Clients Just Don't Understand

For the most part, this ad makes sense: if you switch to TD Canada Trust, you can get iPods. To give another designer credit, they came up with a clean ad where the message is simple and the layout effective, while getting the point across even if the viewer doesn't read all the rest of the copy. However, when design is considered, it can be all in the details.



I can see it all too clearly: the creative team gets the brief, flesh out some concepts and agree on an idea, get some designers working on it, go through some revisions, feel they've solved the design problem and communicated what the client wants, package it up and present it to the client, who in turn generally likes it...but has one dumb suggestion. Having no idea exactly who the client might be in this case, we can assume it was probably either an older, silver-haired, business-in-the-blood, slightly out-of-touch banker, or a team of older, silver-haired, business-in-the-blood, slightly out-of-touch bankers.

They ask, "Now what are these fandangled thingies we're giving away now? Is that one of those Blackberries I keep hearing about?" The creative team explains, "It's an iPod, sir. They're very popular these days, kind of like a modern-day walkman." The client realizes, "Oh, it plays music? How is anyone supposed to know that?"

I can only imagine how the conversation progressed, how the client demanded that their personal design nugget be added to the composition, and how the beleaguered creative team finally complied and trudged back to their computers to make one of those make-the-client-happy changes that renders the project banished from the portfolio and in the end, looking like this:



Music notes? Seriously, to the 5 people who have never heard of an iPod and can't read those menu selections that say "Music" and "Shuffle Songs" and didn't notice that headphone cord coming out the bottom and have never seen anyone walking down the street with one and have not consumed any sort of news media for the past few years, we needed to have music notes? Did anyone assume that an iPod was giving people an inner-ear massage or something?

I find it very hard to believe that someone on the design side of things came up with this little bit of flair for the ad, and that it wasn't the unreasonable demand of someone involved in the approval process. Besides, if you really wanted to put those in, atleast have the sounds coming from the headphones...everyone knows that music doesn't literally emerge from the iPod.

Clients just don't understand.