talk to the organ grinder

I was working as a video consultant for a leading global advertising agency: freelance, one-man-band, brought in whenever a project needed dynamic content nobody in-house had time or kit for. This one came through the account management team, sounding slightly nervous on the phone.

The client was a global telecomms infrastructure corporation. Their business development lead for automotive, across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, wanted a centrepiece video for a large interactive display unit, a showpiece for an automotive event in Salzburg. The agency had produced a creative brief. He hated it. Not politely unhappy, either: unhappy enough that he'd asked, by name, to see "this chap", meaning me, and cut out everyone standing between him and the person who'd actually be making the thing.

The Meeting Nobody Expected to Go This Way

‍We set up a call on the client's high-end video suite, the kind normally reserved for board-level conversations, with me on the other end talking directly to the client, whom I'll call Michael. The account team were there. So was the client's own UK representative. I fully expected both of them to hover, protectively, the way account teams often do when a client and a supplier are put in a room together unsupervised.

They didn't. They were, if anything, relieved. Nobody particularly enjoys being the layer a client is trying to get past.

Building It Live

‍I was working, at the time, out of Ravensbourne, the design and digital media college that had just relocated to its striking new building beside the O2 in Greenwich. The whole place had been built, top to bottom, on the network infrastructure of the very company whose account I was trying to please, a detail I found considerably funnier than anyone else in the room seemed to. The connection was fast enough that I could build the creative live on screen while Michael watched and told me what to change as I changed it.

What struck me at the time, and still does, is how much faster and better the work got once the brief-review-revise cycle simply stopped existing. No deck. No round of comments from six people copied into an email chain. Michael would see something, say what wasn't landing, and I'd adjust it there and then. He wasn't approving my ideas from a distance. He was in them.

‍What Came Out of It

‍The result was a three-and-a-half minute concept film: a post-sale automotive "journey," concept to design to a soundtrack I composed myself, with Michael helping source some of the stock footage along the way. It went up on the display unit in Salzburg as planned. A version of it, the German cut, is still watchable here.

The Actual Lesson

‍The thing I took from that project wasn't really about video. It was about what happens when the person with the problem gets put directly in front of the person who can solve it, with nothing in between them but a screen. Most of the friction in creative work isn't creative at all. It's structural: layers of people relaying other people's opinions about a thing none of them are actually making.

‍ ‍Michael wasn't being difficult by asking to see me. He was doing the obvious thing, and it only felt unusual because it so rarely happens. The best moment in the whole project wasn't the finished film. It was watching two account managers and a client rep quietly step back and let the actual work happen in front of them, because they knew, correctly, that it would go better without them narrating it.