For their very first ad for example, we had to "clean up" or rather "rebuild" the client's logo which someone seemed to have put together in microsoft paint... or maybe they just drew it right onto the business card... I'm not sure. In any case we had to rebuild it exactly, even to the point of rendering a unique font... just without all the mess that came with its initial creation.
Lots of fun, that I luckily did not have to participate in. Other quirky issues came about periodically with this client, but this particular month promised to be an easy one. The jeweler wanted to feature men's platinum wedding rings. The ad was to target men who were well off and thinking about getting married. So we got adjectives like "high-end," "sophisticated," and "male-oriented."
So what did I have to work with? Their photo shoot had produced some very nice close-ups of four of their platinum wedding rings for men. Unfortunately the light in the pictures came out very pinkish making the photo look more like it was advertising charm bracelets to little girls.
So I picked out a good shot of the rings and got to work. I decided that since there was so much pink and peachyness in the picture to adjust the colors more toward the orange end instead of pink. I also decided to work on increasing the contrast, and decreasing the color overall so that the shine, and silver color of the rings would really pop.
After over an hour of adjustments I ended up with a photo that looked at first glance like it was only using 3 colors: black, white, and a pale shade of orange. It was awesome. The orange tint was right along the shine on the ring that was the focal point of the photo and most of the other colors were effectively gone. The black and white really made the delicate gradient of the silver just pop out. It looked elegant, sophisticated, and very masculine for a jewelry ad. I got dozens of compliments from the other designers.
Everyone thought it was perfect... we even told our customer service rep to explain to the client in detail what the design did, and how it did it... and to compare it to ads in very expensive national publications... etc.
The client hated it. Our editor-in-chief even called to argue on behalf of the design because he thought it was that great... but it was to no avail. They requested we use the same image but without any adjustments... That's right pink, no contrast, washed out colors on the rings... It really did look like an ad for little girls.
Now, I'm not saying that the client was wrong and I was right. Though certainly I think my design did a far better job of what they asked for, than what they insisted upon later. However I didn't know their clients, and it is entirely possible that my somewhat stylized color scheme was all wrong for the real target market. It is also possible, and likely that the client went with their own aesthetic preferences over what would have been best for their target market.
I suspect the truth is somewhere in between. The target market was not as high-end/sophisticated as we were led to believe, and the local market may not have "gotten" the ad that I made. (That's right you aren't sophisticated enough for MY AD... or in other words if I run my beautiful, fabulous, amazing ad it will likely be a failure and waste of money for the client... same difference right...) Likewise, the client did not realize that the pink and low contrast of the original photo would not likely appeal to the intended audience.
But instead of trying to appeal to them on the idea of "not going in that direction" we were focused on trying to get them to go in the direction of the ad that we thought was best. So we ended up with an ad that the client liked, the designer hated, and that likely failed in reaching its target audience. Believe me, it was very pink.
The trouble was since we were primarily a magazine functioning as a design firm we were a little out of our league when it came to figuring out what were reasonable revision requests.
In this case a simple "I don't like what you did to the photo," would have sufficed. We could have come up with a softer version with the pink removed or even gone for a gray scale version. Once the client started telling us to do the same picture without adjustments... all of our designs skills and aesthetic/marketing knowledge got removed from the equation.
Just put this here, and that there, and our logo here and that will magically do what the ad is intended to do right?
But the fact is we weren't a design firm... we were the production team of a magazine who was "building their ad," we were not "designing their marketing." That was apparently a delusion we kept stumbling into whenever a client accidentally mentioned a target market, or an intended goal for the ad. Funny how that happens.
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