Present This

At my new job I have of late been re-initiated into the dreaded process called The Client Presentation. You gather in a room with The Clients — here, they look like people who’ve stepped out of a Lifetime movie. Then the designer shows them design, and then you as the writer reads them the copy that they apparently cannot read for themselves. The Client has not seen the design nor read the copy before. Your goal is to manipulate their interpretation of what is being presented. However, what happens usually is each of The Clients tries to think of something interesting to say, to justify their presence in the meeting. Typically, since they have had no time to consider the material beforehand, very little of what they say is well thought out or of any significance. “Just thinking out loud,” they call it. But they’re The Client. It’s their tab. They can say whatever they want. If you feel industrious, maybe you try the three-but approach (i.e., “But what if…” “But that would…” “But how about…,” and if you haven’t changed their minds by the third “but,” then you just sit there and nod like a dashboard toy). And that’s the way things are done in agencies worldwide. And that, unfortunately, is what makes meetings perhaps the single-most cause for workplace ennui and unhappiness. I prefer sending the clients the work, waiting the weeks and weeks for their feedback, doing the “but” work over e-mail and phone, and then finally assenting to whatever they want, nodding like a dashboard toy at my own desk and leaving me more time to play Scrabulous.