when clients make a right mess of your work

One thing that can be frustrating as an agency is seeing a once, meticulously creative client resorting to putting out substandard work.

No one will ever really know the internal problems people face on a daily basis but poorly executed second phase campaign work is a common occurrence in some of the transport work on offer.

By this, I mean initial campaign creative work is done by an agency to an approved standard and the various assets are then passed over to the client (can't speak for other agencies but they would be at mhd).

Typically the client then thinks 'well, we've spent up with the agency doing the first bit of work, they've given us all the files we need, looks simple enough to do in-house.'

They then find somebody in the office who's watched a YouTube tutorial on Indesign, and the second phase gets underway.

From this point onwards things start to go a little haywire and it doesn't take a genius to work out why.

Unfortunately, you can spot the resulting work a mile off. Layout, leading, kerning, hierarchy are often areas where things have gone belly up and when the work comes to light you end up thinking 'but that looks nothing like the work we initially did!'.

Such a shame after spending all that time, effort and (client's) money to do a great job only for the whole campaign to take a creative nosedive at the final hurdle.

Just because you think you can, doesn't mean you definitely should.