To understand our relationship with one another, it helps to get a handle on how we are the same but also how we differ. This podcast explores the way clients differ in key ways from creative folks. Ways that make a huge impact on the work we do together.
Transcript:
Hey there, you know, a lot of people wonder why creative people are so different from clients. And there’s some really interesting reasons that we’ll talk about today. Welcome to clienting. Hi everybody. It’s your old pal grant Sanders from clienting and the sand agency here on beautiful Nantucket in June at the summer is just starting.
It’s lovely here. You know, I’m in the sand studio. You’ll probably hear some birds in the background cuz, the sand studio does not have very good insulation, which is nice in the summer, but not so great in the winter. Anyway, today we’re talking about the differences between clients and creative people.
And before I get into this analysis, I just wanna say that there are some very, very creative clients and there are some very, very analytical business-oriented creative people. This is not a very binary situation — it’s — there are shades of gray. Okay. But in this analysis I’m gonna treat creatives and clients like they are binary because as you’ll see from the first thing we talk about, as a creative person, I am well I’m, I’m more likely to go toward extremes because, contrast is really important to creative people.
So, , that’s the first one creatives gravitate toward extremes and, and clients tend to gravitate toward the mean toward the average. This is why when a client is looking at ideas, They often will, see how many people in the meeting, like a certain idea. And if the, the larger number of people like an idea, then they go with that idea.
That’s not necessarily the best way to go. because some people like ideas that aren’t emotionally potent, because it makes them feel uncomfortable. But as we know, emotionally, potent ideas are the ones that get the most response in the media. So how do you, how do you reconcile that? Well, I think it makes sense for us to all be aware that clients on the most part want things to be gravitating toward the mean, and.
Creatives really do look for extremes. They want the biggest emotions, right? They want the most white space on the other end of the spectrum. They want the cleanest layout. And this is not always easy to reconcile in client agency relationships or client design firm relationships, because we are taught or we are conditioned to make the decisions we make.
Based on a certain set of criteria. Creative people are rewarded daily for doing things that are a big wow, or are subtle, or are, , thought-provoking and clients are rewarded on a daily basis for doing things that the largest number of people approve of that doesn’t make waves. That doesn’t, get too subtle.
So that peop the largest number of people get it that understand it. So that’s the first thing extremes versus the mean versus the average. Okay. Another thing that makes clients and creatives different is their work style. Okay. Um, Clients like to manage things, right. They like to make lists. I like to make lists myself.
I think that’s, that’s part of my work style as a business owner. I like to make lists, but clients like to, , I’ll give you an example that, that, my wife does not listen to this podcast so I can safely say this. My wife is an artist, but she used to be an account executive, and she likes to manage.
Everything she gave birth on her due date. Okay. She likes to make sure that the dog eats at 8:00 AM on the dot. If, if things don’t go according to her plan, she gets, , uneasy. But as a creative person, I like to muse. I like to, , instead of managing, I like to muse, I like to. Let things flow.
I like to, do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. , I’m looking at my workspace right now and I can see, the remnants of eight or nine different projects that are just out there. , I could, I could probably clean up a little bit in here, but, there’s a — there’s a music project over there.
There’s a painting project over there. There is a reading project, nice big stack of books over there. There’s another music project over there. , I like to sort of go from one thing to another and let the spirit move me. That’s what the muse is. And, and clients don’t necessarily work that way.
They have, they like schedules. They like, they like to make things work on a timeline. They like to make things like they like to plan things. And we can get into that a little bit later in this list, because we’re gonna talk about the difference between process and risk. But moving on this one is, is, probably the one difference that.
Most creatives and clients can, agree on — clients are concrete, linear thinkers. They think if a exists and a equals B and B equals C, then a equals C, and creative people are conceptual, divergent thinkers. They, they think if a equals B and B equals C. Then what can we think about C and A that make them different?
Not the same, , how do we put two things together that are radically different to make something wholly new? That’s the, the basis of creativity is, is creating new things out of old things, right. And divergent thinking, is a, a skill that you, that you build. Within yourself as a creative thinker, coming up with new stuff, new ideas, new thoughts every day makes you, makes you a conceptual divergent thinker and, and pulls your brain away from being a concrete, linear thinker.
And that’s okay because, , in business we need. We need people to analyze and we P we need people to create. And I’m not saying one is more important than the other, but when they work together, You know, things can happen. Okay. Another thing that you may not know about creatives is unlike clients who generally speaking have the moderate amount of ego and insecurity.
, some clients are more, some clients are less, but creative people have massive egos and massive insecurities in the same package. Okay. And you can imagine what that means. You know, you can imagine how hard that is to be a creative person. If you have, a giant ego and giant insecurities at the same time.
So the, the ego comes in handy when you’re developing ideas and you think, okay, we’re gonna, we’re gonna only, we can develop an idea that nobody else has ever come up with. Right. And the insecurities come into play when you think, oh wait, is this idea good enough? Am I good enough? These are the kinds of things that go on in creative people’s heads and — they go on in some clients’ heads, but not to the level that it.
It takes place in creative heads. Creatives are uniquely gifted and, debilitated by this trait of ego and insecurity in one package. I’m gonna probably go into this a little deeper in a later podcast because, there’s another piece of this, another part of this that, that we really need to talk about as, as, a business community and that.
Mental health is a greater problem in the creative community than it is in the regular business community. Creative individuals have a higher level of depression and, a higher level of anxiety and also substance abuse. So, it makes sense for us to talk about. In the future. That’s a, that’s a whole podcast.
Maybe that’s a whole book, in and of itself, but, let’s, , let’s put that aside for a later date because boy, that’s, we’re getting a little heavy now. Right? So the next thing that sets creatives and clients apart are rules. Okay. Clients like rules, they like. Structure. I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve worked with, who have pointed out a grammatical mistake in some copy that I’ve written.
When I broke that grammar rule on purpose, you know, a mild example is starting a sentence with a, conjunction like, and, or, but, I do that every day. I also use sentence fragment. Every day in the CR in the creative that I work on in the, in the copy that I write, I, I do that all the. And, , while clients like rules, because it makes them feel secure and makes them feel sure of, , whether we’re doing the right thing, creatives like to break the rules or at least scrutinize the rules, look at them, analyze them, get really cynical about them.
And the one thing that’s, that’s true about creatives and clients at the same time is that they both know the rules. Okay. You, you know the rules when you wanna follow them, but creative people in order to break some rules, they really need to have a strong understanding of the rules. That’s something that I’ve always told my teams, which is — it’s cool to break the rules, but you have to know which rules you’re breaking in the first place.
So study the rules. Right. So another thing that clients love are measurable things, facts, data interesting tidbits, , things that you can measure, things that you can put in a spreadsheet and analyze right. And creative people for the most part. And this, this is not true of all creative people, but the really good ones really love immeasurable things.
Okay. They, they like emotion. They like truth. They like. , magic things that you can’t really put a metric to. I have this saying that I like to live by, which is magic over metrics. I think magic is far more important to the work that I do than metrics are. Metrics are still important, but , the most important.
Is the immeasurable stuff of creativity. If you’re going to be a good creative person, you have to get your head around that. And, and these are the kinds of things that make clients a little bit uncomfortable because I’ll just give you an example. Okay. Things that are measurable. And I talked about it in a recent podcast. Clients love quantitative data because it’s a lot of numbers and it’s a lot of facts.
Okay. But it’s not necessarily a lot of truth. All right. The reason I say that is because you can grab a metric that. 98% of your website users clicked out of a page after two minutes, right? That’s a metric. That’s a hard fact that you can, you can analyze, you can say, okay, we got two minutes of people’s time on this web page.
Great. As a creative person, I’m less concerned with that metric than I. With — with the reason they clicked out the emotions that they were having, when they clicked out, how were they feeling when they left that page? Were they frustrated? Were they, did they come and get the information they wanted? And they were satisfied.
Were they happy? Did they have a good feeling about the brand? These are things that are a lot harder to measure. You know, you can measure those things. You can, you can do qualitative research and you can measure those things. But — the, the, the things that are harder to measure are the things that are so much more valuable to me as a greater person.
Right. So. Next, let’s talk a little bit about process clients, love process. , that’s one of the things that clients ask agencies. What’s your process? How do you work? And process is great. Creative people. Aren’t all that enamored of process, because process is nothing, nothing. Then a way to mitigate risk and creativity at its very heart is risk.
It’s taking risks. It’s putting yourself out there. I heard Nick law who, who works at Accenture now, but he used to be at apple. And before that he was at, oh, I can’t even remember RGA, maybe. And — really smart creative guy, but he was talking about the difference between risk and process.
And I’m completely ripping off his thoughts here. So thank you, Nick, for thinking that way. And it’s interesting that creatives like to take risks and clients don’t clients want to manage or mitigate risks. It’s like it’s interesting because I have a client in the insurance business and their entire world revolves around mitigating risk.
So as you can imagine, taking creative risks in the insurance business is. Not easy for them, but some of them are able to do it because they understand the importance of it. Another difference between creatives and clients is that, , I used to talk a lot about neck ties that people don’t wear as many neck ties these days.
I think neckties are, are going away. I’ve decided that I’m not gonna. Any neckties, unless there’s a wedding or a funeral. And I can tell you I’m not gonna be wearing one to my own funeral because at that point I’m really not gonna care what people think. But so I don’t talk about neckties anymore, but it’s true that clients.
Tend to dress for the workplace. , it’s less true with COVID these days. , I’ve had a lot of zoom calls with a lot of people in t-shirts a lot, a lot of people in polo shirts, but I often try to put on a, a collared shirt for a zoom call if it’s, if it’s a real important client, but I will not put on a tie creative people tend to dress for comfort.
In the workplace, creative people tend to. Not try to impress people with their clothing, although, , it used to be very different back in the eighties. , I knew a lot of suspender and bow tie-wearing creative people, people with horn-rimmed glasses people who. , would go into new business pitches and look very, very Brooks brothers, but it’s not necessarily the, the case anymore.
So, , you can, you can see the difference visually between creatives and and clients. And I, I would love to do an experiment where. We take screen grabs from big zoom meetings and or from actual meetings in-person meetings, cuz those are coming back into style again and see if the average listener could tell the difference between creatives and clients.
That would be fun. Another thing that makes creatives different from clients, I’m gonna start over another thing that makes creatives different from clients. Is the way they think, okay. Creatives tend to be very analytical as we’ve talked about before — they like facts. They like data. They like measurable things.
They are very analytical, creative people on the other hand are cynical. Okay. They like to call into question things that they may or may not agree with. This is why — this is, we can go back to rule-following and rule-breaking. A creative person is very cynical about a rule that doesn’t make sense, you know?
It, I will always wear a helmet when I’m riding my bike. Right. But it is very rare when I’m driving. On a highway that I will go 55 miles per hour, or, , even when the speed limit is 65 miles per hour, I’m usually going 68 or 70. Because I see that as a rule that if I don’t break it, I am putting myself in more jeopardy.
If I’m going slower than 15, 18-wheelers that are blowing my doors off. Five minutes. That’s dangerous. I would much rather keep up with the heavy traffic. I think that’s more that’s a, that’s a good rule of break, , the speed limit, although, , nobody likes the speeding ticket. I, , I don’t wanna speed unnecessarily, but I do wanna, I do wanna question the rules that don’t make sense.
And that’s why I say that clients can be very analytical. Creative people can be very cynical and cynicism is something. That comes naturally to creative people because we’re always asking, Hey, why not? Hey, why, why does this doesn’t make any sense? Why, why would we do that? Why would somebody think that when, when you ask those questions, you come up with creative answers and that, , that’s what we do.
That’s why we, that’s why we. Do the job we do because our wi our minds are, are wired that way to think cynically, not everybody thinks cynically. I mean, I like to be optimistic and, , some of my creative partners are annoyed with my, let’s just say they’re annoyed with my optimism. But, uh, but that’s okay.
You know, I’m not as cynical as some creative folks, but I have my cynical side, especially with rules. I don’t agree with next. Let’s talk about tension clients for the most part, seek to diffuse tension. Okay. And creative people tend to imprint tension in their ideas. And this is something that that I heard about from Luke Sullivan, , Luke he wrote the book Hey, Whipple, squeeze this it’s the quintessential book on advertising.
If you haven’t read it, you ought to, and I am not making any money. There are no affiliate links in. In the description of this podcast. So, , just realize that I’m not here to make Luke Sullivan rich. I’m just here to talk the truth about creatives and clients. Tension, Luke Sullivan talks about tension in this way.
He says, okay, you’re, you’re driving down the street and you see two cars parked by the side of the. Right. No tension at all. It’s just two cars parked by the side of the road. But if you change one small thing about that situation, if you put flashing blue lights on top of one of the cars, then there’s tension, right?
Somebody got pulled over. Somebody was doing something wrong. Maybe it was me speeding on the highway. There’s tension for you. Clients. Don’t necessarily want tension. And here’s a really good example. Okay. Clients don’t like negative things because it makes them feel uneasy. It creates tension, right?
But the truth is negative things. Stick in your brain better. This is an unknown, it’s a known psychological phenomenon. It’s a known psychological phenomenon. Right. Negative things, stay in your brain and are more memorable than positive things. Let me give you an example. If you are a red Sox fan, you know, the name of the guy who played first base, when the red Sox were about to win the world series and somebody hit a single down the first baseline and the ball went between that guy’s legs, you know, his.
Because you remember that the red Sox lost the world series. They were, they were one out away from winning the world series and they lost the world series on that play. Okay. A couple years later they won the world series and very, very few people remember the name of the guy who hit the winning home run or hit the winning run to make the red Sox win the world series.
It was so much. It was so, so much more rewarding as a red Sox fan for them to win the world series, , and I can name a few guys on that. But when that ball went between the legs of that first basement, whose name I know you have on the tip of your tongue it was sealed in everyone’s memory, right?
And that’s because negative things stick in your brain and positive things. Don’t calamities disasters, car crashes. Plane problems. Every trip you’ve ever taken that went really smoothly is greatly overshadowed by every trip you’ve ever taken, where you lost your luggage or the flight got canceled, or you spent the night in an airport.
We don’t remember the good things as much as we remember the negative things. And so when clients want to want to purge creativity of negativity, They’re they’re actually purging it of memorability, right? That’s because clients don’t like tension, tension is hard for them. , I — I’ve worked on the client side and I know what tension is.
Okay. I used to keep Tums® in my top, the top drawer of my, of my desk. , I remember what tension was like when you have to go to your boss and explain why you haven’t hit your numbers. That kind of stuff is — is the kind of thing that you wanna avoid. Right? You don’t wanna feel that way, even in the work that you’re approving as a client, but if we can, if we can overcome that.
If we can, if we can overcome that gut reaction, all my devices are dinging. If we can overcome that gut reaction to, to purge negativity from creative work, then we can make, if, if it makes sense, then we can make the work better. And that’s the goal, right? All right. Almost to the end here, but there are a couple more ways that creatives and clients are different.
Okay. Another one is that. Clients work is work, right. There are meetings. There is there are spreadsheets. There are research reports to look at. Is stuff to approve. There are decisions to make. There are schedules to keep that there are, , things to analyze work is work. If you’re a creative person, the most important part of work is play.
Play is what gets you to the finish line as a creative person. You need to, you need to muse on things. You need to play with things you need to, , go back and forth and, and really mu things over with your creative partner. There’s a lot of play involved in the work that creative people do.
It doesn’t mean it’s less work. It just means that when you see creative people goofing off, it’s not that they’re not working, they are playing. And sometimes you need to get your brain in a certain place in order to come. With a creative idea. , when I was, when I was working in an agency setting and the ideas were not flowing we would go for a walk.
We would get out the basketball, we would we would tell a joke. We would, we would both, , my creative partner and I would get up and stand on the agency’s F. Because sometimes what your brain needs is just to see the world from a different perspective. Play is an integral part of the work we do.
So that’s a big thing that, that clients don’t always understand. The last thing that sets creative people apart from clients is motivation. Okay. Clients are motivated by goals and money for the most part. Some creative people are as well. But creative people are more motivated by feedback and validation.
This is why creative awards are so important for some creative people. , I, I’m not a big award person. I used to really care about awards when I was early on in my career awards made me feel good when I would win this award or that award for some of the work we did because I was looking for validation from my peers, from my community, my tribe.
And I was also looking for feedback, you know, not just. Not just good feedback, but negative feedback, too. Creative people love feedback and validation. They just, they thrive on it. Okay. This is why social media is so important for creative people because it provides that instant feedback and validation.
We know this about clicks and likes for everyone, not just creative people, but , people are getting to be addicted by clicks and likes on social media. And if we’re. Cognizant of it. It can be a real problem. But creative people go overboard for validation. More so than clients. , I’m not saying that creative people aren’t motivated by money.
They are, especially if they have kids. , especially if they have a mortgage to, to keep up, but they really do. They really do need validation and feedback more than just about anyone else in the business community. Okay. So those are the ways that creatives and clients are different. Okay, let’s talk a little bit about the three ways that creatives and clients are the same, right?
Okay. Number one, whether you believe it or not, it’s true. Creatives and clients both want to succeed in business. They want the business to succeed. Okay. They want to meet that goal. They want to be part of the solution. Right? A lot of clients look at creative people and they think, well, they’re, , they’re creative, but they’re not very good business people.
The truth is the best creative people are. Great. Business people because they understand that they are not artists. They are artists in service of commerce. Right? If they were artists, they would not seek anyone’s validation or feedback. If they were artists, they would not care about awards. They would just do their–
That’s what artists do. , sculpture and paintings are not done by committee. You do not seek other people’s validation when you’re an artist, but when you’re a creative person in an, in a design firm, in an ad agency, in a PR firm, in a production house, as a freelancer, you are a de facto business person.
Right? This was something that Tim Brunell talked about in a recent podcast. We did. And, many thanks to. For that. Another thing that brings us both together as a community is that we clients and creative people do their best work when communication and information channels are wide open and clarity is the watchword of the day.
Okay. When they there, when the information flows, and the communications. Channels are open only good things can happen. It’s when people can’t ask questions when people get shut down, when, when when ideas are stomped on before they’re fully fleshed out, that’s when. Problems happen. , that’s when goals don’t get met, but when communications channels are wide open, that is it’s the best situation ever for a creative person and for a client because, we’re working as a team and we’re talking to one another and that’s, , that’s the goal, that’s the goal of this podcast, at least.
And then the last way that creatives and clients are the same is that we all agree that ordering a steak well done is an abomination. And it should be outlawed. Okay. Never do that to a, to a good stake. Especially with the price of beef these days. It’s just, it’s just the worst thing ever. Anyone, anyone who does that?
Oh boy. Oh, they ought to be punished, punished. I say anyway, I hope you enjoyed this podcast today. I hope you got a little bit of an insight about creative people and how they are similar to you, but also, , very different in many, many important ways. If you have a question that me an email, leave a question, leave a question on the website.
We love to get feedback. Feedback is the best thing ever as I just said. And , stay tuned. We’ve got. Interesting guests lined up in the coming weeks for the clienting podcast. One guest is a CD at a very well-known ad agency. Another one is a strategy person who has risen in the ranks of a large, quick-service food organization.
Stay tuned for that. This is. Exciting stuff. And we’re just getting started folks. We are just scratching the surface here in episode 12. , wait until episode one 20 to really judge us. Okay. This is only episode 12. You can hear all the beeps and the, and the blurs. I wasn’t able to silence all my, all my devices today.
I am so sorry about that. I will try to edit some. Anyway until next time, this is grant Sanders saying, be well