I love the show Mad Men. I watched it from the first episode at air time and it had me hooked from 20 minutes in. It warmed my little nerd heart that I was going to be able to be a fan of something right from the outset, instead of happening across it in my Netflix queue years after it’s off the air and the memes are already old (Lost, anyone?).
By the way, Mad Men is on Netflix and if you haven’t seen it yet, you need to stop reading this and binge watch it over several weekends. Then, come back and read this blog post.
If you have been living under a rock that doesn’t get basic cable, Mad Men is a drama that is meticulously set in the 1960s in an advertising agency, at the height of its allure and excess. The main character is a dashing, Randian superman named Don Draper who is a highly respected leader in the creative/copywriting field, but has a troubling and inescapable past. He’s also quite the drinker, smoker and philanderer.
Great as the drama is, I guess I have to say that I like the interplay between the agency and its clients more than anything. The idea pitches, the sales process, the customer relationships… are all familiar even now with web dev, whether its a large agency with separate design, sales and billing groups or a one-man shop where you’re doing all that yourself. Mind you, I would never take a potential customer to a brothel (so don’t ask) as they often do on the show, but I’ve dealt with client intransigence and trying to do the best job for the client in spite of themselves on the other.
Most people aren’t designers and won’t get the same things from the show that a designer would. However, we are all consumers. Some of us are even in the position to hire designers or employ agencies to do some work in some form or another. They’d do well to heed one recurring lesson from the show on allowing experts to handle what they are good at. Micromanagement is destructive to the creative process and also very expensive for the client. It simply is. Whether it comes from a lack of self-awareness or being used to getting what they want, this is a common problem among clients then and now.
A perfect example comes from at episode near the beginning of the 4th season. The agency has just been nominated for a Clio for a highly inventive television commercial for a floor wax called Glo-Coat, and the buzz is about as meme-like as you can get in the 1960s. At a company mixer, the ne’er do well son of their largest and neediest client (a tobacco company, back when government regulation of cigarette advertising hadn’t kicked in and tobacco companies were gold mines to Madison Avenue) asks Don when his cigarettes were going to get a commercial as creative and popular as Glo-Coat’s. As usual, Don answers with a single phrase that says a dozen things at once: “they asked us to swing for the fences.” Translation: they trusted us to do our jobs and got out of our way and as a result, this small company is making money hand over fist.
This particular client had a tendency to overstep his bounds in the creative process, as well. In one episode, he shows up for a commercial shoot and asks that a take be done where the actor stares straight at the camera. The director politely informs him that staring right at the viewer would make them uncomfortable but his informed opinion is waved off. This same client later makes a pass at the commercial director and as a result of being rejected, asks that the unlucky victim be fired from the ad agency. I hope that I’m not spoiling anything when I say that the large client in question was about 70% of the business of Sterling Cooper and that sexual harassment was a much different thing four decades ago, which made the client’s request a no-brainer for the ad agency: the poor commercial director was terminated for (please forgive the pun) not taking one for the team. Vox argentum, vox dei.
Every designer has stories like this but maybe less salacious. I had a small client when I was first starting out who was a delight to work with but had more money than sense. Right around that time, I had just learned the hard way a very important rule about web design: the client does not buy a website from you, they rent your time and past experience and the result is a website. They were made well aware of the fact that every time they came back with dozens of tiny requests to make a font two points larger, and to move the logo a few pixels to the left, make every page a different color, etc., that it was costing them my full hourly rate. In the end, the site ended up looking so bad that even though I had the option to do so, I did not include a site design attribution link in the footer. I didn’t want my name anywhere near the site.
It was a steady paycheck for nothing other than holding my tongue and doing as I was asked, so I suppose one of us won out. Just be careful not to be the client who is willing to pay whatever it takes to get what they want, or your designer may see you as a magical machine that takes in no-effort work and turns it into cash.
I suppose this all goes hand in hand with what I consider to be the secondary lesson from the show: don’t assume your designer doesn’t know anything about your business or product. Sure, you know your product quite well and you also know who your current client base is. Many clients mistake the preliminary fact-gathering process that the designer goes through with the client (“so, tell us about women’s swimwear!”) as complete ignorance about everything having to do with their product or service. It isn’t; that type of questioning is simply due diligence on the part of the designer. Perhaps they want to know what your product means to you.
In one episode, a female copywriter pitches a commercial concept for Heinz Baked Beans that involves the beans tumbling in the air against a white background in slow-motion while a classic waltz plays in the background, in a very obvious nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It would have been a visually arresting commercial, and also fun. The client stopped the presentation dead in its tracks. Have you seen beans up close? he asked. They look like entrails, he explained, trying to be helpful. He tried to be even more helpful-er by suggesting that perhaps they try to make beans cool. The result was a second pitch which was almost exactly what the client wanted, but it was discarded.
Designers live in this world, and they represent the 99.9% of the people in the world who don’t work in your line of business. Isn’t an outside opinion worth something? Clients may know their customers (actually, “we know our customers!” is a common comeback from clients when a designer points out that perhaps something they’ve suggested for the site isn’t a good idea) but conveying ideas to that speak only to the audience you know is preaching to the choir. Isn’t the point of developing a website to grow your business? A very effective way of doing that is to open yourself up to new potential markets.
If you want to learn to be a better client (or identify those who are), this show is a must-watch.