If you read this blog last Thursday you might recall that I posted the following comment from Dave Trott’s blog:

In my first job I made friends with a freelance writer. He never wanted a permanent role because he thought it would make him complacent.
Every agency he worked for got the best out of him. If they didn’t, he figured they wouldn’t ask him back.

I was going to expand on this point, but in the end time pressures and sheer indolence got the better of me. However, the comment immediately elicited this response from GOUT-LEGS:

but this whole thing of freelancing and giving it your all because you don’t have a contract! is COD SHIT.
you have no loyalties and you smash out as many ideas as possible, mainly old bottom drawer ones, so that the job is done.
i’m not sure i know of any freelancer who has made a piece of work that made it onto their reel?
(i’m not saying that has never happened, just talking about my experience)
the only time freelancers impress is when they treat it like a placement, mainly because they want to get hired again.

So, two sides to the story.

I don’t know if either of the above people are/have been freelancers, but as there are a lot of them/us about, I thought I’d shed some light on the matter from my point of view (ie, that of a freelancer).

I used to think that ‘freelance’ was a euphemism for ‘unemployed’. I guess for some freelancers it is, but I suspect that the majority find regular work (I have not worked full time since leaving full time employment, but I have earned more money and the time I’ve taken off has been more by my choice than being unwanted). But with more agencies moving towards a freelance model (ie: one which allows for a mobile and expandable/shrinkable workforce in the departments where the amount of work is unpredictable), I think that more people will end up doing it and that will reduce any kind of ‘unemployed’ stigma.

You also get a lot of situations where people work long-term freelance (I believe the neologism for this is ‘permalance’), where you know you’re going to be at a certain place for a minimum of a few months with a view to possibly extending it. I think this is a good way for both employers and employees to test the water and see if they like each other. For example, I recall a very senior creative team who were freelancing a few years ago where, to a certain extent, the company was seeing if they were a good fit to be CDs. But overall the permalance situation offers a little more security of income that is balanced out by the fact that you are expected to become more involved.

With regards to the two arguments above, I think that freelancing is what you make it, but it’s also what the agencies make of you. The insecurity factor can certainly spur you on to work harder than a full-timer, but the lack of involvement can make you work less hard. If you know you’re leaving tomorrow afternoon there might be less of an incentive to pull out all the stops, but then if you want your time at the agency extended, or you want to come back, you know you mustn’t disappoint, and that can light a fire under your arse.

The situation can also be affected by what you’ve been called in to do. By their nature, freelancers are often used to fill in temporary gaps. They are not usually there for the long-term, so often they do not get to see a job through, instead handing over their script or layout for a permanent team to finish. That can be dissatisfying, but you have to accept that it’s part of the job. You also avoid all the headaches and meetings that come with production. Does it even itself out? Probably not, especially when (to take GOUT LEGS’s point) you end up with nothing to add to your reel/website/portfolio.

I have, however, found several unexpected pleasantries about freelancing:

1. You get to meet new people. This isn’t just good because you might make new friends, it’s also good because when you meet people for the first time they are generally on their best behaviour, trying to make a good impression (as are you). So instead of the politics and history that you get from working on a job with that account man who screwed you over a couple of years back, you make a fresh start with everyone, and that tends to make the days really rather agreeable. Equally, you don’t get into a rut with anyone, instead greeting people with open-minded optimism – and that’s a great way in which to have most of your daily contacts.

2. You work on a new things. After a long time in the same agency you will inevitably end up working on the same accounts more than once, and you will therefore bring baggage to those situations: you know the client’s an arsehole or unlikely to buy a certain kind of ad, so you hit the patterns you always hit and that can close off routes to good work. Equally, you get to experience new working methods, different types of clients and new takes on how to improve.

3. You often work on the most interesting projects. I don’t know if it’s coincidence but as a freelancer I’ve worked on more large pitches and ginormous international campaigns than at any other time in my career. As I mentioned above, you get often get called in in an emergency because the brief’s been hanging around uncracked for a month and the absolute final pain-of-death deadline is looming. It’s fun to work at the business end of things. It keeps you sharp and the work exciting. There’s more energy and you feel valued.

4. You get random days off but you still make your money. You know those times you wanted to get going with your novel/see an exhibition/sit on a park bench drinking Thunderbird? Well, they pop up with a welcome regularity when you freelance. That means you can sponge up all those things that make you a better creative and a happier person.

5. Autonomy. Although you need cash, you have the freedom to work when you choose, and that can be very empowering. I remember when I had to buy my own Mac and phone instead of using the company ones. It was not a cheap experience, but it was a really good one. I am responsible for my own shit: how I work, when I work, why I work. Autonomy is widely recognised as one of the keys to happiness, and I have definitely found that to be the case.

The bad things about freelancing really come down the the insecurity about further employment, having to really organise yourself when your brain is not really set up for such an onerous task and the lack of new work to add to your book. These shortcomings are not to be taken lightly, but if you work hard when you do get a gig then that should mitigate these issues.

I must say that I’ve really enjoyed it so far. I may be fortunate in the positions I’ve been offered, but I think you make your own luck. In fact, I have been offered quite attractive full-time jobs that I have decided not to take. That isn’t to say that if the right job came along I wouldn’t be interested, but I feel like freelancing has let me stretch my legs and open my eyes.

And, for better or worse, I have no idea what will happen next.

(By the way, if you need a senior team, Daryl and I may be available to help. See our website on the right to check out our work and contact details. Individual art directing and copywriting also possible.)

I can’t tell you how much fun this blog is.

Actually I can: it’s as fun as shouting some bollocks in a room of 1500 people then waiting all day as ten of them shout back.

Anyway, if that appeals to you, there’s an advertising blog (not mine) that you – yes, you! – can contribute to in complete anonymity.

It’s called Advertisers Anonymous and its content remit is fairly wide: something vaguely related to advertising, I think.

So if there’s anything you want to get off your chest and the comments section of this blog isn’t quite enough for you, log on today and post away.

The google ID is advertanon and the password is advertan0n.

Happy blogging.

PS: if it’s not clear, the ‘o’ in the second advertanon is a zero.

Boring…Boring…BORING!

And it makes no sense.

(Thanks, G.)

When I was at advertising college I did two campaigns that perhaps, on reflection, were not what the people who set the briefs had in mind.

The first was for Bishop’s Finger ale. My campaign consisted of pictures of dying Ethiopians and the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise above the endline, ‘When God gets pissed he gets pissed on this’. The team who set the brief declined the opportunity to crit the work. If I recall accurately they said, ‘We don’t know what to say about this’.

So that was that. Except…by some quirk of timing, when the next team came along to crit the next campaign the work was still on the wall. They loved it and gave me the usual stash of marker pens that visiting teams would bring as prizes.

The next campaign was to publicise a scheme to tag children in shopping centres so that they would not be abducted by strangers if they became separated from their parents. My campaign showed testimonials from paedophiles explaining how much they liked kids. The endline? ‘Tag ’em or we’ll shag ’em’.

This time the team (at GGT, I believe) were unimpressed. I think the course tutor was too. If I remember rightly I got a long lecture about how inappropriate my campaign was and how I had wasted everyone’s time. They were probably right.

What does that tell us? That I was a bit of a cheeky bastard, I suppose.

I also suppose that I thought that it was more important to give my fellow students a laugh than just dribble in with another campaign that would be perfectly decent but nothing more.

Oddly enough, in the time since, I had forgotten about doing both of these campaigns, but was reminded of them years later when I bumped into different people from my course who recalled them.

Well, Bill Bernbach did say that if your advertising goes unnoticed everything else is immaterial.

I like to think he was smiling down from heaven as I wrote those lines.

I know that the real purpose of this blog is to help you waste time during the working day.

That’s fine.

So with that in mind, may I point you in the direction of the man who has wasted large chunks of my weekend…

Louis CK

I know you’ve probably heard of him already and are silently mouthing ‘lame’ at your monitor right now, but I don’t care. Everything he says is funny and true. He does that observational stuff that has, for some reason, made Michael MacIntyre so big, except Louis CK will also tell you about 69ing Hitler and the fact that he doesn’t like his baby daughter because he doesn’t know her and she ‘might hate Jews’.

Anyway.

Enjoy.

(By the way, I forgot that I actually put this Louis CK clip on the blog a year or two back. It’s one of the best.)

I was reading Dave Trott’s peerless blog the other day when I came across this comment from Vinny Warren, creator of Whasssuppp and peerless (in a different way) blogger himself:

after getting fired once (right before xmas, nice) i read an article in the New Yorker the gist of which was “never fall in love with the company because they never fall in love with you”. it made a big impact on me. and made me realize that as creatives we are essentially self-employed, whether we realize it or not. and that our job is essentially to ensure we are marketable at all times. and to never drink the proverbial corporate kool-aid.

Above it was another interesting comment from Rick:

In my first job I made friends with a freelance writer. He never wanted a permanent role because he thought it would make him complacent.
Every agency he worked for got the best out of him. If they didn’t, he figured they wouldn’t ask him back.

These are really worth two different posts, but I’ll try to combine them without fucking the whole thing in the ringpiece.

The idea of creatives being self employed makes a lot of sense. In reality, you motivate yourself, work the hours you choose (I mean work, as opposed to sitting at your desk reading shit like this) and apply your own standards to what you produce. What your boss thinks or makes you do is another matter, but if you’re not satisfied, you do more.

How that relates to falling in love with a company is interesting. Companies obviously create cultures that you may or may not feel an affinity with. For example, the staff at Wiedens seem to drink the Kool-Aid more than the people who work at most agencies. That in turn makes them happier and prouder to work there, perhaps making them stay longer than they otherwise would. However, with nearly all companies, what you are really doing with much of your extra effort is making the man at the top richer. So when you write a line that saves an account or stay until 3am to get a pitch right, the benefit might come in the form of a raise, but more often it’s a pat on the back as the real cash goes upstairs. If you’re OK with that, then you’re OK with that.

But it’s true that companies will not love you back. They can’t – They’re companies: basically, abstract notions that don’t have feelings, no matter how much they suggest they do. The people who work there are one thing, but what happens beyond that is all in your mind.

Actually, the other point is too big to go into now, so I’ll just leave it there and come back to it next week or something.

(Thanks, P.)

UPDATE:

(Thanks, Anon.)

Make your own here.

I’ve had a go:

What it lacks in wit it makes up for in swearing.

I was reading this article about how the UK ad industry has taken its biggest employment hit since 1991, when I noticed something odd.

The UK appears to have had the same number of people working in the industry in 1966 as it did last year, yet in between those two points the population grew by about 20%.

So we either had a very wasteful industry in the sixties where enormous numbers of people were employed to do very little, or we don’t have enough right now.

This would link back to my post from earlier in the week where I wittered on about people being overworked for no increase in their wages. I’m not saying that the sixties weren’t wasteful – I can just imagine the amount of actually productivity that happened through a fug of pipe smoke and brandy fumes – just that today it seems as if each employee is being worked much, much harder.

Lucky the job’s so gosh-darned fun, eh?

The last book I finished this week was Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton.

Unfortunately, the only thing I really learned from this was that I shouldn’t take a dead man’s book and shove it out in the shops without making sure it’s really finished. The book is slighter than even a book of this nature ought to be. Entertaining but kind of empty, a bit like eating a sponge finger.

That aside, you voted Grrr as your Gold Pencil of Gold Pencils. However, it was so close between that ad, the iPod and Surfer that I declare it a tie.

Well done to everyone involved.