The title says it all, what's the dumbest request you've had from a client?
I have had quite a few, but the one that sticks out in my mind was a particular web client. They were a medium sized company that sold a product on a national level. It was a basic household product. During a planning session they once asked, "Do you think we would get more traffic to our web site if we had naked women on the pages?"
Trying to keep a straight face I calmly responded, "Perhaps, but I think that it might alienate your primary customer base, women."
"Yeah you're probably right," they responded, "we thought it might be something different to do, but we wanted to run it by you first." (they being two men if you didn't figure that out yet).
So how about you? Any experiences you can share without giving away too many details or losing your job?
Visitor Comments
One client told me to ask professional photographers to make "drafts" of the images that they could make for him.
I replied: "If they make the photographs, they will charge you".
He insisted: "No! Why? I don't have to pay if I don't like the photograph".
Me: "Maybe you prefer to hire a pencil drawer. You can always erase the draw... but still you will have to pay".
Posted by: Octavio Isaac Rojas Orduña | September 10, 2005 6:04 AM
I once worked for a New York City politician who told me I should 'order' reporters to attend his press conferences.
He was serious.
Posted by: David Parmet | September 11, 2005 10:24 AM
It doesn't make a funny anecdote, but I had a CEO who wanted an agency to come up with some creative for an ad campaign, with no info on what we wanted to accomplish. The CEO didn't like the creative, so asked me to come up with something instead. Still no indication of what the campaign was to accomplish.
What's the old saying about insanity being someone who keeps doing the same thing, even though it fails repeatedly?
Posted by: Eric Eggertson | September 11, 2005 12:19 PM
I once had an SEO company ask me to figure out why a content manager we developed for a mutual client was stripping the end quotes from her META keyword tag. She copied the client on the e-mail stating that it was imperative that this worked since Google was "using META keywords EXTENSIVELY now a days" to control site ranking. Ha. META keywords being used to control page rankings are so 1997 - back when webcrawler.com was cool.
Posted by: Sean O'Shaughnessy | September 12, 2005 12:03 PM