Have you heard of any agency ever volunteering to discuss their biggest mistakes? Well, here we are in this follow-up vlog for our previous ‘Biggest Losers’ podcast. Listen and learn from us, and try not to repeat the same mistakes we did. And if you have made these same mistakes in your marketing and advertising career, know that you are not alone! 

Let’s start!

Welcome to part two of our “Biggest Mistakes” podcast! I'm Noah, this is James, and we are the biggest losers!  

Overbuilt & (Waaay) Overbudget

Have you ever rationalized overdoing a project?

"The client will love it and hire me again!"

"I'll get so much more recognition."

"This will look great in my portfolio.

... Ya, us too. :-)

Noah: So, continuing to talk about the biggest losses in our marketing and advertising careers, here’s one from me. 

I had a really amazing client. They were a video game producer, and it was super cool to be able to work with them. I was so proud of working with them that I wanted everything to be perfect and amazing. But we didn't have the budget, and so one of the things that I ended up doing was overbuilding everything. 

And so I overbuilt this structure that would house the gaming consoles, and we would tour it around to different campuses, and it was so heavy and so massive that we had to hire additional staff - we were already close to being over budget, but hiring the additional staff to help with the assembly and the carrying of every single piece put us way beyond our budget, and they never used this thing again!

 We built it because I thought we'd use it for multiple seasons, thinking, “These are going to be my lifetime clients, so let's just overbuild and over-engineer this structure,” and we did. 

And sure enough, they never used it again. It went into storage and never came out so we ended up spending too much and ended up having to put together this massive thing. It took us eight hours to assemble -  it was just a nightmare!

And the second part of that mistake was that on the first event we didn't have insurance. We didn't pay attention to the nuances of the details there and didn't check for our insurance policy to make sure that it would include event activation. So when I got there, they asked for our insurance policy, and I provided our insurance policy; it did not include events! So, we could not execute our event at this location. 

Anyway, the next day, we did get insurance, but we were a day late, and the client was not thrilled. Always make sure you have the right Insurance because you'll leave yourself super exposed if you don't!