Clients - a musing

Part Two of a trilogy 25 years in the making

I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed working with every single client that has crossed my path over the last 25 years, but some of them stand out for various reasons.

Most Fearsome Client

My very first job as a new business was copywriting a brochure for a firm of club doormen (bouncers) in Birmingham.

Both directors were so big, they had to stoop as they came through the door. They were very affable guys, dressed smartly, were willing to listen and had a great sense of humour. However, when they frowned slightly at something they weren’t sure about, you had the feeling your life was about to end – quickly and with some degree of pain.

I don’t think I have ever felt so nervous handing over copy for approval. And I can’t believe they ever had any trouble in the establishments they ‘looked after’.

Best News Photo

A packaging business had issued a news release promoting a storage box that was very strong and which could be stacked to great heights even when full. The release bombed. They came to us for help.

“What weight can each box take?” we asked. “7.5 tonnes,” they replied. And there was the answer.

One week later, four jacks were removed from a 7.5 tonne vehicle, leaving it balanced on one of the new boxes, which had sections cut out of its top to accommodate the vehicle chassis. Three minutes later and with a nervous vehicle insurance rep on the phone, the photographs had been taken and the vehicle was back on the ground.

The results – masses of coverage in key titles, huge interest in the product and some substantial orders.

Most Important Competition Lesson Learned

The lesson? If possible, try to do a little research before deciding on a competition winner. When we tried to arrange a presentation photoshoot with the winner of a posiest pet photo competition, we were told the dog had died three years earlier.

The winner of a best garden competition wouldn’t be photographed receiving the first prize in her garden as she was extremely agoraphobic and wouldn’t come out of her house. The work had been done by a neighbour, who lived abroad six months of the year and had just left on his extended break.

Quickest Major Result For A New Client

We felt that our assimilation notes for a new client were a strong summary of the business and how it had grown over the previous 12 months. Fleshing out the story with more operational detail and some customer testimonials, we submitted the final version in the industry’s main awards scheme just four weeks after starting work. Our client walked away with the headline award.

A great start for a working relationship that lasted eleven years – although it put the pressure on for the last ten years and eleven months of that period.

Most Fulfilling Work

I have tremendous admiration for all the emergency services and for the people who work within them. When the opportunity came to help the comms team at a regional ambulance service, we jumped at the chance.

Here was an organisation that saved lives and went to the aid of people in trouble 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but whose ability to operate effectively depended on the funding it received from other health bodies who always had other priorities.

Of course, saving lives day in day out isn’t necessarily a news story when that’s what you’re expected to do, but when something goes wrong? That’s a different story. Negative press was having an impact on everyone in the organisation – even when they knew they were doing their best with the staff, equipment and systems available.

Our role was to help boost team morale by generating good news stories and to minimise the amount of potentially adverse publicity by making sure any editor looking to publish something negative could at least make a decision based on having all the facts at their disposal.

We did a great job. We increased the amount of positive exposure, reduced the negative and made sure that any issues were at least reported in a fair and balanced way. I’ll always be very proud of our involvement.

Biggest Disappointment

In 2002, we issued two April Fools stories for a mobile phone client.

One concerned a couple who had bought a mobile phone for their pet parrot, so they could call it from work and prevent it getting lonely during the day. The other featured a mini airbag, which could be attached to a mobile phone and which deployed around it if the accompanying sensor detected the handset had been dropped.

Both stories attracted a lot of enquiries from the national press and regional media for additional photography, interviews and so on. We were confident that Monday 1st April 2002 would be a memorable day, and so it was – but not for the right reasons.

That’s because on Saturday 30th March 2002, Buckingham Palace announced the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. The weekday media caught up with the news on the Monday and made up for the delay by dedicating oceans of space and airtime to Her Majesty’s lifetime. As a result – and undoubtedly alongside a host of other wizard wheezes for April Fools’ Day – our parrot was caged and our airbag deflated.

Simplest, Most Effective Idea

A network of mobile phone retailers was upset by the decision of supermarkets to sell mobile phones and wished to make the point that ascertaining each customer’s specific communication requirements, identifying the best solution and ensuring that the solution was delivered correctly was slightly different to flogging somebody a tin of beans.

So, we got the mobile phone specialists to sell beans for a short while at a cheaper price than the supermarkets. The idea captured the media’s imagination and coverage was amazing. So much so, that we revisited the idea eight months later in the build up to Christmas, substituting sprouts for beans and achieving similar results (as you would if you switched sprouts for beans – but that’s a blog that will probably never be written).