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Client Project Reflection
I think a lot of us found the client project to be an experience much different from anything we’d done before. There weren’t really any set guidelines on what we’d produce or how we’d produce it. We were able to develop our own projects under the umbrella of the larger project. Obviously, this was a learning experience for all of us, and there were plenty of kinks along the way, but I think for the most part we all performed very well and I’m proud of what we accomplished as a group.
I think in some ways the way we were treated, trusted to work independently and set our own standards, really motivated us to try our hardest. Perhaps if it was more regulated the project would have been a bit more taxing to complete. Instead, it was easy to do the work we needed to, because we more or less assigned it to ourselves. I thought that the responsibility really made us want to perform to the best of our ability and produce work that we thought reflected what we could do.
Working with other people is always at least a little bit difficult. At times there were communication issues. For instance, there was some debate in our group over what our organization (YMAT) did or stressed exactly. Some members of the group seemed to want to stress that the parents themselves needed to quit smoking, which, though certainly true if they were smokers, did not strike me as the key message the group wanted to get across. Rather, it seemed to me that they wanted to stress the importance of avoiding secondhand smoke and advocating for the health of your children. At times the idea of “group consensus” is frustrating to me, as in this instance, because it can sweep little nuances under the rug. I’m often concerned about details such as this one that may seem trivial to some but seem entirely paramount to me. This is why I usually like working alone, but I realize this is not always possible and that working with a group can definitely have its benefits.
To avoid a similar problem in the future, I’d ask for more information from the organizations. There was also debate about the organization’s name within our group, which ultimately led to problems as we went the wrong route. To avoid these problems, I’d ask for more information from the organizations. A little dossier with the group’s name, the names of the employees, the group’s mission, and any other pertinent information would be very helpful. At times, it almost felt like we were sort of deciding these things for the organization, which I think is sort of ridiculous. Perhaps advertisers can help organizations focus themselves, but I don’t think they tell them what they are.
Though these issues sometimes made me feel a bit disconnected from the group and like I wasn’t really being heard, I still managed to learn a bit working with clients. I think I realized that maybe the client doesn’t always know exactly what they want. Maybe part of this was that these were not clients exactly but were sort of doing us a favor by allowing us to gain experience working for them, but I realized that our job was not so much to produce what they told us to but to interpret their message and try to distill it into simplified messages that could be easily accessible for people seeing them.
I wouldn’t say that the experience was entirely ideal; I would have liked to maybe work in a smaller group, as I find I contribute more in such settings and have an easier time communicating things that bother me. Still, though, I learned a lot from the project and think it was helpful to have this professional experience handed to me.
