There was the gentlemen who was starting his first business, and came to our initial meeting armed with a spreadsheet that listed every penny he planned to spend on marketing: newspaper ad space, radio time, my services, a graphic designer's services, radio production, everything. It was one of the most beautifully formatted spreadsheets I'd ever seen.
It was all wrong.
Ignoring media rate cards and average prices for various services, he'd plugged in numbers that suited his budget. His number for ad space in the Baltimore Sun, for example, was less than half of the rate card price. "Everything's negotiable," he explained to me, in the same tone you use to explain bedtime to a four-year-old. His new logo was going to cost him $175 because... that's how much money he had. (Most designers in this area charge $750-3,000 for a logo.) The radio voice talent he planned to use would cost 1/3 of union scale because... "I'm paying in cash!"
He'd listed everything I was to write, and helpfully listed how many hours each project would take and what he was going to pay me per hour. I can't remember everything, but I remember that he figured I could write a brochure in four hours and a radio script in an hour and a half, all for the princely sum of $15 an hour.
I tried to gently tell him that nothing he'd budgeted was going to happen for the amount he'd listed, and he became quite angry. He threatened to take his $60 budget for writing a brochure and $22.50 for a radio script elsewhere. I wished him luck.
I never saw any evidence that his business actually got off the ground.
Of course there have been the clients who wanted my home phone number "so if I get a brainstorm at 11 p.m. I can share it with you right away," the ones who couldn't understand why I stopped working when their deposit check bounced, and the ones who wanted me to work for free initially, "because when my (fill in the blank) becomes a big success you'll share in the wealth."
I think my favorite, though, was the man who'd inherited a paint company from his father, and apparently was sick of talking about paint. His creative direction for the print ads, radio commercials and TV spots we'd proposed: "Don't mention paint or talk about painters."
Uh, OK, what should the ads be about? "Talk about how paint makes people feel. But don't use the word paint."
While we were scratching our heads over that, he added his media plan to the creative direction: "I don't want the usual media, the magazines, the newspapers, the TV, the radio. I want outside the box gorilla marketing stuff. You know, guys with sandwich boards, media events, flyers stuck on windshields, things like that. Be creative!"
You won't be surprised to learn that his company was bought by a competitor and it was "suggested" he retire.
Don't get me wrong: I work with a lot of folks whom I greatly respect (and, hopefully, vice versa). I've worked with many who trusted my recommendations, and wanted to learn about marketing and advertising from me. I remember the ones who wore sunglasses to every meeting or insisted that their color blindness wouldn't prohibit them from choosing logo colors because there have been so few of them.
And because they've been so memorable,
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