Articles, Featured Articles, Organizational Design, Strategic Innovation

On April 20th, I participated as a judge in the interactive portion of the National Advertising Awards. Joined by a crew of seasoned interactive veterans, we evaluate 15 submissions. While I can’t share what ideas won (you’ll need to wait until May the 12th to find out), I can let you in on one of the biggest points of contention between the judges – do you follow or challenge a brief when you get one?

I’m sure you’ve been put in the situation before. An RFP or a project arrives on your desk that just doesn’t feel right. Maybe it doesn’t take into account fundamental human behaviours. Maybe it ignores market realities. Or maybe it’s just trying to solve a tactical problem rather than dealing with what really needs to be solved. Either way, it creates an uncomfortable situation – are you a going to tell the client they’re wrong, or are you going to do what’s asked.

The NAA Interactive Briefing

In the interactive division of the National Advertising Awards, entrants were asked to submit an innovative creative solution to the the following business problem for Sympatico.ca:

“Drive adoption of Sympatico.ca’s various assets by convincing our target audience to make Sympatico.ca or one of its sister sites, like Best Health or Auto, their homepage. The site is currently competing with U.S. and international sites like MSN and Yahoo.” (for more details, download the full briefing here)

Of the teams that responded to the challenge, half developed creative advertising campaigns consisting of a mix of traditional and social media forms. Some came up with clever campaign concepts that successfully focused on strong calls to action that supported the stated business objectives.

And the other half of the entrants told us the portal model is dead.

Dear Client, You are Wrong.

Now I don’t want this to turn into a debate around whether portal models like Sympatico.ca are dead. What I do want to ask is, if you’re put into a situation where you don’t believe that a brief is responding to the right thing for a client’s business, do you follow it?

In the past, I’ve been on both sides of the coin before. Perhaps it comes down to the difference between taking client work to get paid and taking client work to make a difference. Here’s a quick summary of your likely outcomes:

Partners Vs. Working for Approvals

A lot of agencies don’t break the brief. The hope is that once the ability to execute is proven, there will be the opportunity to show strategic worth on something else. In my opinion, this is the wrong approach to design. This is working for approvals instead of working to achieve a result.

The benefits of not working at an agency is you’re not boxed into agency scenarios. As a strategic innovation and experience design firm, clients come to us with a recognition (and expectation) that in order to strategically differentiate, you may need to go outside your comfort zone. Questioning long-standing assumptions is part of our value proposition, and as such, every brief gets broken to some extent. If your job is to solve problems, then articulating the right problem is step number one. It’s the difference between a partnership and a paycheck.

Now obviously not everybody has the opportunity to work like we do. So what do you do when the brief is wrong?