Please Feed The Animals

“If I hadn’t lost my job in advertising I never would have ___________________________.’”
That was it. Seemed simple enough. Yet, when I sat down to be interviewed for Erik Proulx’s movie about what people in the ad world are doing with the “opportunity” posed by unemployment, I looked back at the director and said, …well…I actually said nothing.

I couldn’t answer the question. At least I couldn’t put my answer into words. And even though we came back to it more than once, I still never really gave a decent response.

Not that a few things didn’t flash through my mind—from the practical (“If I hadn’t lost my job in advertising I never would have finally painted the trim on the house”), to the essential (“…I never would have organized my work and put it on the Web”), to the patronizingly obvious (“…I never would have been able to spend so much ‘quality time’ with the family”)—I just didn’t say any of those things. Not even a pithy copywriterish statement about how being laid-off actually opened a small window for me to make a documentary film about surfing and cystic fibrosis.

Nope. I didn’t say any of those things. Instead, I left the director and his fabulous RED camera hanging, in all its HD glory, unable to fill-in the blank with anything sound-byte worthy whatsoever.

That’s because the real answer to that question is actually much deeper and more career-redefining than I was prepared to say.

News flash: Not having a job gives you a lot of time to think. A lot. All that energy that used to go into thinking about clients and “creative storytelling” and “brand experiences” needed to go somewhere (and my house only has so much trim to paint) so that left me with only one client on the payroll that I needed to worry about. Me.

It’s a new and unusual place to be and not without its challenges. I guess the irony is that we as ad people are supposed to be the experts on how to create a brand for someone else—and most of us are pretty bad at creating one for ourselves.

This goes back the whole outside perspective thing that agencies have been selling for decades, but it needs to change—at least when it comes to ourselves. We have no choice. Our own personal brands are being defined whether we consciously do anything about it or not. (Have you Googled yourself recently? Hit the “images” button? You might want to do something about that.)

It’s interesting. As creative people we used to be defined by where we worked and what we worked on. This is no longer true. The Web and the continuing evolution of social media have made us all much more in control of our own personal brand. We’ll take that brand with us wherever we go. On a certain level, we’re all content creators working outside the system now, no longer at the complete mercy of a client’s production budget or the whim of an editor at Adweek. We can always be producing and publishing for ourselves and about ourselves if that’s what we really want to do. This is just the way the world is.

Ad people should be the ones who get this more than others—not sure that’s the case, though. The first step is to realize it. The next is to do something about it. So that’s what I’ve decided to do.

Right now I’d call my brand a work in progress. It definitely needs a refresh—this is advertising, after all. If you’ve been cruising in the same job for more than, say, three years, chances are, given the shifting earth below us, you might need to do the same.

And if I hadn’t lost my job in advertising I still wouldn’t have figured that out.

So at least I got that going for me.

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