Let This Be A Lesson

A few years back, on the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, I received an email from a friend on social media. A fellow ad guy who was the creative director for a small agency in the midwest. He needed help naming a product for a client. They’d tried to keep the task in-house with a couple of initial rounds, but the client asked them to go back and try again. (This happens to all of us at some point.) 

So my friend, whom I’d never met in person but had known for the better part of a decade through the internet, reached out for help. At the time, I was preparing to fly my family to Houston for my mother’s 80th birthday. It was going to be a surprise with all of her children and grandchildren coming in for the weekend. We were the farthest away and would make the biggest splash. 

My gut told me to pass on the project. After all, we had a full weekend planned with family we hadn’t seen in years. But then I thought ... how much trouble could it be? I’d just upload the creative brief to my brain before our flight and let my mind wander like always. Besides, my friend was in a tight spot. Plus, I wanted to make a good impression as someone he could count on for future projects. He said he could only pay $1000, and knew that was extremely low for a naming project for someone with my experience. Of course there was also the traditional promise of “potential future projects” as well.

Despite everything, I took the project. I’m a workhorse creative. And my friend needed help. 

After the big surprise with my mom, things settled down enough for me to begin processing the information from the creative brief and allow it to marinate. As ideas began to bubble up over the weekend, I’d log them in a note on my phone. I even woke in the middle of the night with a name concept (the one I considered the strongest in the end, actually.) The weekend was great and the side project didn’t distract from my enjoyment too much—although everyone knew that when I disappeared for ten minutes at a time every few hours, I was doing research. 

We returned home on Monday and after unpacking, I spent a couple hours sorting the names and writing justifications. The next day I presented ten strong options to my friend. He said that I’d given him a lot to think about, told me he’d be putting a deck together for his client, and thanked me. 

A week later he sent an email. I noticed right away that there were people I didn’t recognize in the “to” field. He said that while the client liked many of the ideas for names, they wanted to see more. 

Oh no. It was one of those clients. Although I was now convinced that maybe my friend wasn't very good at pitching ideas. Because I know that I'd given him some good ones. Or else the creative brief was lacking information. Whatever it was, something was off.

And so as I read the email, the sound of a full cupboard of dishes crashed onto the floor of my mind.

It turned out that the other people on the email were other writers who my friend contacted. People who, like me, spent their Memorial Day weekend thinking about product names for a company none of us had even heard of two weeks before.

One of the guys, I’ll call him Johnny Ringo, was a self-professed “superstar copywriter” who was quick to reply to the email with a clever response. I felt duped, but played along nonetheless. I had a job to do and I was going to finish it, by God. And I damn sure wasn't going to let Johnny Ringo upstage me. So I worked for another day—knowing that each hour I spent thinking about this thing lowered my already low hourly rate. Plus, I had no confidence that anything I could conjure at this stage was going to be sold well.

I presented six more names with deep research proving why each would work. I even made sure to present solutions that had clean URLs, and on a few options even offered killer taglines to drive the names home. 

Then I billed him. 

Ten minutes after submitting my invoice, my friend emailed me. It seemed that I completely misunderstood the the project. I was actually working for $500—and would make the full amount only if the client selected one of my names. 

I'm sorry ... what??? Nope. That was never a thing. And if it was, I would have never taken the project. Friend or no. Especially given my situation with our trip. No. Freaking. Way.

Suffice it to say, I was pissed. 

We exchanged another couple emails as my friend feigned regret for my inability to understand the project. In the end, I was paid $500, and a silly name with no teeth submitted by Johnny Ringo won the contest that I didn’t know I was entering.

My old friend and I haven’t so much as liked each other’s tweets since that day. But I learned a two valuable lessons from this mess.

1) Friend or not, get everything in writing up front. It's something I do on 99% of my projects, but not this one. I let the "friend" thing get in the way.

2) My time and life outside of work is and will always be way way WAY more valuable than what anyone will ever pay me. You simply can’t buy time lost.

When I look back now I see that I was completely responsible for how this scenario played out. Which is to say that I had the chance to turn down the project, but didn’t. This wasn't my old friend’s fault. It was mine. For not trusting my gut.

***

Jim Mitchem is a writer, a copywriter, a marketing consultant, an editor, and an entrepreneur. Between 2009 and 2012, he took a brand from scratch to #120 on the Inc. 500 (as well as Fastest Growing Company in Charlotte) with 3000% growth in a market that didn't exist, during a recession, and with zero traditional advertising. He’s been in marketing and advertising a long time. He gets audiences to think differently about things and moves them to action. In 2015, he published his first novel, Minor King, and co-curated the new book Gone Dogs which he can't keep in stock. He has a wife and two daughters. He likes baseball and dogs. He really hates writing about himself in third-person.