On losing and loser clients

Ocean's Gate, Like Heaven's Gate

Many times in my decades of consulting, I've been directed to do a dumb thing by a client that's paying me to, well, steer them away from doing dumb things. (And yes, this post was inspired by a small group of obscenely wealthy people dying in the ocean, causing untold expense to find out what happened to them, all of which is money that could have been spent on so many, many better ideas.)

It's the single worst part of consulting, and the hardest judgment call you'll ever make. If your client hears your counsel and chooses to keep in their bad course, you are honor-bound to execute it to the best of your ability. All while knowing that, like a failed military coup in politics, this refusal to bow to expertise, math, etc., is just setting the stage for a deterioration of the relationship later. 

Most agencies lose 1 out of 4 clients every year, and most marketers don't stay at one gig for life, especially in aggressive categories. You acquire a past as being either too ineffective or too inflexible, the client acquires a past as being obstinate or resentful that you are telling them that they are wrong, and the seeds for a future separation are shown.

I'm not really sure how to solve for this, honestly. I've tried at most of my gigs to make it about the math, under the theory that math can solve a disagreement without emotion, and gives everyone a great way to walk it back from a bad decision. Test don't guess, and the only real way to fail is to not test, or at least, not test effectively.

But the trouble with this approach, and the reason why M&AD hasn't been able to elude the gravity that every other agency is subject to, is this: "the math" isn't binary. Which is an odd thing to say about math, but hear me out. It's never about a single key performance indicator. If it were, you could do your job forever and the only real issue is ducking AI or boredom, because your job is simple AF. 

But for most clients, if I drive leads to your business cheaply, you can say I've done my job -- or you can point to lifetime value and ROI and say I'm done nothing useful. I can say it's your site or your offer or your competition, and now we're back to the world of emotions, not math.

For clients like this, you win so long as you do the thing that makes them happy. You try to make yourself bulletproof by getting them to change the way they look at the world... but reality is that most people do not change the way they look at the world. And if they do change, it's not always for the better.

And that's when the job starts to lose its fun, its vitality, its candor and its color... and you start to think about the client that's going to replace this one. Which is also why agencies are never not looking for new business. Ping us accordingly.

What We've Been Up To

 Because, well, it's been a while.

Falling out of love with the NBA. (Whoops, wrong blog.)

Working for a non-profit with the damned near holy mission of protecting free speech in America. (You may have seen some of our TV spots in the Philadelphia area. Check it out.)

Finishing up assisgnments for consulting clients in insurance, programmatic marketing, online education, SAT prep and others.

Which is all a long way of saying that if you want to get on our dance card, we've learned some things and have less bandwidth than before, but still some. Reach out; we know more than ever, and have value to add.

Seeya!

Deactivating Twitter

So that happened today, for both the sports and business blogs. It was surprisingly easy, honestly, but I never really loved the site in the first place.

A few things:

> I have no idea how much this business was worth before Musk decided to have a nervous breakdown in public and light more money on fire than anyone has ever lit before, but you have to assume it was more than nothing. Which is what it's worth now.

> There's really no reason to think that social media as a business model, which wasn't exactly swimming in profit before this insanity, should survive this dumpster fire. Sure, some of the smarter people from Twitter are going to land on their feet, but you just had a brand that was known worldwide cease to exist. There's reasons for that beyond the bad ideas of a delusional maniac. 

> Anyone who is still working at Twitter should be presumed a grifter. There's no way that the 25% that are left are there for any reason other than to take the money Musk has got left. One presumes that there is some.

> I'm not certain that if I drove a Tesla, I'd feel good about it now. I get that they are great cars, but you are driving something that used to be known as a premium brand and forward thinking, and is now a source of ridicule. Can't be good for the resale value. And they were always expensive to fix.

> If this gets us to a better world of less snark and international influence on the decisions of nations from outside actors, I'm OK with losing out on the joke room pitch fest that was my feed. If it just means a world with less bad ideas of fun, also a thing.

> If you want to draw a similarity here between Musk and Alex Jones, or Musk and the content apocalypse going on with HBO Max / TNT Et Al... well, I'll see your supposition and raise with the following. There's been too much content for anything approaching economic sustainability, and we're probably going to a place where everyone is going to be presumably entertained a little less. Or just differently. Emphasis dark.

> If you'd like to imagine a dystopia where everyone stares at a TikTok feed of AI-driven quick twitch junk food for the intellect, yeah, that too. I'll be listening to podcasts instead, but I'm also not delusional; most folks are going to do the easy thing. You don't have to be like them, and if you've read this far, you probably aren't. Feel good about that.