The week between Christmas and New Year is the only stretch all year when my inbox goes quiet enough to think. I spent Tuesday going back through everything I worked on since January, looking for the pieces worth keeping, and the honest answer surprised me. The best work I did this year was talking three clients out of things they very much wanted to do.
None of it is in my portfolio. There is nothing to show. That is the structural problem with this job.
The first was a rebrand that did not need to happen. A founder had gotten tired of her own logo, which is the most common reason rebrands start and the worst one. Her customers were not tired of it. Two sessions and about four thousand dollars later we had established that the actual problem was a site nobody could navigate on a phone. She fixed the site and kept the mark she was bored of.
The second was a mascot. I like mascots. This one would have been a talking otter with a Portland accent, whatever that is, attached to a company that sells software to hospital procurement departments. The room loved it. I asked who the otter would be talking to, and watched everyone arrive at the answer together: a fifty four year old man working through a compliance checklist.
Most of the value a strategist adds is subtraction, and subtraction does not photograph well.
The third was a values page. They wanted to publish six. Two were true, one was aspirational in a way I thought was honest, and three were things every competitor also claims. We shipped two. Their sales lead told me in October that the short page comes up on calls unprompted, which never happens with a six item version of anything.
I have done this long enough to know why the no is hard. Yes bills more hours and produces a case study. No produces a mildly annoyed client, a smaller invoice, and a thing that quietly does not go wrong for two years. Nobody puts the campaign that did not run on an awards entry.
Nobody puts the campaign that did not run on an awards entry.
I sang Rocket Man badly on Friday at the sticky floored place in Southeast where the host calls everyone baby, and she told me to stop apologizing before I got to the second verse. Good advice, generally. Truffles and Barnaby have no opinion on my year, which I have decided to read as approval.