As a 15-year veteran of the advertising industry, Erik Proulx once created commercials for brands like Fidelity Investments, General Motors, and Perdue Chicken. He created and produced the campaign that won the Volvo account for Arnold Worldwide, and was the lead writer on that account for almost two years.
Then in 2008, two days after being offered a raise and a promotion, his agency laid him off without ceremony.
Erik is now a documentary and commercial film director. As the both the creator and a subject of his first film “Lemonade,” Erik has front-line exposure to a profound shift in attitude around work and careers.
His experience, combined with the collective experience of the hundreds of people he’s interviewed for Lemonade (the book), has made him an insightful speaker, author, and advocate for personal and professional reinvention. He has appeared on CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, NPR’s “On Point” with Tom Ashbrook, ABC News with Tory Johnson, and several other national print and broadcast media to discuss his expertise in careers and re-employment.
Erik has been a contributing writer to Advertising Age, Adweek, Creativity, Huffington Post, and the Good Men Project. His advertising work has been recognized in local, regional, national, and global award shows. As the both the creator and one of the subjects of “Lemonade,” he has seen first hand that, despite the still-dominant survivors’ mentality that you’ve got to hang on to what you’ve got, more and more (and more) people are becoming disenfranchised with careers-as-usual and finding new ways to make lemonade.
Erik is currently filming a feature-length documentary called “Lemonade, Detroit” about the reinvention of a city trying to redefine itself after the collapse of the auto industry. A 17-minute short version of the film can be seen here.
Erik’s director reel can be seen here.