The daylight between two professions — A Business and Creative dilemma
"I don't think they understand."
That is a common complaint that I hear when describing the parties on either side of a project between the client (business) and vendor (creatives). We are already past the negotiation stage, so both parties simply have to do their part and succeed in the objectives set. Yet as the project gets under way, "teething issues" begin to add to the frustration meter. Unfortunately, this is more of the rule than the exception based on my personal anecdotal observation of the industry at large.
It is within this observation that I begin to spot a glaring common denominator - that at the source of these conflicts is the illusion that both sides speak the same language. Sure, these conversations happen in the same tongue (in my case, mostly English), but the vocabulary that each side has is deceptively different. For instance, providing raw footage (spoken from client's perspective) has a different meaning to RAW footage (spoken from vendor's side). The former refers to the request to have the unedited clips taken by the camera, while the latter refers to a recording format, of which there are many types.
But it is not just in the words themselves; the expression of ideas and expectations are most crippled by this illusion. It provides a false sense of understanding whereby all parties involved leave the table assuming that the other party has understood the context. In actual fact, misunderstandings have occurred, and that will come back to bite them as production goes underway - by which point the cost incurred to rectify the issues may involve additional fees, heated tempers and lower satisfaction. Usually a mix of all three.
To mitigate the risks of such a scenario involves a factor that is easy to identify but takes a lifetime to master - because we are ultimately talking about communication amongst people and entities, the strings of influencing factors and demands are so intertwined that only maestros need apply.
This factor is the ability of the Point of Contact representing either side to fully appreciate the context in which the other side is basing their communications on. This enables the PoC to clarify vague demands, set mutually agreeable and attainable terms such as deadlines (a key complaint in such discussions), and perhaps most importantly, to read between the lines.
Speaking from where I now stand (as a vendor), the ability to read between the lines and pre-emptively ask the right questions is crucial to the success of any project, because most of my clients have come to my team to seek for expertise, which means the service rendered has to include the discovery of what they truly want from this investment rather than simply acting on what is in the brief.
Fortunately, I stumbled into taking a degree in Business Administration (Marketing) at the National University of Singapore. Unintentionally, I learnt the frame of mind in which many of these projects are first conceptualised - from objective to budget. They are usually done in high-stress scenarios that are not conducive in understanding all the factors. Therefore, this necessitates the vendor playing an educational role as well in terms of guiding the client through the production process - though this goes both ways as the vendor will also need to learn the intricacies of how their client functions internally in order to avoid pitfalls that is present in all organisations.
Each new relationship between client and vendor should start with the caution that each side has more work to do in order to appreciate the full context of project factors. Only then can the daylight between the two professions start to close.
