by Rachel Smith
09 September 2015
I’ve been working for a corporate client and I was initially stoked about the gig. It was fun work, the subject matter is an interest of mine and the pay isn’t bad. However, there are too many ‘cooks’ in this particular company and my copy (which I felt nailed the brief well) has gone through so many edits with, I might add, so many people who AREN’T professional writers, that it now resembles a dog’s breakfast. What can I do, if anything? K
Not a lot. This is one of the worst parts of freelancing, in my opinion – when the client’s editorial process is so unstructured and allows so many people to have a say that your copy is left limping and bloodied, like a wounded animal. You just want to put it out of its misery – or at any rate, not have your byline attached to it. But even that’s not the end of it, because if you’re too embarrassed to admit it’s yours, you can forget about using it in your portfolio. Annoying all round.
One particular experience that sticks in my mind was when I wrote taglines for a large retail client. I might submit five taglines, and invariably the marketing team would like tagline 1, the media department would like tagline 3, the CEO would like tagline 5 and I’d be asked to take out all the buzzwords and bits everyone liked in order to create a new tagline that tried to keep everyone happy. Which of course was impossible to do (and we’d end up going back to one of the original taglines). It’s hair-pulling stuff, because you’re being paid to deliver what the client wants – not what sounds or works best from a professional writer’s point of view.
Other common things include submitting sales copy to a client and finding them changing it by adding paragraphs that either sound crap or don’t make sense, or dotting every sentence with exclamation marks. Because BUY! BUY! BUY! No, no, no. (Some people just don’t understand subtlety.) Or you submit copy that sounds polished and slick, and they want it rewritten in a completely different tense that just sounds clunky and weird. Argh, I feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about it!
Of course, this can happen on magazines but I find it’s more common when you work for big companies who may have multiple departments attached to a project, or no real idea of what they want. And I guess sometimes we just have to accept that our work is soul-destroying and be grateful that it’s paying the rent. Oh, and hope the next client who hires you is one of those amazing employers who says, ‘I can’t write to save myself; that’s what I need you for’, thinks everything you submit is amazing and never changes a single word. (Yes, they exist.)
Have you had this happen to your work? What’s your experience?
Dear K,
Hate to say it but when you sign up for freelancing one of the things we need to learn to do is BITE OUR tongue.
I learnt this the hard way with my first Pr comms role for a mobile phone company in the UK who insisted that their brand name was in almost every sentence. Was it Shakespeare nope, did it pay the mortgage yep.
Fast forward a decade and I found myself as a government contractor whose copy would go through 20! departments. All of whom wanted to have their say. Dogs dinner doesn’t cover it – think road kill. The upside – I got paid and there was no byline to haunt me.
While I do understand your point, and empathise with you, I have to say I love working with my corporate clients because they care so much about what I do. While the copy may not always come out the way I’d like it, that’s ok because the client is getting exactly what they want (and my byline doesn’t go on any of it). For one-off projects it can be painful, but most of my corporate clients end up sticking around for the long-haul, and we become business partners. I get to know their style, they get to know mine, and we work together. While it can be a lot more effort than a once-off magazine article, I find the partnership aspect really rewarding.
Sounds like you’ve got a good group of clients Rakhee. I have a few long-term ones like that too, which is great because as you say you can get into a groove and know exactly what they want, making the job a lot easier over time. I’ve also had my fair share of painful ones too, though! 🙂
I had almost exactly the same experience recently with a client. Promised to be nice regular work filing one blog a week for a corporate website. The first few went well, I was working with the marketing and comms manager who was an ex-journo and we got on swimmingly. Because I got on so well with the client who’d engaged me we’d not got into the habit of detailed briefs or anything like that, often I was just given a headline and told to write whatever as long as it somehow connected to what the company was doing.
This worked just fine, it was actually a lot of fun, until the company put on a ‘social media communications executive’ who started covering every piece I did with comments and then the CEO got involved and started adding his two cents worth as well. I was often having to completely rewrite pieces which was definitely ‘grit my teeth and think of the money’ sort of stuff.
Because there was no detailed brief I couldn’t fall back on the old “I’ve covered the brief properly haven’t I? but what I did was ask my contact to start writing briefs. Being an ex-journo she immediately understood what I was trying to do and at this point she said, “it won’t matter because the social media executive wants to do them.”
I stuck it out for another month or so but in the end I got sick of being in the middle of a company politics power play – being out of that sort of crap is one of the reasons why I love freelancing – and I sacked myself.
Great story Darren. I have sacked myself from a couple of clients too – sometimes it’s not worth the grief. What a bummer though that such an initially great gig descended into the job from hell…