It’s very frustrating when you make something that you know is good, something you believe in, and the client just throws it away. But it’s one of the downsides of our job and you learn in time to live with it (but never accept it completely).

But worse than that is seeing some of your rejected work having being done by somebody else. That really pisses you off.

Last year I was still working for Lowe&Partners, as an art director, and together with my copywriter, Alexandra, we were the ones assigned to Unilever’s Axe account (our creative directors were Avi and Diana, they are now self employed at Mercenar – check their site for some nice award-winning works). We did a lot of things for them, some great, some not-so-great, many adaptations, as the client usually preffered to adapt foreign Axe campaigns from other countries than approve something new and original, made specifically with the local target in mind. Plus the eternal “small budget” problems. Among many unconventional ideas that we presented, one looked exactly like this (larger image on Ads of the world):

We presented the same concept, with similar execution.
Life isn’t fair, I know.

From what I hear, another nice concept we made, still for Axe, which got postponed many times, will be made by another ad agency (wouldn’t really matter anyway, since I no longer work for Lowe). At least I hope they’ll make it right, I’d be glad to see it well executed.