After dark

This will be very deja vu-ish (funny, you don't look vu-ish) to my fellow copywriters and art directors.

You've been working for eight weeks on an important presentation to the client. The day of the big meeting finally comes. It's a Wednesday at 4pm. There's no immediate deadline, but this was the day and time everyone was available, so this is when it was scheduled for.

As the meeting goes along, the client laughs at the right places, nods their head and you're thinking how great it's going. Then just as you're all getting ready for Miller time, as you're walking out the door, the CMO asks if they can have a word with the management supe and the creative director.

When they come out of the conference room, the smiles are gone. So are any thoughts of Miller time. The clients you thought loved everything had a little problem with it. They hated everything. And they want to see new work in the morning.

The call goes out - everyone at the agency stay at the agency. Place your dinner order and cancel your plans for the night. You're there until morning, coming up with new ideas for the clients to hopefully like as much as they led you to believe they liked the first ones.

There are so many things wrong with this picture it's hard to know where to start. But I'll start here: What does it say about a client who knows you took a couple months honing to perfection the ideas you just presented, and then asks you for entirely new ones fifteen hours later?

It says they're an asshole.

Anyone who had any idea what it takes to do what you just did would realize it doesn't happen in that short amount of time. They're poking a dog with a stick. Watching you jump through the hoop. They're laughing, and not with you.

The other thing that's wrong with the picture is the agency agreed to do it. Without an ounce of self-respect, dignity or value for their own work, they cut themselves off at the knees and affirm to the asshole client the work they do really has no worth, since you spent months working on it the first time when you could've just come up with it overnight. Like the account leaders just told them you would.

There comes a point, at work, in life, where you have to - and let me quote the bumpersticker here - just say no. When you have to make clear you respect yourself even if they don't. That great thinking takes time. And the fourteen hours from 5pm to 7am is not that time.

I'm not saying you can't come up with something, you can. But at that time of night and level of burnout and exhaustion, when creatives are cracking each other up with bad Christopher Walken impressions, scrounging around for cold pizza and sleeping face down on their keyboards, it won't be anything either of you will be proud of.

Which only lowers their opinion of the agency further. It's a vicious circle.

Still, the same people that agreed to this insane request will be the ones high-fiving each other like overgrown frat boys just for the fact they managed to churn out something that, if there were any justice, would be sitting at the bottom of a birdcage. We've all been there.

I think anyone who knows me would agree that while I'm a joy to work with and for the most part a little social butterfly, I also have a short fuse and don't suffer fools lightly. Another thing they'd tell you is I don't have a problem saying no for the right reasons when everyone above me is saying yes for the wrong ones.

No matter what time of day it is.