People think client relations is easy, but as a long time account director, I’ve devised this quiz to separate the real client whisperers from the fakes.
Go ahead, test your client relations skills, but consider your answers carefully because each wrong answer will literally ruin your career!
1. Your client asks to make the logo bigger for the fifth time. You:
A. Remind him that we already did…four times.
B. Make it so big that it gets cut off on the screen.
C. Stick him in Wayne Szalinski's shrink ray and make him the size of a cockroach. Then step on him.
D. Tell him to expect it in an hour. “We're trying to increase awareness after all!”
2. Your client wants to replace the Asian family in the TV spot with a more “relatable” Caucasian family. You:
A. Tell her: “You are the problem with America.”
B. Offer to replace her face with your fist.
C. Send her to a Chinese nunnery where she can only eat steamed vegetables, wash chamber pots, and pray for forgiveness.
D. Suggest exploring a less “Asian” looking family since our agencies have a “diversity policy.”
3. Your client needs to test the testing version of the test concept that is being used as a test for the campaign that will test whether consumers respond better to tested campaigns or not. You:
A. Draft five more versions, changing one word each time.
B. Throw him into a pit of hungry army ants to test whether they’ll respond by eating him.
C. Commit yourself to Rikers Island because it’d be way better for your mental health.
D. Smile and say: “Of course! We want to make sure that our idea will really resonate.”
4. Your client would like to brainwash all women into thinking they’re fat and worthless. You:
A. Refuse.
B. Suggest that it might impact his daughter negatively.
C. Let the harpies have him. Piece. By. Piece.
D. Try out a few lines on the women in the meeting and then talk timeline and budget.
5. Your client wants to convince people to kill each other using nicotine and smoke. You say:
A. “No.”
B. “You are more disgusting than regurgitated vomit that’s been curdling under the sun.”
C. “You are Charles Manson’s smaller nipple.”
D. “This is such an exciting opportunity. We’re going to get so much media coverage!”
6. Your client asks to flood the entire country for National Root Beer Float Day. You respond:
A. “That might not be possible given the laws of physics…”
B. “I’d like to float you into the middle of the ocean with a piece of bleeding steak.”
C. “I’ll float into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and befriend a humanoid amphibian god who will obliterate you for ruining the Earth.”
D. “Brilliant—and we can throw glass cups in as giveaways!”
7. Your clients need to stain a white shirt with lamb’s blood so it can be cleaned with their detergent brand. You:
A. Say it might not be approved by animal review.
B. Transform her into the mother of those lambs so she can feel the repercussions.
C. Develop a virus that only infects mindless sadists and causes them to deteriorate into fertilizer on which grass thrives.
D. Do as required, and capture videos for social so it can be repurposed for Q3.
8. Your client wants to suck the bone marrow out of your firstborn. What do you do?
A. Respectfully ask that he reconsiders.
B. Run away with your child to northern Russia.
C. Feed him into an industrial sausage machine, wrap him in his own intestines, and sell him at the farmer’s market.
D. “Let us regroup and get back to you!”
9. Your client fires you. How do you respond?
A. Rip your correspondences up one by one before setting them ablaze for a pig roast.
B. Explode from joy into tiny molecules that fly free and never have to worry about needing a job to pay rent or buy groceries.
C. Book the first ticket to Mars and become the queen. Reinvent advertising so that it actually benefits people. Invite all the best creatives there. Then destroy Earth.
D. “Please reconsider! We’re happy to do it for free.”
If you chose all Ds, then you are a true client whisperer. Congratulations on being free of any morals!