I remember some years ago I was working for a small strategic communications agency, and one of our clients was a large Japanese electronics company.
They had just started to roll-out a cinema advertising campaign (produced by Grey I think). It was very striking – shot in black and white, featuring a beautiful woman in a long black dress walking towards the camera with the client’s product worn around her neck like a necklace. The final image was a close-up shot of the product, with the client’s logo embossed on the front, and a caption beneath. This was going to be an iconic image for the client, and one which they would use for many pieces of marketing.
One of the projects that my agency delivered each year was ‘The Range Review Brochure’ – a 48 page, perfect bound glossy brochure showcasing the entire range. This year, with the lady in the black dress on the front, and worryingly with a print run of 100,000 copies.
When a client commissions a quantity like that I always get that twitching feeling low down!
Anyway, 2 days before delivery, the printer was boxing-up the completed brochures into 500’s when he called to say ‘I think we may have a slight problem’!
As it turns-out somehow during the process the image had become flipped, ie a mirror of what it should have been, and nobody had noticed. So the client had quarter of a million copies of a brochure with their logo round the wrong way on the front cover!
The only redeeming thing from my perspective was that it wasn’t one of my projects…thank heaven’s!
Anyway, this just highlights another reason to leave print behind, because no matter how careful you are, and how often you check things, there’s always a chance of an error creeping in, and you can guarantee that when it does it will be on one of the really big jobs!