Author Archives: Brad

September 30, 2010

Hungry, Hungry Creatives – by Brad

By Brad

This year, the advertising business has been a victim of a brain drain. Some of its top creative talent abandoned executive, and in some cases, CCO posts at agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi, DDB, JWT, BBH, and the like. So what’s happening out here? These are (were?) coveted positions with big salaries and perks, all for a job that’s not your buttoned-up, grey-suit kind of job. You can wear jeans, travel a lot, and be the “creative voice” in the room of important business folk.

Well, just maybe as it turns out, the gig just ain’t what it used to be. Traditional media is declining, and so is the whole belief system that a brand controls its image. Clearly, a brand’s image belongs to consumers, who made up their minds long ago about what they think of Apple, Nike, GM, IBM and their choice of canned black beans. Exercising creativity in advertising is becoming harder and harder. If consumers aren’t prone to listen, or are just tuned out of traditional media altogether (thank you Internet, DVR, iPod, video games and declining print readership), then advertising becomes big companies and brands talking to themselves.

Those in advertising who are paid to foster all this creativity find that their jobs are harder than ever. Everyone is trying to understand new media in a world where new becomes old very fast. TV spots don’t have the reach they once did. And whatever clients want, they want it cheaper. No wonder so many big names have left the building.

So what happens to all this unused creativity? Where is it going? Here in New York, I’m noticing an abundance of new and unusual food trucks with tempting menus. Also, a lot of their marketing is done cleverly, online, through Twitter feeds and Facebook updates. People want to know where the Belgian waffle truck is, as well as the one that sells upscale slushies (tea and coffee flavors), and the one that sells $2 pastries. And graphically, most of these trucks look have amazing color choices and logo design. Are food trucks the new advertising?

It makes sense, doesn’t it? The new food truck movement is what everything advertising should be. It’s creativity at its core, with the advantage of appealing to people’s sense of taste and smell. As for the product itself, you can dress it up, market it, put it on the street, and the people come running, money in hand. Best of all, they come to you. No focus groups. No meetings. No conference reports. And if anyone makes a fuss, the people next in line will vocally (if not physically) encourage the nay saying party to step aside. We want our grilled cheese and milkshake, dammit.

Don’t get me wrong, plenty of ex-CCOs are opening their consultancies or directing documentaries or something of the sort.

But I think making and selling authentic spicy Louisiana gumbo (sorry, no hyperlink) out of a Chevy Suburban would be way more fun. That and I’d get to go home by six.

Brad Mislow likes to eat.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments
August 13, 2010

Someone’s Getting a Job. Is It You? – by Brad

By Brad

The economy blows. Advertising firms are still trying to make sense (and money) from the digital revolution. The unemployment figures get scarier by the month. Who the hell can find a job nowadays? Creative people. That’s who. In fact, after The Big Ad Gig takes place this fall, a few lucky ones will find themselves gainfully employed at impressive global advertising companies (yes, they still exist).

The second Big Ad Gig’s big event on September 30 in New York. By that time the candidates will have been chosen, the work will be ready to present and the judges will be poised to make a decision about who gets added to the payrolls. It’s all done live, in front of an audience at the Times Center. So you know, no pressure. Those judges, by the way, are some pretty big names: Ty Montague, Andrew Keller, Tham Khai Meng, Andreas Combuechen, Jimmy Smith…you know, creative directors who can put you on the payroll and get you an office and stuff. But you got to show them what you’re made of. The deadline is August 23. Directions are on their website, thebigadgig.com.

Now here’s the inspiring part. Last year, a handful of budding creatives were out of school, working menial jobs and just trying to scrape by. Anna Lippert-Haczkiewicz came to Chicago from her native Poland to get a portfolio together at the Chicago Portfolio School. She was working at Starbucks. She entered. Her idea was among the winning entries. She got a 30-day gig at Atmosphere Proximity that turned into a full-time job as an art director. That’s where she is today. Recession be damned. If she didn’t enter, she’d probably still be making tall lattés today. Or folding sweaters at the Gap. Or spending another frigid Chicago winter staring out the window.

But she’s not. She’s working. As are two of the other winners from last year – at Ogilvy and Saatchi & Saatchi. In real creative departments. Getting real paychecks.

I know in the end it’s only very few people who end up employed. But hey, it’s a way in. If you’re one of those people who just can’t get a email returned about a job opening, this could be your chance. They’re asking for entries. They want to hire someone. There’s nothing to lose.

So, are you in?

Brad Mislow is, well, Brad Mislow.

Posted in Gentle Nudging, Job(s) Of The Week, Jobs | 1 Comment
July 30, 2010

The Year of the Reaper – by Brad

By Brad

Well, this feels weird. So here it goes. Since you all (or y’all, depending on what side of Maryland you’re reading this) are my online buds, I’ll share some news about me since writing my first post on this blog a year ago.

Don’t Fear the Reaper, for some strange reason, remains the most read post on pleasefeedtheanimals. I honestly don’t know exactly why. At the time I was without a full-time job for the first time in my career. Yet, for some reason I still don’t understand, I was feeling was tremendously positive despite my layoff and uncertain future. I felt it was within my power to reboot my career. Still, the economy last summer was just plain awful. Like many of you, I was wondering from where my next paycheck would come. I should have been freaking out. When I sat down to write, I found the right voice. It was funny. It was upbeat. It was me. I’m humbled that so many of you have read the post and continue to do so. Thank you. Over and over again.

Since then, amongst my frequent online ramblings, I found a lot of freelance work at various agencies, and did a decent job being an independent soldier of copywriting fortune. I felt fortunate to have found work when I did. Honestly, I think a lot of it was luck. My father always told me, “you make your luck,” and I believe there’s truth to that. Even though I secretly wanted the big TV shoot with the travel and the craft services table and the wrap parties and everything that makes advertising fun, I was happy to accept under-the-radar digital assignments and direct pieces. They kept the lights on, the kids fed, the bills paid.

As fortunate as I felt to be finding steady freelance, recently, a full-time job presented itself. I thought long and hard about it. I remembered my last post about someone who turned down an offer in a weak economy. I looked at the news about the continued fickleness of a recovery that just won’t settle in. I accepted. And I’m working with good people who I want to grow with. Perhaps this is my chance to reboot, and to laugh in the face of “the reaper” who I wouldn’t let get the upper hand.

Maybe I’m just having a good year and should simply accept that with the deepest humility. Or maybe I should smugly tell the reaper to take a hike. I’ve got ads to make.

Epilogue: If the happy ending of this post turned your stomach, or made you throw up a little in our mouth, then here’s a hyperlink to agencyspy, where there’s an ample supply of snarky comments to fulfill one’s daily dose of cynicism.

Brad Mislow is a senior copywriter and just wants to please you.

Posted in Karma, Layoffs, Survival, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments
July 8, 2010

Do you take it? – By Brad

By Brad

This article has caused a recent uproar on the interwebs lately. To sum it up, a 24-year-old college graduate lives at home with Mom and Dad. He’s been looking for work since graduating in 2008 with a PolSci degree (I know, I know). His search yielded one result, a $40K-a-year offer as an insurance claim adjuster. And he turned it down. According to more than 1,000 overwhelmingly angry commenters, this young man made the dumbest move of his life. Others are outraged that a child of privilege has the option of being choosy when so many would jump at such an opportunity for full time work.

So it made me think about those who haven’t had a full-time job offered in some time. Say you’re offered a job at an agency you’re not crazy about, doing work you don’t want to do…do you take it? Times are tough. Do you suck it up? Let your portfolio take the hit? Just to keep the bills paid?

There’s one camp that says, “of course you take it.” Any job’s a good job. Those bills don’t pay themselves. If you have a family, they’re not going to stop eating or needing new clothes or getting sick, etc. You stick it out until something better comes along. Or just make the best of it. Or both.

Then there’s the other camp. Hold out (and hold your breath). Trust your gut. Wait for the next thing to come along. That choice job offer should turn up someday.  Maybe it does. And maybe it doesn’t.

A career in advertising is judged by the quality of work one completes. Awards are won. Parties are attended. Rockstars are made. That’s what we all aim for. In rough economic times, those goals may just have to wait. Your reality may be way bleaker. If you find employment, freelance or full-time, you may be called in to work on unglamorous client-driven projects: newsletters, direct mail, banners, Facebook pages, etc. You’ll get paid to do it. You don’t have to do it. But do you?

Brad Mislow is a freelance writer type person who loves fresh peaches in the summer.

Posted in Survival | Tagged , , | 16 Comments
June 22, 2010

The Black Hole – by Brad

By Brad

Anyone looking for a new gig knows that lonely and confusing feeling. The one which you’ve done all you can to get the attention of anyone who can hire you. You’ve emailed. You’ve called. You’ve emailed again. You’re waiting by your cell phone, trying every Jedi mind trick you know to get it to ring. Mine involve a lot of scrunched-up facial expressions and hand motions, to no avail. Must consult Master Yoda on that one.

Basically, you’ve found yourself in the limbo world of radio silence, and you don’t know what to do next. Lord knows you need that job, but all you’ll settle for is a fucking phone call or email saying “Hi. We got your message and you [got the job/didn't get the job/we're not deciding anything till the boss gets back]. Something. Anything.

No one sets out to be a stalker. It’s just too time consuming and far too creepy. And the cheerier you sound, the creepier it is. I bet if I listened every one of my follow-up voice mails, anyone would conclude that I’m a bumbling idiot or a serial killer. Because behind the breezy, casual “hey, I was just seeing if you looked at my work and made a decision yet” is “will you people just hire me already? Don Draper is not going to magically appear and write banner ads for salad dressing. So clear off a desk and brew a pot of heavily caffienated coffee. I’m coming over!” Nope, can’t do that. That’s why there are security desks and large men behind them.

Has sending brief but cordial rejection letters gone the way of the Gulf Coast sea turtle (ooh, too soon?)? They were all the rage when we were fresh out of portfolio school. Friends of mine used to post them on a wall of the house they rented. The jist of them all was:

Dear____,
Thank you for your interest in ____ agency.
Unfortunately, (lame excuse here).

We wish you luck in your endeavors.

Signed,
someone’s actual name.

As trite as that is, at least it was a response. The crazy thing is that nowadays it takes a fraction of the time to bang out an email. No envelope. No stamp. No mail carrier. And yet, so few places do such a simple act.

We’re all big boys and girls. We can handle the rejection. If we can’t, why the hell would we want to work in advertising, a business, in which more often than not, you hear the word “no”?

So all your follow-up emails and voice mails just go down a black hole, I guess. Just digital bits and bytes gone forever, sucked into a galactic vortex. That is, until some ad or project you worked on goes viral, wins an award, or gets the attention of some very desperate creative director needs a warm body right now to bang out ideas that were due three days ago.

Hey, sometimes you take what you can get.

Brad Mislow has a new website! It’s bradmislow.com! Clicky clicky clicky!

Posted in Kvetches, Survival, Uncategorized | 12 Comments
June 3, 2010

The Short Attention Span Career – by Brad

By Brad

I was in a meeting this week and someone asked me how long did I work for my first agency.

“Eight years,” I said.

Everyone looked up.

Judging by the expressions around the conference table, you would’ve thought I was the 2,000-year-old man.

(with a Mel Brooks old man accent): Let me tell you about 1999! Oy! The black sketch books we carried around! People listened to music on CDs! Oh boy, were they shiny! You would stack them on your desk like waffles! We didn’t know any better!

Eight years in advertising is an eternity. My next job lasted two. As a freelancer, I now count work cycles in weeks. Sometimes, in days. I guess the next logical step would be to work at a place for eight hours before moving on somewhere else.

Longevity used to be celebrated. End of year holiday parties would call out people who worked at an agency for 10, 20, 30, 40(!) years. It’s one thing to read a book by David Ogilvy. It’s another to have actually reported to him.

Ad people like to move around. We all know that many agencies don’t do much to encourage longevity any more. There’s kind of a natural flow of hirings and layoffs to keep agency culture fluid. This is not necessarily a bad thing until you realize that no one at in your department knows anyone above a certain level on the org chart, or where the damn toner cartridge is.

I once read that people under 40 in today’s workforce will change careers seven to eight times in their lifetime. I’m starting to see why.

They aren’t given much of a choice.

Unless they don’t want to eat.

Brad Mislow is a regular contributor for this site and an irregular person overall. If you see him, say hello.

Posted in Survival, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 6 Comments
May 19, 2010

Pop!

By Brad

I’m a sucker for meaningless milestones, and believe it or not we are experiencing one right now. Seeing that we’re approaching the summer of 2010, that means we’ve hit the 10-year-mark of the bursting of the dot com bubble.

Let’s take a trip through time, shall we?

It’s spring/summer 2000. The NASDAQ is hitting the 5,000 mark. The print (chuckle…) magazine the Industry Standard is as thick as a phone book and practically bursting with ads for start-ups – all of which are as graphically confusing as their company’s business models. AOL and Time Warner just completed the “merger of the century.” Everyone has a Motorola Star-Tac cell phone and uses them for phone calls (really!). If you worked in advertising then, you were working on at least one goofy dot com account (most likely doing traditional advertising for them, ironically) that acted as if they had more VC money than BP, pre-spill. You sat through PowerPoint presentations in their downtown offices staffed with private chefs and furnished with billiard tables, table tennis, foosball and some archaic video game from the 80s. Every presentation showed how the company was going to “change the way we _____ ______”, and was followed by a slide of future profit projections represented by an arrow, pointing ever-upward.

Didn’t exactly turn out that way, did it, class?

For us in the ad biz, 2000 was the beginning a long process of downsizing and constriction, leading up to today. Agencies began to shrink. Layoffs began. Expense and production budgets were slashed. Then came 9/11 and things got worse. The housing bubble that excited most of America didn’t reverse the downward spirial of traditional advertising agencies. Years of steady decline continued with the rise of digital media. Then came 2008, and the rest is history.

The immediate aftermath of the 2000 crash was quite a shock. First of all, our sugar daddy dot com clients disappeared. No more hanging out in hip downtown lofts. No more lavish dinners/bar tabs on the company dime. However, if you wanted a deal on used ping-pong tables or Aeron chairs, just name your price. Second, people who left advertising, finance, law, etc., for dot com glory and riches soon returned to advertising, finance, law, etc. They were somewhat humbled that they had to return to Career Path Plan A in order to make a living like normal folk. Lastly, creativity in advertising took a hit. Creatives had the run of the land in the dot com boom in 1995-2000. Don’t believe me? Look up TV spots of that era for outpost.com (hamsters shot out of a cannon), pets.com (a fucking talking sock!), the initial yahoo ads (talking dolphin, especially), the initial Etrade ads (money up the wazoo)…I could go on. The point is it was a time when outrageousness was expected and demanded. These companies needed the attention of consumers and investors alike, and you didn’t get it by being quiet or humble, so it was thought. After the burst, creativity took a hit and most companies wanted conservative messaging. The pendulum had swung. 9/11 made it worse. Then we had to be conservative and patriotic. Don’t question it, do it. We’re at Code Orange, for chrissakes.

Ten years after, here were are. Many of us are still in advertising, and to us those days of the dot com bubble are as distant as those from the Mad Men era. It’s a very different business now. Some say that’s the last time advertising was fun. They may be right.

What were you doing in advertising in 2000? What accounts were you working on? What was the most outrageous/excessive assignment you found yourself doing? When was the moment you said to yourself, “this is BS and is going to fall like a house of cards one day”?

Please comment. The time machine is on.

Brad Mislow is a freelance senior copywriter who’s worked on…oh I think you know me by now.

Posted in Layoffs, News | Tagged , , | 10 Comments
May 5, 2010

ABC – Always Be Checking in

By Brad

It has never been easier to be in touch. Email. IM. Texting. Facebook. Linkedin. Tweets. I would say cell phones and landlines too, but no one answers them any more. So forget phone calls.

Advertising is a social business. And it’s full of social butterflies. It’s been that way long before social media, or even before the whole damn Internet. Ad folks populate bars like nobody’s business. We drink. We talk. We party. We hook up…um…different post topic. I digress…

My point is that if you’re unemployed, underemployed, overemployed, happy at work or having visions of setting the place on fire, you should always be checking in with people you know on the outside. Always, always, always. You know who to reach out to. Your former co-workers, producers, post-production folks, recruiters and anyone else who may know something that you don’t. This is how people show up at a new job on a Monday after losing their old one the week before.

Opportunity is a fleeting thing in advertising. It will breeze by you if you’re not looking. And nowadays, it’s hard not to be looking. Linkedin updates. Overly excited job-related tweets and status updates. Ad blogs that are updated several times a day. Anyone out there remember when the new Adweek (print version) arrived at your agency and you had to pass it around? People would photocopy the classified job postings on the back pages, oh-so-slyly, and then work the phones behind a closed office door. Now you can have an interview booked without leaving the meeting you’re pretending to care about. That’s progress.

So always be working those contacts, and you may land a new job you’ll soon be tired of after a few months. Or it could be the one you always dreamed about. How should I know?

Brad Mislow. Freelance Senior Copywriter. Blogger. Frequent networker. Non verb-user.

Posted in Gentle Nudging, Jobs | Tagged , , | 1 Comment
April 19, 2010

Be a MacGyver

By Brad

Oh man. I’ve been battling a whopper of a digital brief lately. The assignment is nothing special, but it’s one of those “make some banners now and make the idea big enough so we can launch a new campaign from it.” So, you know, no pressure. Yet it’s been a tough nut to crack. And every day, I’m getting my ass kicked by this piece of paper. My team and I think and scribble and think and play online and think some more. Every night around 9ish, our ideas look pretty good. And around 9ish the next morning, they suck. So we start over. I look at the brief for the millionth time. “This brief’s a piece of shit,” one of us says as it’s tossed across the room. I walk around the office for signs of inspiration and leftover meeting food (there isn’t any). I return to my desk. I look at the brief again. Except it doesn’t look like a brief any more. It’s a time bomb. There are wires. So many wires. What do I do? This thing’s gonna blow. I’m frustrated. Stuck. I start the litany of “if onlys” such as “if only we had a bigger budget…if only we had some sound…if only we had a celebrity voice over…” If only I wasn’t such being a whiner. Briefs like this aren’t solved by whiners. They’re solved by MacGyvers. Someone who can look danger in the eye and beat it with nothing but a paper clip, sandpaper and lemon juice. Sometimes, that MacGyver fella has got to be you. Grab your needlenose pliers and save the day.

Not all assignments go smoothly. Some make no sense whatsoever. Frequently, the “figuring it out” part is saved for the creatives. Lucky you. No one knows how it’ll turn out. And yet, through the fate of the cosmos, this enigma of a riddle ended up on your desk. Whining, venting and complaining don’t move the deadline. Who said what we do is easy? Who said it was fair? Who said every assignment would be awesome? We are taxed to find the answer. Somehow. If we value our jobs. We burn the midnight oil. We burn the midday oil. We load up on caffeine and sugar. We fart around on YouTube looking for inspiration. We do what we do till the ideas flow. Then we have the rest of our careers to wonder why we didn’t do it differently.

MacGyver wasn’t a whiner. He got out of every mess looking like a champ. He would have made a good ad guy. Then again, he never had to deal with client bureaucracy, Facebook and impractical banner sizes. Still, I bet he’d make it to the closing credits, looking awesome, as his mullet victoriously flaps in the wind after saving the day, yet again, just in time for the local news.

Brad Mislow drank waaaay too much coffee today.

Posted in Ideas, Survival, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 3 Comments
April 5, 2010

RIP The Portfolio Breakfast

By Brad

“He’s dead, Jim,” Chief Medical Officer McCoy would sadly report to Captain Kirk every time some poor low-ranking Enterprise crewmember was (predictably) killed on some godforsaken outer planet by a Klingon or some perceivably undefeatable alien life form. Shatner, uh, Kirk would inevitably display a dramatic, but masculine burst of emotion before reassuming command of the mission.

Obviously, I’m talking about the decline and fall of print media.

Is it too early too call it dead by TKO? In case you want to think otherwise, here are some cold, gory details: newspapers have slashed a fifth of its journalists since 2001. Magazines are dropping like flies. 367 magazines ceased publication in 2009; 525 in 2008; and 573 in 2007. Do you live in Detroit and want a paper delivered to your home? Well, t.s. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is allegedly hemorrhaging $1 million a week(!). Even if that figure is off by a few ten thousands, that business model is no way sustainable. Period. Professional photojournalists are now seeing their work being undercut by amateur photographers using cheap digital cameras and cell phones. And, as you all know, ad sales are way, way, way down. And here we are.

At a recent portfolio breakfast gathering, I approached the artist rep and asked her what she thought of all this. Don’t get me wrong, the work being presented was gorgeous. All the usual contenders were on display – the celebrity book, the borderline pornography fashion/beauty book, the food book, the industrial imagery book, the airbrushed-in-Photoshop book, etc. The work is always great. It’s amazing what some people can do with photography. The sad thing is assessing the value of this kind of work in a digital age.

So I asked this artist rep about it and she said she no longer brings in new photographers unless they can produce video as well. That’s smart, I wondered, but is it enough? “Hope so,” she said. These reps are smart people. I figure they’ll find a way to provide talent to ad agencies. In the meantime, there’s all this great photography with very few places to put it.

The digital part of me doesn’t mourn the decline of print media at all. By nature, it’s environmentally unfriendly, not-to-mention full of obsolete material and in most cases, of poor editorial quality. I don’t recognize many magazines anymore based on their content, with the exception of the New Yorker or the Economist (stop rolling your eyes). There have been so many editorial reorganizations in the last 20 years that the end result is a bad product.

But I do mourn the loss of an art form as old as paper itself. The blank page was exactly that – a great place to start. As an idea person, it was a joy to find a way to fill it with the smartest way to sell a product. Good ones were framed in the lobbies of client and agency alike. Great ones were awarded. And now, it’s time to move on. Years of layoffs in the print industry and advertising industries have gone too deep. At this point, all we can do is slowly wait until the plug is pulled and we watch the patient slowly flatline. It was a good long run. Let’s bow our heads in silence, and get back to making the next iPhone app that will keep people occupied in waiting rooms, DMVs and airports everywhere.

Brad Mislow is freelance senior copywriter in New York, and a regular contributor to PFTA. He wanted so badly to work for Rolling Stone when he was 16, and is happy his career didn’t quite work out that way. Oh well.

Posted in Survival | Tagged , | 6 Comments