We see it in every competition judging. A good piece of work that just misses the cut because of one glaring  flaw. Something in the ad that I equate to a ‘turd in the punchbowl” — a phrase i picked up from a former business partner. And this flaw is almost always a client directive. We can tell. In the end, it gets in the way of the ad’s design, and subsequently, its message. I just returned from judging the Ocala Addys and the ad that almost made the cut in this competition was an ad for Spivey Aesthetic Dentistry. It was a smart looking ad effectively executed on a budget using a stock photo of a beautiful woman smiling wearing luxurious sunglasses. The image is full bleed and tightly cropped. The headline reads “VIP sunglasses: Louis Vuitton. VIP smile: Spivey Aesthetic Dentistry.” And there’s a nicely designed, albeit a bit oversized, logo in the corner. Nice, right? Well, below the small, nicely typeset headline there is a completely obtrusive, random mess of contact information and a photo portrait of Dr. Spivey in a block knocked out of the photo that is so large that it over powers everything that is working in the ad. My first thought was that this was an ad for new condos geared to a young, affluent crowd. The block of information the client has forced into this ad actually looks like a giant business card for a real estate agent — with the requisite photo of the agent. A simple line of contact information at the bottom of the ad, near the logo –without the portrait– would have saved this ad from it’s failure as an Addy entry and probably as a piece of effective communication. My former business partner had another name for what the client created here: a sales prevention device. Dr. Spivey, listen to your designer. He or she is a professional and they understand communicating in print. They don’t tell you how to whiten teeth or make caps, don’t tell them how to design your advertising.