WEEK 38: 66 Hours

Last week was very busy. Between multiple shoots, meetings and presentations, everyone in the team put in at least 66 hours of work.  After all the meetings I have participated in during my time at Humour Me, I have noticed a few fairly common and rather irksome habits among clients, such as:

  • Repeatedly checking their phones
  • Chatting among themselves while a presentation is going on
  • Interrupting a presentation multiple times
  • Sleeping (this is rare, but has happened a once or twice)
  • Repeating the same points again and again during the feedback session after a presentation

Of all of these traits, the most frustrating one to me is interruption. When someone interrupts me while I am presenting something I have spent days – and sometimes weeks – preparing, it can really throw me off balance and make me lose my train of thought. I have realised that some clients will do this on purpose just to agitate presenters. With experience, I have learned how to improvise and bring the presentation back on track when this happens. However, the clients I really struggle with are the ones that interrupt with intent to discuss. If anything I say inspires them, they will immediately derail the entire meeting just to talk about whatever came to mind. While these interruptions are rarely malicious, they are highly distracting and it is often challenging to bring such clients back to the presentation.  

Having said that, there are worse things a client could do. For example, a very popular trend in advertising today is clients neglecting the value of a creative idea. I must clarify that not all clients are like this. However, the ones that fall into this category have a tendency to demand infinite creative ideas from us at no cost.

Every idea that we come up with takes a lot of effort. Genuinely original ideas are rare. However, many clients prefer quantity over quality and therefore are perfectly content with sanctioning the creation of a plethora of sub-par content that is clearly copied from somewhere else. At Humour Me, we take pride in our ideas and it is very disheartening when they are not valued.

In other news, the production team headed out at 6 am today for a shoot with Bhuvan Bam. For those of you who don’t know, Bhuvan Bam is one of India’s most successful YouTubers (12 million subscribers) and now, Arctic Fox’s brand ambassador. I’ll tell you how the shoot went in my next entry.

 Speaking of Arctic Fox, one of my primary responsibilities is planning and analysing their social media content. Arctic Fox as a brand stands for empowering young creative dreamers and encouraging them to chase their dreams. Part of this includes addressing the barriers they are bound to face along the way. Unfortunately, this can sometimes be their own parents. So we came up with an idea for a content series called ‘Dear Parent’. With this series, we gave our audience an anonymous outlet through which they could share something that they wanted their parents to know. Here is the first video we made:

We treated this idea as a content experiment and did not really expect much from it. But it did surprisingly well, and many people have contacted us and shared their stories. We will definitely be continuing this format of content for a while longer.

Another thing we did is to reach out to creative artists and give them a platform through which they could showcase their art. This idea stemmed from the need to marry our product and our brand philosophy in a stronger way. Instead of simply talking about chasing dreams, we actually wanted to do something that showcased our belief system. So we got in touch with a few artists we found on Instagram who were doing great work, even if they did not have many followers. We then sent them a backpack and told them to use it in any way they wanted to creatively showcase their work.

Here are the first two collaborative products. The first is by Namita Sunil, a fashion designer, model and illustrator. She modeled with the backpack and also illustrated on top of the image using her signature art style. The second one is by Nitya Bellani, who caught our attention with her interesting illustrative perspectives on trending topics.

We published these images on our social media platforms and promoted them in different cities – of course, we gave the artists credit. This way, they get higher referral for their own work, and we get a collection of unique and exciting content for our page.

If you know anyone whose work deserves to be shared, let me know!

I shall conclude this rather lengthy entry with a topic that never fails to entertain me: things interview candidates say. Last week, a candidate entered our office and asked if this was ‘hummer me’.

See you next week!

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