn’t make our client’s English any better. Example: One of the panels showed a young barista, working in a coffee shop. He’s our hero. Remember: aspirational-yet-flawed. So the input caption we were handed read: My job is hard. Gee. My job is hard. He’s a barista, right? So we came up with this version: Life can be a grind. Cute, huh? And so we got big pats on the back from the client, and we were happily endorsing a check five minutes later. Yeah right. Here’s the problem: The client didn’t understand “Life can be a grind.” So they kicked it back to us, instructing us to make it more like “My job is hard.” And, by extension, our job was hard! There’s not a huge lesson we can simply spout from this story. There were a zillion revisions and, not shockingly, for one of the “hero stories,” after they rejected Version 10, we used their suggestions for Version 11 to gently suggest that they re-visit Version 1 and, you guessed it, that was the one that flew. The takeaway? Assignments like this boil down to patience, and trust. The skill is just a subset. Need help with an outside-English-to-English assignment? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!  Great photo by Alan Retratos. Landing new business is exciting. It means new assignments, and a new source of revenue. What’s not to get excited about?
We worked with a client recently on some customer-discovery work, and found, counterintuitively, that almost the exact opposite was true. That was the case for them. It may well be the case for you, too. Let’s explain. Who wants what? As part of our near-religious passion for taking a customer-back approach to everything we do here at Copel Communications, we were helping this client of ours—a niche consultancy—to develop their new website by first determining who they wanted it to reach. So far, so straightforward. Now, we need to clothe the details here in anonymity, but we can still make this story clear enough for you to understand and profit from. Historically, this client of ours had worked with various types of customers, whom we were defining as avatars—or, more colloquially, “putting into buckets.” Among those buckets were the “Go-Getters”: the really aggressive customers who offer high reward… for commensurately high risk and high maintenance. There were the “Tire Kickers.” They weren’t an obvious group, at first; it took a lot of discussion to tease them out. But once we did, we realized that we didn’t want to attract any of these energy vampires to the business. (We have an entire article on this topic, which you’ll enjoy.) The third bucket (are you sensing the Goldilocks vibe here?) was what we ended up calling the "Lovably Boring” cohort. They were exactly that: Steady, meticulous, detailed, risk-averse… yet honest, straightforward, trustworthy, and reliable. Bingo. They automatically became our client’s prime target. Weighing the cost and effort to attract, sign, and service them, vs. the revenue and profit potential vs. the other buckets, it became crystal clear… in hindsight, of course. It took a bunch of modeling and number-crunching to reach this conclusion. But once we got there, it was great. You (may) know the old adage: “Speak to the target. Let the others listen.”That was the case here. (Granted, the “Tire Kickers” were kicked right out of the room.) Catering to the un-exciting You might conclude, somewhat logically, that reaching this “boring” audience would itself be a boring assignment. But nothing could be further from the truth. As we’ve said, taking a customer-back approach makes things not easy, but straightforward. And in the case of our “lovingly boring” target audience, it actually made it fun. Imagine: Climb into the head of that super-cautious prospect. What gets them excited? Things like safety and peace of mind. What freaks them out? Things like risky approaches and high-pressure sales. Aha. From here, it became downright enjoyable to create this safe, Eden-like online oasis for this group. Knowing their personalities, and needs, made it straightforward for us to determine what kind of language to use… what kinds of fonts, colors, background video music, amount of white space… all of it. The lesson here is to really follow that customer-back approach. That customer’s values might not align with your values. But you’re not selling to yourself. You’re selling to them. And what, after all, could be more exciting than converting a boring prospect into a paying customer? Need help with customer-discovery challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help!  Great photo by Alex Knight. From bots to AI, everyone’s in a tizzy about this new technology which threatens to take over the world, eliminating vast swaths of good-paying jobs as it goes. And yes, we did use the word “tizzy.”
Here’s the thing. This is a two-way street. There’s an inherent creative challenge here that no one is talking about. And that’s making the positive case for this technology, which—spoiler alert—often saves jobs, rather than displacing them. We know. We toil in these trenches quite often. So what’s this all about? Let’s take a second to discuss these supposedly-evil technologies before we weigh in on how to portray them, positively, from a creative standpoint. Broadly, the two we’ll discuss here are robotic process automation, or RPA; and artificial intelligence, or AI. Quickly and purposely over-simplified:
Honestly: Does any of that make you shake in your shoes? We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: We’re not any more threatened by these than we are by a word processor. They’re just tools. Powerful tools. And that’s why they’re making such a big splash nowadays. They’re new. So there’s a fear-of-the-unknown factor at work. The good news We have a client that custom-builds lots of AI-powered bots. And we help to promote them in various media. So the age-old creative challenge goes something like this: How do you “portray” a bot that you’d like to sell, knowing that it’s actually an evil job-killer? This would have you asking yourself things like: “Should we even portray it at all?” and “Do we even mention this evil technology?” Well, we’d spoiled this above, and so we’ll dive in here. This technology, this tool, is hardly evil. And in the majority of the use-cases that we’re tasked with promoting, they’re a downright godsend to the people who “work side-by-side” with them. How is that? Imagine you’re a worker. Sitting at your computer all day. Doing tons and tons of drudge work, like creating reports using data from one system, and manipulating it in another and doing all this stuff, over and over, because none of the systems talk to each other and, importantly, all this drudge work is eating up the time you’d rather be devoting to the more important and fulfilling parts of your job, such as serving clients or customers or developing new solutions. Wouldn’t you love it if you could simply flip a switch, and all of the work, in your day, that you hate-hate-hate, magically goes away? That’s what happens. You’ll never see this in the news, because it isn’t scary, and the media’s job is to try and scare you in order to keep you clicking. But workers who get bots not only love them; they actually show them off to their co-workers, who each want their own. Talk about viral. The creative challenge that solves itself All of the above discussion was not a digression. To the contrary: It was the setup for solving the initial creative challenge. The answer, as you can now see, is to address this one head-on: In other words, feel free to depict this technology as friendly, as an assistant, a life-changing development like the microwave oven or the cell phone. Thus, we routinely work on marketing materials which, yes, personify and anthropomorphize RPA bots. And they’re all portrayed as eager, friendly helpers. Incidentally, this entire tale is a great example of taking a customer-back approach to a creative challenge. Once you know what the end customer (in this case, the worker who could benefit from the addition of an AI-powered bot) needs, the way of expressing the solution, creatively, becomes not easy… but straightforward. Need help with challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you.  Great photo by George Dolgikh You’re in business to make money. These days, that sounds like a dirty little secret, but all businesses exist to make money. To reward the owners. The shareholders. To turn a profit.
Therefore, you charge your clients for everything you do. Or do you? Or should you? In this article, we’ll dive into the reasons you should, or shouldn’t, provide some hard, payable work for free. It’s based on lots of experience, with lots of clients—and often, their clients. The cold-reality ROI argument You’ve surely heard of a “loss leader.” Something that gets a prospect in the door for a super-attractive price. “Super-attractive,” as in “untenable.” Hence the “loss” you take on it. Ever played a scratch-off Monopoly game at McDonald’s and won a free order of French fries? C’mon. You think McDonald’s will lose money on that one? Remember: You can’t claim that prize on that visit. You have to come back. So would you ever, honestly, make a trip to McDonald’s, and only order French fries? Even if they’re free? Of course you wouldn’t. Neither would anyone else. Hence the “cold, hard ROI” argument for freebies. Which goes something like this: Sure, you can give away something for free—just so long as you’re virtually assured that you’ll end up making way more than the value of what you gave away, from that same client or customer. Ooof. How cold. How… Darwinian. It’s the little things First off, know that we here at Copel Communications toss out freebies to our clients from time to time. Typically, they’re what we’d consider “too small to charge for.” We recently did a little quick-turn project for a client that, while admittedly urgent, simply wasn’t a huge amount of work for us. So what were we going to do at the end of the month? Line-item it for, say, 50 bucks? Naah. We refuse to nickel-and-dime like that. Still, we did list it on that month’s invoice. But the price? “N/C.” Surprise and delight Sometimes, tossing out the freebie is just the right thing to do—especially if you’ve got a longstanding relationship with a client and the right project comes along and you can afford to do it. Ever give your dog a treat not because he chased a squirrel away from your bird feeder, but rather "just because”? This is like that. True story: We have a client that competes in an incredibly high-tech field. In fact, among our tech-savvy clients, this is one of the savviest, to the point where it’s always challenging to write for them—to assume that mantle of brilliance. It’s difficult and daunting. Yet we must be doing something right, because this client keeps turning to us with projects for years and years. One day, however, the owner of this business hit us with an unusual request. Turns out he was running for town council in the area where he lived, and wanted our help with some of his campaign materials. Man oh man. We knew this would be a freebie the instant we saw it. He sent us some fliers. And posters. And emails. And what-not. Asking us to clean them up, and bill him for whatever it required. Now we know this guy and you don’t. Trust us: He’s a great person. Any town council would be blessed to have him aboard. We were flattered, and honored, to work on this stuff. Sure, we had other paying gigs on the calendar, but were happy to carve out time for him. And when we turned to it, we hit it out of the park. Our client was delighted! He was so grateful—perhaps especially because this assignment fell outside of his usual high-tech comfort zone. “Send us your invoice,” he said. And so we sent it. With every single item line-itemed. We showed the “rack rate” for each thing—what it would cost in the real world—and even added up the total cost. And then, below that, we subtracted the entire total cost, with the note: “Courtesy discount." Amount due? Zero. If you think this client was delighted by the work we did, you can only imagine how surprised and happy he was to find out he was getting it for free. And we felt great. It still feels good, simply re-telling this story. Happy ending? So, this client immediately came back and rewarded us with zillions of dollars’ worth of fresh, new work. Right? Wrong. In fact, it was months before he needed our services again. Are we bitter? Not at all! This is the antithesis of the “cold-reality ROI” argument. We’d call it the “spark of humanity” argument. A little Christmas, when it isn’t Christmas. Businesses exist to turn a profit. But they’re also run by people who live lives. Sometimes you simply need to connect at that very basic level. Have thoughts on this issue or a story to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear it.  Great photo by Ketut Subiyanto. No that’s not a brand of beer. When we refer to “Draft Number 10,” we’re talking about Word docs.
Oh. Which begs the question: Why embrace that? Just by its moniker, “Number 10,” it’s daunting and annoying. Who in their right mind would ever enjoy, let alone embrace, the tenth draft of anything? Wouldn’t you be automatically burned out? Let’s answer that “in their right mind” question first. This is business, not art If you’re a painter or a poet, up in your garret, you can dream and wile away the hours, finessing your grand opus—“a hundred visions and revisions,” in the words of T.S. Eliot—and you’ve only yourself (and perhaps your muse) to answer to. But we’re not talking about art here, despite our decades of experience (not to mention lots of awards) in creative services. We’re talking about business. Money. Deadlines. ROI. Where, then, does a Draft Number 10 even come from? Quick oh-now-you’ll-get-it answer: A client who’s a perfectionist. Aha. Now everything should make sense for you. We have a client—we’ve actually had lots of clients like this—who’s a perfectionist. Who will revise and revise and revise a draft until it’s almost perfect… and then decide that it’s anything but, and then trash it, and start over, and then revise and revise and revise again, taking us along for the ride. As a creative resource, you could fight this. But you know that that would get you in trouble, and perhaps fired. You could just go with the flow: “Oh, this is the way they like to work. I’ll just… endure it, without complaining.” It’s possible that you could coast along like this indefinitely. But neither of the above approaches benefits anybody. Thus our advice to you in these situations: Embrace it. Heck, enjoy it. See it for the invaluable paid education that it is: Our fastidious client in this story—like most of the clients we’re lucky to work with, whether they’re fastidious or not—is quite brilliant. We would pay to learn their thought processes. To try and osmose just a tiny bit of that genius. Why do they toss Draft 5 and do a wholesale rework for Draft 6? Incidentally, the method behind the madness reveals—if you pay attention—that overall, these drafts get better as they go. It’s not a simple straight slope, were you to graph it. But the trend would be positive. Put it this way: Wouldn’t you love to see Einstein’s notes en route to e = mc2? We get paid for our services. It’s incumbent on us to remain profitable. So we don’t lose money on assignments like this—while, at the same time, we don’t take advantage of our clients’ generosity. And while we get paid in dollars, often the greater reward is the knowledge. The insight. And, frankly, the ability to help other clients like this in similar situations. As we’d said, we’re not along simply for the ride. We dive right in, on every single draft, seeing what’s changed and doing our best to make it better throughout. That’s why our clients entrust us on this journey. Need help with a client, or project, that feels unending? Contact us. We’d be happy—truly happy—to help. |