Or products. I think the only reason to be in this business is that we get to work with the very best parts of our clients' businesses.

So I think every product has magic — if you look at it through the customer's eyes and see the very real needs it fulfills and the problems it solves. Then, once we know what to say, it gets a lot easier to decide how to say it.

Of course, there's no reason to say anything without a solid business objective — building sales or earnings, generally, or subgoals in service of the bigger goals, which could range from brand-building and lead-generation to improved quality and service.

And since it takes cooperation from all of a company's stakeholders — prospects, customers, employees and channel partners — to help reach those goals, it behooves us to communicate with all of them.

Once we're communicating, I do use the creative brief, or message strategy, that Peter Kaufman wrote about years ago in ClickZ. Almost every time I've ever run into a problem over a given piece of creative, it's turned out to be because we thought the message was obvious and so forgot to get the strategy formally articulated.

Finally, I believe that doing consistently good work in this business requires a love of learning — about our clients and their businesses, about technology, about what's happening in the world and how the communications that are all around us keep changing all the time.