Rusty Knives cut slow....

I told you so…

The flipside of “...in the room,” “I told you so” occurs when something fails or goes wrong and all involved suddenly swear that they’d been warning against it from jump, which of course is usually a lie. (Think: 9/11 Commission hearings.)

Rationales

When abused, it’s the greatest CYA tool in the marketing game. A rationale is a document that explains why certain creative directions are being explored and why certain ideas are being executed. Rationales are written up for client approval before any actual work gets done.

Why?

Because if the work doesn’t come out the way the client wants the agency can hold up a sheet of paper with the client’s signature and say, “See this? This was your idea, too.” In fact, in all my years, rationales rarely lead to better work or better thinking. They often lead to over-thinking, over-analyzing, and supreme confidence in the fact that somebody besides you will get screwed if it fails.

Focus Groups

I’ve been involved in over a hundred focus groups for a variety of clients and projects, great and small. They all had one thing in common: Somebody had to CYA: A client. An agency. A brand manager. An account exec. A studio exec. A film director. A creative director… Someone who’s forever scared of being wrong about anything got to thinking, “If this fails, I’ll need a scapegoat. I know, let’s ‘focus group’ it. That way, if it bombs, we can blame ‘them’.”

So month after month, year after year Corporate America and Hollywood round up their built-in excuses:
 
Groups of random people—most of whom would never voluntarily associate with each other under any other circumstances… place them in sterile rooms, usually with two-way mirrors like they’re lab rats or suspects in police line-ups. Next, they’re shown storyboards. Concept boards. Unfinished movies. TV pilots. Product samples and prototypes. Then soft, by-the-book execs base anywhere from five to seven figures worth of manpower, ideas, and strategies on the opinions of people who usually have no idea what they’re talking about because they’ve been shown things they’ve never seen before in conditions they’ll never see again while being asked a bunch of stupid questions under an even stupider set of circumstances.

Why?

Well, besides being an added source of revenue, focus groups imply research and research implies formulas. Formulas imply predictability and predictability implies certainty. And business loves certainty.
It’s all about comfort. And as annoyed and stressed as most businesspeople pretend to get over focus group results, the fact is, they love them. Focus groups help businessfolks CYA. If the focus groups agree with you it’s because you’re brilliant and they “get it”. When they don’t or want something that turns out to be a world-class disaster (New Coke, Yugo, the Arch Deluxe) it’s their fault and you were simply giving consumers what they said they wanted. Either way, you’re covered.

“It’s okay; you’ve been wrong before,
you’ll be wrong again.”
—Arnold Drummond

There are two certainties in business: (1) Each day, something will go right; (2) Each day something will go wrong. Now it may not be big either way, but it will happen. The question is, “How will you react?” Will you CYA? Or will you handle it like a professional? Choose the latter and remember: We all fall short and it’s okay. Just learn from your mistakes, congratulate those who’re right, and keep it moving.

And don’t worry about the person who screws up, worry about the person who swears they never have or never will. That person is either lying, unwilling to take risks for what they believe in or just stupid. Either way, they’re CYAing, which means they’re liable to dead a business faster than most of the mistakes and bad ideas combined.

In order to kiss someone’s butt
you have to let them turn their back on you.