Fondly Remembering That One Project That Kicked My Ass
I’ve always found storytelling easy.
Whether it was building out a campaign, writing a TV commercial or creating a story for a short film; I discovered early on in my copywriting career that converting vague emotion to words came easy to me – so I milked it for what it was worth.
Over the years I developed a kind of shorthand for working on campaigns – understand the objective, produce a theme then express that theme creatively across different channels. Along the way I learnt that the most valuable skill the typical Nigerian client appreciated was speed.
Do it in half the time. We want it yesterday. Give us this thing like, now.
Those early years were brutal. Dealing with projects was recognising that you had to evolve or die. There was no middle ground.
So, like most of my colleagues, I learnt to ideate and write fast. Shorten the process, work with the gist of an idea and boom. Bang out a concept and fine tune as we got closer to the deadline. This meant many times the finer details of an idea were mostly left unfinished, but – who noticed? Everyone was focused on the big picture.
I got away with this for quite some time, mind you. My work was approved, the campaigns kept running and every year without fail, things I wrote won a bunch of awards. Whatever metric was used to measure creativity, I was beating it. I genuinely believed I had hacked the system.
Then the project of 2017 came along.
In early 2017 Up In The Sky had just turned a year old and was just starting to get that ‘new agency’ buzz. We had calls and emails coming in asking about pricing and timing. We were as they say, on the up and up.
Then one day we got this connection from a prospective client out of Asia.
The potential client had a project they needed done but didn’t want to travel for it. They had ideas they had developed, and they needed two commercials localised and shot with extra communication materials created for them.
I remember the team and I reading the message with big, overconfident grins on our faces. This would be a walk in the park. A very profitable walk in the park. In a matter of days, we made contact, agreed on the financials, and started prep. I sketched an overview of our proposed solution for the brief for the client’s approval so the creative and production departments could get to work.
And right there as it says in the Bible, was the first place our Agbada hooked.
Right out the gate, some things were different about this client.
First is that they were unbelievably polite. I’m talking freak-you-out polite. There were apologies before and after questions were asked.
Now I don’t know about you, but my generation of the typical Nigerian Creative would IMMEDIATELY get stressed when a new client was polite to them. Chalk it up to years of abuse, but when someone treats you like a human being every now and then, your brain needs a minute or two to catch up. Was this a trap? Had I missed something in the contract? Why is everyone being so nice?
But what we’re here to talk about is the second thing that came to define this client. They took ‘meticulous’ to new heights.
Every phone call where they made a request was followed up with clarification emails. Every phone call where WE promised a solution was followed up with clarification emails. Please explain this solution. Why were we proposing this? Had it been done before in that area? Could we share examples and background for it, perhaps?
For the first time in a long time, my razzle dazzle bullshit wasn’t working. I was being forced to slow down and sweat the details.
It felt like being asked to slow down and chew your food. But this time your food was glass.
A month before the project was to be executed, the mail trail already had a thread of about three hundred emails in it, with past messages frequently being referred to. I had resorted to taking screenshots of discussions for easy reference. Once, the client asked that we delivered five items. We examined the budget, double-checked our margins, and happily informed the client that we could provide eight items instead of five, at no extra cost to them.
The client thanked us politely and asked that we stick to five as agreed.
I was starting to dream of this project when I went to sleep.
Very quickly we started to understand some things we had done in the past on other projects just wouldn’t work here. We couldn’t share a stock photo version of a concept if we knew the team couldn’t recreate that to a T.
I couldn’t give vague timing when discussing delivery – (later in the week, before five, in the next two hours) the whole team had to have precise times for reverts.
I took notes during meetings then made notes of my notes.
And then the Project Day arrived.
We had assembled the best production team our money could buy. All of us had checked and double checked our plans. I had anticipated all manner of things that could go wrong and was fairly confident we could address them.
…
So how did it go?
It didn’t go well. For those two days the only thing that was up in the sky was my blood pressure.
We had two client reps show up on set to monitor proceedings. You see, when you shoot in Nigeria, you know you have say, fifty shots to get before the day ends. Now things might go wrong and heaven itself might fall, but you know the day will end and you’ll somehow have all fifty shots in the can because you really don't have a fucking choice. We don't leave money on the table over here. It’s just that that entire process of getting work done will look like chaos.
That chaos freaked my clients out, bless their hearts.
It was two days of immense pressure, fielding phone calls, calming my director, getting yelled at, yelling, and crawling into bed past midnight on both nights.
I didn’t love it.
But you know what? The project came out fantastic. We got commendations from the client and even made friends that we still meet up with every year we go to the Cannes Lions Festival. Think about that. That’s amazing.
But here's the real kicker. We took some of those workflow ideas we had learnt and started including them in our other projects, starting with our biggest project that year. It was a short film which debuted to a standing ovation when it showed some months later and went on to win at almsot every award and festival we plugged it in for that year. It was a little film called Closed.
So, what’s the takeaway here?
The most obvious is that your process can always get better. Second, competing or collaborating globally helps give you that much needed perspective on what standards of quality your work should be at. And finally, tough projects that challenge you make you sit the up and pay attention when you get soft. That’s all that keeps you from becoming a has-been with wins that don’t have value outside of the state you live in.
Sayōnara!
