Truth: Bad Work Costs More.

Once Someone Says “I think”, It’s All Over.

The interesting thing about agency work is that it’s mostly not done for the client. AND what I mean is that it’s not done for a singular person… Or their spouse, or their kids or the guy in the finance department that they think they’re asking as a little impromptu focus group. It’s made for its identified audience, for real reasons and by professionals who’ve been trained to utilise the pesky insights, strategy, research and knowledge that leads them to using their other bits of expertise.And here’s the thing… It’s why you’re paying us money, remember?

The Perils of Microscopic Focus

It’s about perspectives and those include taking steps back way way way far away from a “vanishing point”, so that you’re not focused on the design of some dumb piece of collateral that will only get a glimpse in the whole scheme of things, that you’ll be tempted to take 20 rounds on, ask for multiple 3D renders to be color correct even in the shadows, some testing and other nonsense which turns a $200 expenditure into a $20,000 piece of shit.

In working on a past brief that began with a small 120k budget, an easy in-and-out for the small Creative team assigned, I saw actual asks from clients for dimensional renderings of flowers and color adjustments that, in reality, could never be replicated by a florist in a different country thousands of miles away — these went multiple rounds and are only one tiny bit of “I think” that compound a budgeted 22 hours of creative time to well over 600 and a total budget that reached over 7 figures. While the budget blossomed financially, at its core was poor decision making based on opinions and not actual outcome. So, in the end, the impact remained that of a 120k investment. The income for the agency looked good on paper, but ultimately there’s a cost and bill that will come due for the individual client and the agency who embraced the wallet of what can only be described as an abusive, drunken night on the town.

According to the Project Management Institute (PMI), rework accounts for up to 50% of project time in some organizations, adding significant costs to budgets.

If Your Agency Isn’t Pushing Back, You’ve Got a Problem.

You’re probably used to being right — you’re smart, after all. You know strategy, media, creative, the works. So why would anyone you’re paying question the genius your parents (probably) reinforced was surely yours? Even as timelines slip, relationships fray, and your budget hemorrhages, you’re still the smartest person in the room, right? No need for your partners to challenge you or redirect based on pesky realities.

But let’s entertain the excruciating idea that instead of trust, you’ve got an agency that’s given up, or one filled with people too incompetent to see the train wreck coming. Everyone’s polite, but they’ve gone quiet. Maybe even your key contacts have changed.

I’ve seen it all: expensive, unused photoshoots, commercials that die in review, only screened in embarrassment, products liquidated due to disastrous decisions. Clients nudging stylists aside, sending their kid’s sketches to art directors… usually, it’s an inexperienced client with too much responsibility, refusing to collaborate. The senior agency team distances themselves, leaving juniors to “learn” from the mess. Everyone loses — except the agency, who still got paid.

Now, when these debacles are part of a training process for a junior employee, that’s one thing. But when seasoned professionals with years in the business create these expensive disasters, it’s not just a learning experience anymore; it’s plain incompetence. If this describes you, we’ve given up. And if we invite you to the office to sit at a screen and “help” us understand, know this: you’ve become a cautionary tale in our small world, a story with personal costs that extend far beyond the hourly rate we charge for translating your PowerPoint renderings to our Macs.

“I Think” is Forbidden

In the earliest university design courses, there were a few set rules with doing group “critiques” of each others work. One of the most steadfast was that we could never say “I”; things like “I like” and “I think”, which would serve to take the criticism away from general terms and judgments of the work itself and back to the person. It’s not about you. It’s about the work and it’s about who its been created for was the purpose and something that we tend to easily forget.

AND we forget even more when the professional stakes get higher, we’ve got “face” to save and responsibilities are given to those without the experience to wield their position.

The Ugliest Thing I Ever Made

Many brands, many clients, many agendas — each with its own look, platform, and designated territory in the NCAA Basketball tournament. It’s a collegiate championship in the US, whose sponsorship comes with layers of voices, including the governing body. As the agency for the big red soda company, we were tasked not only with the broadcast, digital, events, and everything else, but also with creating a unifying visual for seven different drink brands: water, juice, sports drink, diet, regular, lemon-lime, and more. Each brand claimed a different component of the game: the action, the cheerleaders, the bench, the fans… you get the picture. Now, imagine each of these brands wanting independent representation on a single visual that would end up on vending machines, merchandise, broadcasts, and basically everything big enough to hold it. This is the beginning of what’s technically called “a clusterfuck.”

Representatives from grocery, fast food, casual dining, fountain, and every brand imaginable from every level — you get the picture. And us: an account person, a copywriter, and an art director (me). Do I need to even talk about the result? Fuck. After much discussion, it featured a black player (at least for the Men’s Tournament), flying towards whatever, trailed by ribbons filled with people in brand colors, each with micromanaged casting and separate “hero” bottle shots, so that even the tiniest of bottles were perfect. It transcended bad; it was too confusing to be understood. I’m not sure the clients even liked it, or if they just wore each other down after so many changes. In a fucked up way, it was a triumph for me, because sometimes something is so awful that it’s laughable. They spent a LOT on making that bad image, but imagine how much they spent advertising, printing, and getting that ugly thing out there. I used to keep it in my portfolio because explaining it said more about my tolerance and understanding of complex brands than any other single image could.

Research by the Harvard Business Review shows that feedback focusing on personal traits rather than specific behaviors is less helpful and can even be detrimental to performance.

A 2021 Gartner survey revealed that 72% of CMOs feel pressure to prove the ROI of their marketing efforts — a pressure that can be amplified by misguided feedback and a lack of trust in creative expertise. All this to say, relying on gut feelings instead of data and expertise is a recipe for disaster.

First-Time Jitters and the Cost of Micromanagement

It’s hard in doing something the first time, and a lot of micromanagement and second guessing comes from people running something for the first time. They don’t want to fuck it up and I really don’t want them to fuck it up either. The difference is that ultimately while it might be an embarrassment to the people who worked on it and a demoralising pain, it’s not ours. We can walk away. The brand and the client, however have to remember where the project started and then look at what a mess they’ve made in the end, as their colleagues take measure of their slightly smaller offices.

Gallup estimates that actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. $483 billion to $605 billion each year in lost productivity

A Final Word to the Client

So, dear clients: I do work for money, but as a creative who lives with the frantic midnight messages, the endless “did you try,” “have you thought about?” and “I think” nonsense, along with the endless revisions to your logo size (always bigger, never smaller), I’d rather be making something worth showing another human being. Trust the process. Stop obsessing over every pixel and let the experts do what you hired them for. Stop overthinking and maybe even trust yourselves and your role in this entire process. Ask questions before acting on a whim — what you think is easy might come with brand issues, hidden costs, delays, casting and location issues, or even political conflicts within your own company. Otherwise, you’ll just end up with an expensive piece of shit and a smaller office to match the shrunken results you’re getting because you focused on the wrong shit.

A study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) found that the average return on investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns developed with agency expertise was 112%, compared to 80% for those developed in-house.

The Real Cost of Bad Work

There does remain the beginning question that is also the end one: what is the real cost of bad work? Because I’m not sure it’s something that can be counted in just dollars, revisions, likes or any of the measurable variables. We can definitely say that poor and confused direction produces waste while increasing levels of frustration in measurable ways, but the greater costs may come due in future as we progress in generating indecisive, ill-informed clients who equate doing and doing and doing as what their idea of being an brand marketer actually is. And as we rely more and more on the agency to fill the gaps in training the inexperienced graduates, while allowing them to act without reasonable instruction or supervision, it’s a whole system that will pay. Yes, the truth is that bad work costs more, but in the end, we’ll all be paying for it.

A survey by Edelman found that 81% of consumers say that trust is a deciding factor in their buying decisions. Bad work can erode that trust quickly.

A study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that the average cost-per-hire is $4,129, while the average time it takes to fill a given position is 42 days. Bad work and a toxic work environment are significant contributors to turnover.