Don't Like - All Criticism Being Valid

One of the stranger elements of modern white collar work is the degree to which you have to accept criticism, even if the criticism makes no sense. The most significant time I’ve ever encountered this in my career was presenting an advertising campaign to the Clackamas County Tourism Board. This board was responsible for marketing Oregon’s Mt. Hood Territory, which included everything west of Mt. Hood in the county. As part of our brief, we were asked to showcase Oregon’s majestic old-growth forests. And so, in one of the two campaign directions we presented we had this cool treatment that showed a beautiful forest. We were all really excited to pitch the work to our client. However, there wasn’t just one client. There were the main day-to-day clients and then there were the constituents who had to approve the campaign and who all had an equal voice. So, we presented our two campaigns and everyone was excited about one of them—except for one person. She didn’t think it worked because—and this is a verbatim quote—“People don’t think of Oregon as a green place.” This was an insane piece of feedback. Oregon is absolutely known as a green place. Sure, there are other climates in the state, but not for the area we were focusing on. Our brief explicitly told us to fit forests into our campaigns, but once this client made that comment the work died. It made no sense, but she was resolute and we had to adapt. I don’t remember what we ended up doing, but I wish we could’ve said, “I’m sorry that’s just wrong.”