One of the most irritating thing about my job is when you go and present some nice work to a client, and they say something like this:

"Well we really like (exciting impactful campaign idea), but our consumers are really dull, techy types, so this is a bit risky. We'd better go with (dull anodyne campaign idea which is only being presented to make the other one look even better)."

This is, of course, complete bollocks. Imagine you're selling something like a router, which is some piece of gubbins that allows computers in a network to talk to each other. You're probably selling it to the IT manager, the finance manager or the managing director. These people may have high powered jobs, and they may spend a lot of their days playing with grey boxes, counting beans or firing people - which is where I think clients get the idea that they will somehow be frightened by interesting marketing materials.

But (and this is the bit they apparently don't teach you in marketing school), THEY'RE ONLY PEOPLE!!

When they go home, they have wives, husbands, kids, friends and everything else that the rest of us have (well not friends in my case obviously). They buy the same products as the rest of us, they have a sense of the aesthetic and (wait for it, this is the clever bit)

They're people that react to cool advertising for consumer goods, and they're people that buy things because of it.

So why, exactly, do otherwise intelligent people forget this, and try to make them spend serious amounts of money from their budgets based on dull, uninteresting mailings? One company that used to be a client of mine used to send single sheet A4 product sheets (which basically list features, benefits and specifications and that's your lot) in order to try and sel equipment that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Needless to say they didn't sell very many. We (and I mean the creatives) managed to persuade them to do something a bit (and only a bit - but sometimes these things take time) more inetersting, and their sales went up by 200%.

Even worse is when the bloody account people at the agency start watering concepts down before they even get presented. It's not the best way to manage a client relationship.