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.

Brad and I went to the Creative Circus together. He spent many years at Ogilvy and then BBDO, and eventually became an Animal like the rest of us.

Brad has a way of writing stuff you respond to. To date, his “Don’t Fear the Reaper” guest post is the single most read piece on this blog. And “A Bitter Pill” from March 25th already has 27 comments.

He’s passionate about advertising the way a lot of you are. And the way I used to be. Given that I’m doing more of the reinvention thing these days, I thought it would be good to have a regular voice of the industry. So from now on, Brad is no longer a “guest blogger.” He’s a “PFTA Blogger,” complete with admin access.

So, Brad, welcome to the bowels of Please Feed The Animals. Glorious, ain’t it?

Check out this clip from Boston’s View on WCVB – Boston’s ABC affiliate.

As well as this blurb in Boston Magazine.

At long last, the beta for Please Feed The Animals is up and running for your experimentation. Some initial known issues:

•Pleasefeedtheanimals.com still points you to the blog during the beta phase, while beta.pleasefeedtheanimals.com will take you to the career site
•The home page still needs a couple of tweaks. Mainly, the RSS feed of the blog is static and undesigned.
•The portfolio section is not live yet. Look for that in the next couple of weeks.
•The job board is empty. That’s because we are launching the beta to hiring companies at the same time we’re launching it to you.

Once you play around with it, please use the feedback section to let us know what you think. If there are issues or bugs, let us know ASAP so we can fix them.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few amazing people, namely the developers and project managers at Skookum, PFTA’s producer Ted Villa, and the awesome design help of Joe Morris, Michael Durwin, John Szalay, Richard Haynie, Liz Frazier, Conor Feely and Amanda Talbott. Thank you so much for everything you did despite the knowledge that I could give so little in return.

Seems the idea (it’s only still a trailer at this point) about people who reinvent themselves after a job loss is striking a chord these days. Here are just a few of the media outlets that are discussing Lemonade. Oprah, call me. 617-359-8159.

Fast Company

Looking Beyond the Pink Slips: Lemonade the Movie Offers Inspiration for Plan B

PSFK

Agency Pink Slips Inspire Lemonade

AdAge

Ad Agencies: Ad World Layoffs Inspire Documentary

Agency Spy

Lemonade: If You’ve Been Laid Off, This Film is For You

Agency Spy (Podcast Interview)

Today on the Menu: LemonadeMovie/PleaseFeedTheAnimals Creator Erik Proulx

Boston Business Journal (Cover Story)

Lemons into lemonade: Laid-off ad exec finds opportunity in job loss

Boston Business Journal (Lisa Van Der Pool Blog)

‘Lemonade’ is optimism after the squeeze

Jawbone.TV

‘Lemonade’ Movie: Has Twitter Become a Tool For Film Production?

Career Renegade

I Was Fired. And Got My Life Back

idsgn – A Design Blog

When Life Gives You Lemons

Campaign London

Film documents experiences of redundant ad industry workers

Apartment Therapy

Lemonade: The Movie

AdLand

When pink slips rained, Erik Proulx made pink lemonade.

AdPulp

One Day You’re A Creative Director, Then You’re Not

AdRants

Lights, Camera, Advertising

Edward Boches’ Posterous

Coming This Recession: LemonadeMovie.com

We’ll Know When We Get There

Making Lemonade

Minds For Rent

A Film For The Recently Unemployed Advertising Professional

Brainstorm9

Você foi demitido, e agora?

The Denver Egotist

I Got Laid Off And…

AdPunch

The Positive Side Of Pink Slips

Swiss Miss

Lemonade

Career Renegade’s Jonathan Fields interviewed me for the weekly segment on his blog called Career Profiles. Other than neglecting to lower my chair to camera level, I think it turned out pretty good.

If you’re not familiar with Jonathan Fields or his book, get familiar with it. As I alluded to in the interview, he’s doing for careers at large what I hope to do for adfolk…helping them see that their skills aren’t exclusive to a single industry. That what makes you happy and what makes your career can be the same thing. And that you don’t have to rely on a behemoth employer for your livelihood.

Or, you can read the transcripts.

Lots of news to catch you up on. Stop by PleaseFeedTheAnimals.com tomorrow at 2:00 PM EST and I’ll fill you in.

•The pictured logo won by a landslide. Final tally: 222-43.

•Designers have been working feverishly to finish production of the new site. We finally embraced the “many hands” mantra and asked for 1-2 days from a half dozen designers instead of a month from one. I always hoped that PFTA would be “by and for unemployed advertising talent.” I didn’t dream it would happen so quickly.

•Scheduled to meet with Skookum this afternoon to discuss a time line for launch.

•Be on the lookout for the official PFTA Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Those will be up and running by next week.

•You might remember Greg Thomas from this post back in November. Ever since he was my boss at Brokaw, I’ve had immense respect for his approach and intellect toward advertising. Well, Greg has agreed to be my business partner for Please Feed The Animals. I’m honored. You’ll be hearing more from and about Greg as we approach launch and beyond.

•A few people have been emailing me that they are getting interviews and job offers through contacts made on this site. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. Please, keep informing me if that happens for you. I have no way of knowing otherwise.

That’s it for now. Good luck everyone.

The rub on freelancing has been that typically, the juiciest assignments were left for the staff. The role of a contractor was to come in, mop up the garbage no one else wanted to touch, and collect their day rate. No one got hurt. Nice and tidy.

Then along comes Mr. Recession. For the first time in a long time, agencies were cutting bone instead of dead wood, leaving some of the most talented people in the world ripe for the picking.

The level of today’s available freelance talent has game-changing implications. Never in history (and this includes the depression, since advertising hadn’t yet emerged as a career) has so much world-class talent been available for short-term projects. Smart agencies – and even smarter clients – are tapping this incredible resource pool.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that between January and March of this year, freelance job sites Elance.com and Odesk.com alone posted a combined 70,500 jobs from hiring companies looking for contracted work. That represents increases of 35% and 105% respectively. Similarly, the Economist reports that Freelancer’s Union has seen its membership grow by 2,000 – 3,000 month since October, and now has more than 100,000 members.

Now, it doesn’t take a math major to know that fewer new jobs + more layoffs = a growing freelance pool. But when you compare those numbers with the amount of jobs shed in advertising since the recession began early 2008, you get a sense of one direction our industry might be heading.

If an agency has great talent available to them without having to absorb the expense of hiring them full time, why wouldn’t they milk that for as long as they can? And, as newly independent contractors, why wouldn’t we?

There will come a day when advertising agencies start hiring again. But the question remains, if you were thriving as a freelancer, would you want to go back?