When you present creative to a client, what’s the fine line between being pompous, and giving your work the consideration and attention it deserves? That’s always a tough one for me. To spend a long time on flowery, pretentious speeches annoys me. So, we tend to go the other way, jumping right into showing the work and “letting it speak for itself.”

The problem is – that’s not always a good idea. Clients may think that the concepts that took us days if not weeks of hard work, were just lucky coincidences, fortunate flukes that happen to sound and look all right because… just because.

We need to find a happy medium. Enough of an introduction to set the tone, review the challenges, remind the client of the goals, retell the competitive scenario. And then, only then, show the goods.

Wait a second!
Here I’m trying to help, and you make me go through hoops? There’s something wrong with this picture.

That’s how I felt when, after having done a lot of research on available volunteering opportunities near me, I narrowed them down and started the application process. Not fun. The forms were so long, the questions, so deep and probing and covering so many years and requiring so many dates, that I felt I was applying for super fancy coveted jobs in corporate America.

First gripe – let me see the entire application before I have to fill it out. If it’s going to be six pages long and will ask questions that I consider have no rhyme or reason vis-à-vis a volunteer’s job, I want a chance to see that before I do all that work. Second gripe – as much as I understand that an organization wants to make sure of the caliber and the morals of their volunteers, they also could cut us some slack. I cannot believe the application for a volunteer position would basically be the same as the one for a job seeker. Am I wrong, just being lazy or self-righteous? Hmm.

You could say this is the ultimate Inside/Out maneuver – do you understand so intimately and well what your company does, how and why, that you could explain it to a kid, and get him or her excited?

Try it. It’s wicked hard. Mostly if what your company does is a bit floaty, vague, and tough to put into the words that would make sense to a young child. Like advertising… marketing… PR…

But why to a young child anyway? Our audience is not kids but smart grownups, right?

Yes. But they are busy and distracted; they have a lot on their mind and are using a tiny portion of their available brainpower to listen to our message. So we have to make is simple and sticky. Which means we have to understand our mission and our vision; our position and our differentiators so well that we don’t need pompous terms or business jargon to answer the scary question coming out of a kid’s mouth – “What do you do? “

Great! You or your PR team interviewed your customer, or your customer’s customers, developed a great application story and had it picked up by a trade pub. Now what?

We’ll tell you what we do at Inside Out for our clients.

First of all, we make sure we have permission from the people we’ve interviewed to re-use their statements and comments in other ways than the originally planned ones. We give them examples of what we’re thinking of doing; if possible, we show them other stories that we have already “stretched out”. And then, we go for it!

1. We shorten and edit, and it becomes a snappy, to-the-point FaceBook entry.
2. We re-write as needed to turn it into a script for a quick video that can be posted on our client’s FaceBook page, or on their website.
3. In many cases, we pick up some of the best comments to be used as headlines for our client’s next print or electronic ad campaign. They have a freshness to them that’s very hard to replicate.
4. We also often combine case studies about the same product or service, or about the same company, to create a solid testimonial piece.
5. And it goes without saying… we post the original story to our client’s LinkedIn page.

The point is, we never waste good, original content. There’s always another way to make it work.
Ask us!