“Pursue a certificate in terrorism 100% online.”

A recently published Ad Age article highlights some glitches in Google AdWords’ crawling methods and pointed out the ludicrous ads that were then associated with the article. The ads were similar in terminology to the actual content, but looking at the bigger picture were offensive and completely inappropriate. It reminded us that even though minor details are “small” (ex: a picture caption), they’re still large enough to take away from our intended focal point, render the important information useless and cause us to lose credibility all at the same time. 

The piece pointed out a couple instances where the article was crawled for keywords and related ads were associated with that content which were obviously not supposed to be there. A headline that ran in Mumbai not too long ago read: Terrorist kill the man who gave them water. The article was about a terrorist attack. It was accompanied by an ad titled: Terrorism: Pursue a certificate in terrorism 100% online. Enroll today.” Oops.

While it would be nice to have more control of ad placement in Adwords and other ad placement engines, the systems are getting better. Check out these cool examples from Google:

• “Learn more about adjusting your placements here”: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=106539
• “Exclude specific IP addresses from your placements”: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=61492
• “Learn about specific placement vs. contextual targeting”: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=112267

Read the full Ad Age article here: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=138567.

The Happy Studio – Conflict. When it happens- and it will.

It’s unavoidable. We work in a field where you have to fight for what you believe in. Conflict is part of the job. Finding careful, and complimentary ways of saying “no” feels like a recurring calendar event. This is more than a service industry, it’s a creative service industry, which makes it more perilous. It can get you down if you let it. We’ve evolved some ways of coping with conflict. Some of them through good advice, some through trial and error- most of them out of pure necessity.

Thick Skin
Some clients feel like they need to beat you up a bit to feel like they got their money’s worth. It’s not right, but it’s a fact. The first, and most important thing you can have is a thick skin. When a client singes your eyebrows in a meeting, learn to absorb it as best you can. A healthy dose of self confidence will help more than anything. If you know the work you are doing is great, you can get through a lot of tough conversations. If you walk into every meeting knowing where you stand, why you did what you did, and how you earn your money, you’ll avoid a lot of bruised egos. Try very hard to make every client your friend- but remember that you’re being paid to do a service. You might forget about the money in your fervor to make a great project- the client won’t.

Bounce Back
So you got beat up a bit in a meeting. They had the usual laundry list of complaints (logo bigger, etc.). You stayed up late, went over budget, crashed a computer, and still made a miracle only to have it dumped on. The client is not spending money to be sympathetic. They hired you to do a job, and if you didn’t want to do it, you should have said “no.” Realizing that you can say “no” when you don’t want to do a project is the most liberating tool you have in your belt. It helps you take ownership of this process that we call graphic design. It’s not fine art. Your brochure will not hang above someone’s couch. It’s art made for hire. If you can adjust your thinking, you can bounce back much faster.

Speak Up
Once things are off-track, you better keep your mouth shut. Your job is to not let them get off-track in the first place. In the heat of a meeting, sometimes you want to bite your tongue. It’s uncomfortable to speak up and re-route the conversation, or tell someone they’re wrong. Think about it, though- would you rather have an uncomfortable 5 minutes, or spend the next week working on a project that you don’t believe in, and that could lead to a lost client? You don’t think it’s that serious of a decision? The client might want to have their voice heard in the project. Everyone likes to feed their ego. But in the end, they’re paying you for results. If the results don’t happen, they’ll find someone else to do their work. Period. It won’t matter how much butter you rubbed on them to placate their badly formed ideas if the campaign doesn’t work.

Have a Support System
It’s tough out there. You better have a support system that works. Despite what you see on Mad Men, heavy drinking is not the best answer. Find a good gym, a copy of Wii Fit, a willing listener, or a hobby. Keeping your energy bottled up might mean you lose your cool with a client who’s only barely pushed your buttons. Sometimes an unsent email is more therapeutic than you can imagine.

A Team Effort
Coworkers are a great resource for blowing off client steam. They’ve been through it, and they can relate. Don’t be afraid to share the story-just save everyone the drama. The last thing you want is for your staff to start resenting the client.

Blog it
Once some time has passed, and you have some perspective, write about the conflict. Try to condense it down to a knowable nugget. Don’t use your blog to get back at you client, or to poke fun at them. Never mention names, but put the story out there. If you write a thoughtful article, the client that instigated it could read it without even knowing it’s about them. Telling the story is therapeutic, and it also sets an expectation from your audience of clients about how you prefer to be worked with.

If You Let Them, Bullies Will Monopolize Your Time
A few months ago, we fired one of our most long standing clients. He was a friend, and doing work for his company was a great source of pride for our us. There were a number of reasons why it was time for both of us to move on, but the biggest was that we hadn’t redefined our relationship. Both of our companies had grown many times over since we started working together, and yet we were still charging low rates, and he was still treating us like he was our biggest client. It was a bad relationship for us in our workflow, and in our portfolio. Every time he called it was like a fire drill. We simply weren’t able to do our best work when we were under such tight deadlines, and poor budgets. He monopolized our time because we weren’t firm enough about our boundaries. There were no ramifications for his disorganization, or indecision. Anyone of us would turn into a little Caligula if we were allowed to do so without consequence. It was more our fault than his. We’re both better off for having made the split. We’ll have more time to concentrate on the projects that bring us the most money and joy, and he’ll have someone brand new to do dial-up fire drills with.

Glimpses of Genius, Beauty, and Novelty – Soda Anyone?

• What a great website – And who doesn’t want to play with carbonation?
• If you use PowerPoint – Consider this instead
• You probably already know, but if you don’t – Github is a great place to browse
• When you update Twitter – What does it say about you?
• Architecture fans – Read BLDGBLOG!
• Simplify your start page – Sticky Screen
• Better RSS reading – For simplicity sake
• Even better RSS reading – Must have some web experience though
• Truly great new design blog – idsgn

The Happy Studio – Commit Only to What You Can Control.

So here it is. The most important advice we can give you. It’s the thing that changed our work lives fundamentally from the ground up and that made us more profitable, and happy in one fell swoop. We quit committing to things we had no control over.

Client work is a nefariously tricky to tame. People change their mind, push dates, and generally demand the irrational. We were stuck in the same boat for the first few years of our business. Projects ran terribly over time, and over budget through seemingly no fault of our own. We were doing great work, but making more enemies than friends. It was borderline unbearable.

Actually that it was unbearable ultimately led to us trying something that had seemed impossible only a few months earlier. We quit promising things. Not all things, -but most of them.

Schedules
Schedules slip. If you get to the bottom of why they slip, -it’s usually on the front-end. If the planning goes smoothly, and the deliverables are organized well, the process goes like clockwork. The problem with us was usually with deliverables. We had absolutely no control when the client would get us the deliverables, -so we had no control over the planning phase. By the time we got to the starting line, we were already behind.

Inevitably we would start designing without a firm grasp on the totality of the content. It was an awful thing to do, -but we felt so pressed to make progress it was the only thing we knew to do. The client would call and ask why we hadn’t shown any mocks, and we were not brave enough to say “because you haven’t got us every last drip of deliverables we need to get started with.”

We find that people can be very tough on us about making progress, even if they’re the ones holding said progress up. It’s human nature, and there is no sense fighting it. Our answer: we started embracing that fact, and writing our proposals accordingly. Our proposals today have no actual dates in them. We make promises about the gaps between client input. We say things like:

Home page mockup: 2 weeks after wireframe approval
2nd Page mockup: 1 week after Home page approval.

Every step is inherently tied to the previous step… We don’t really care if our clients take 3 weeks to approve the homepage, – our delivery date keeps sliding accordingly.

Revisions
No one single thing can ruin a project more than revisions. It’s such an important part of what we do that several of the articles in this series revolve around how to deal with them. It’s the one thing we have thought more about than any other client service topic in our business.

The fact is that clients will change things. Design is an evolutionary process. People need to see things before they can react to them. Most of the clients we have in the business world are quite frankly terrible at visualizing. It’s not their fault, -they’re great at things we could never do. But again, it’s something we have made a point of realizing, and trying to embrace. Walking into any project, we tell our clients up front that there are going to be revisions. We say that we’re very swift, and adept, and great at what we do, – but we’re not mind readers, so there inevitably will be changes along the way. It sets a great stage for us to build on. People walk into the situation with a correct assumption.

The second thing we do is write our proposals split into two parts. The first part is the promise. It’s the budget, and the deliverables that we 100% commit to, and that we unarguably are going to give for the stated price. It’s called a quote, and it’s very different from the second part of our proposals, which is an estimate. This second part describes all of the things we cannot control. Changes to nav midstream. Doing multiple versions of an ad. Changing the color 4 times. We find that revisions can comprise around 10-15% of the cost of an average job, so we budget accordingly.

The quoted amount never changes. Even if we budgeted totally wrong we keep our promise. If we find efficiencies along the way, and come out better than our hourly rate: congratulations to us…

This budgeted revisions estimate is flex space, and we include it in our estimated total for the project. If the client is wonderful to work with, and amazingly organized, and somehow escapes the process without a single revision, -they don’t pay a dime of the estimated amount. If they wander, and are indecisive, they can use that budget plus some. We just promise to keep them appraised of how the money is being spent, and how quickly. We watch that revisions budget like a hawk. We very rarely have a project go over budget.

The revisions budget actually does several things:
* It establishes the premise that everything in the project costs money.
* It gives us leverage in deciding which revisions get made, and which get pushed back against.
* It gives our clients who often have bosses to answer to, some flex space to adjust along the way and still be on budget.
* Escaping the prison of the hourly wage is a good thing. Otherwise the better you get at your job, -the less you make.
* Everyone likes a project that comes up under budget.

External Costs
We always write our external job costs up as estimated amounts. While we do our homework quite specifically to make sure the vendors we rely on stick to their budget, we give ourselves some wiggle room. Our early days in business saw a few projects go horribly over budget because someone forgot to do their math right. It’s impossibly unfair to penalize your client for internal mistakes like that.

The Happy Studio – Handling Revisions

Revisions are part of our business. If you try to fight human nature, you’ll fail, -and have less clients because of it. People change their minds, committees have to be pleased, legal has to have their say. If you’re prepared for it, and understand it’s part of the job, you’ll get through it easier.

• First, have a strong filter for what’s a “revision.” If it’s your fault, or something that should be part of your job to start with, -treat it as such. Accept blame, Assure the client. Act fast. Put yourself in their shoes, – what are the things you would want to hear? Sorry is probably at the top of the list, followed closely by a promise to fix it promptly.

• Think about the big picture. Have your thoughts together going into the meeting so you can talk quickly and succinctly if the seemingly small revision is going to effect other parts of the project in a costly, or bad way. Don’t hesitate to bring things like that up to your clients, they would rather have prompt honesty. Clients want to brainstorm with you, – let them. But take control of the process by remembering the big picture.

• Smile a lot. Many creative people hate meetings, -us included. Remember that your clients are real people with real needs. They’re not there to torture you. Your friendly attention during the meeting will help everything go faster, and smoother. The best tool to bring in your belt to a client meeting is sympathy.

• Say yes first. Just say yes a lot. Say that you understand. Take notes. Even if you come full circle ten minutes later and say you think it was a bad idea, -say yes first. Make positively sure that your client knows that you think their ideas are worth listening to.

• Ask your clients to rephrase their revisions. Make them be specific, and keep probing until they are. When they say “you know what I mean?” -it’s an invitation for you to ask more questions. A vague outcome to a meeting doesn’t do anyone any favors. You’ll just have to repeat the meeting, and spend more time and budget clarifying the thing you should have cleared up in the first place.

• Ask why. Don’t be rude, -don’t be abrupt, -but ask your client why the change needs to be made. If you disagree with the revision, making them verbalize the purpose will often expose the fact that the revision is an attempt to cure a symptom rather than the real problem.

• Wait. Say you want to think about it for awhile. Time heals all wounds, and it often eliminates the need for changes, too. Sleeping on a problem often opens you up to a solution based on the request. Time also gives you the perspective you need to remember that this is a service industry, and that you only make money when your client approves you time to work. No matter what else they are, – revisions are an approved way to make money.