The Haystack

Joe Jaffe shakes his finger at BMW in a great response to certain points in its request for proposal to ad agencies last week.

Having worked in creative services for the past 13 years, I’ve seen plenty of RFPs. I’ve never found them fair. Basically, a company can spend a relatively small amount of time putting together a document which asks for the impossible, send that out to several agencies who are thereby granted the opportunity(!) to respond with a relatively large amount of time and effort to come up with a campaign and pitch it. And we all do it. We want the business. That’s just the way it goes.

I would love it if everyone just refused to do it. There are plenty of agencies refusing these blatant attempts at getting free or low-cost creative work. Let’s face it: if 20% of creative work yields 80% of the results, then all the agencies responding to RFPs are doing this most important, most creative 20% before they even get the job, and only one of them gets the job.We’ve done it plenty of times, but I’m starting to do the math. Often, we’re not even informed about how many shops are competing, so we’re not even in a position to calculate chances vs. time and resources.

Jeffrey Zeldman points out a few problems with many RFPs, especially those asking for preliminary work.

It’s hard to do, but we ought to just say no.

Business Week’s article about the very public demise of iFulfill.com indicates that business blogging may have a flip-side, depending on what one chooses to blog, and the way one chooses to go about it.

I have the feeling everyone knows Joe Clark. There are plenty of beautiful blogs out there, but if you want a blog that is diverse, typographically surprising and just a pleasure to read, you need to get over to fawny.org now. Do it. Add it to your feeds. His writing is informative, witty, sarcastic, visually easy to read, and he knows his shit. One of the most prolific web minds out there, Joe Clark (for those three people who’ve never heard of him) is author of the still very relevant Building Accessible Websites. Why does he deserve so much praise? Because he once complimented my use of Rotis Semi Serif on the Cinnamon website. Just kidding. That’s not the reason. It must be the almost subliminal “You enjoy fawny.blog” at the bottom of the page.

Go there and find out for yourself. Pretty recent, entertaining, and something I’m chewing on: Footnotes are like Unicorns.

And no, he’s not paying me for this.