As a creative team, we are continually asked to put the best spin on a client’s business. Fair enough. That’s what they pay us the medium-sized bucks to do. But when that pitch represents a fantasy, not an accurate reflection of the client’s business, then the communications feel false, not credible and overblown – certainly easy to ignore. So how can it be different?

In our view, our primary responsibility as a strategic creative team is to create communications that offer up a precise picture of what it’s like to do business with a specific client. What’s their reputation in the field? What kind of people are they? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Why would someone choose to work with them, instead of their competitors? These are obvious questions, but how you distill the answers is the real key. It’s not a matter of amplifying some strengths and trying to invent a clever and powerful image. Instead, it is being real – not overstating benefits, but instead, placing them in a context: If you like your rye bread without caraway seeds, this is the bread for you. Instead of some obscuration, such as: there is no rye bread equal to the 100% rye flour bread we bake. The communications have to preview the experience. Disappointment is a business killer. Feeling duped will turn off a customer forever. What if instead, we stopped selling and really started to dig deeper into the reality and acted almost as if we were an independent entity that was asked to evaluate a business and report on its activities – successes and failures.

Of course, this only works if a client has a positive story to tell. If a client is trying to conceal a fault or talk about what a customer wants instead of what they can actually deliver, we don’t want to work with them. We don’t sell disappointment. We want to bring people together with the business that best meets their needs. Our job is to help the public determine whether a particular business is a good fit for them.

If we can establish the client as a trustworthy communicator, whatever we say in our ads our other marketing materials will hold so much more weight. And we’ll be able to look at ourselves in the mirror every morning and feel we’re not salespeople, we’re correspondents.