This article was originally written in 1992, after I’d been freelancing for a year at Ammirati & Puris. Then updated in 1998. Admittedly, it has a certain amount of hubris which was a reflection of the times. Since then, the ad industry has changed more than anyone would have imagined. As have I.
In late 1992, shortly after the first Gulf War, when the United States was heading into a recession and ad agencies were still reeling in the wake of mega-agency mergers, a change was taking place in the way ad agencies were employing creative talent.
At the time, over 200 Kuwait oil well fires were still raging out of control. I saw them as a metaphor for the ad industry, a place where I’d spent most of my adult life making a living as an art director. During the following seven years the economy improved and some of the names changed but the manic way advertising agencies handled business did not.
Things Change
It’s common knowledge that a lot of creatives were fired during the takeovers by big conglomerates in the late ’80s in order to lower agency’s overheads and fetch higher sale prices. WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, Interpublic and EURO/RSCG were paying top dollar to build international networks. But after the smoke cleared and the shuffling around of people and accounts quieted down, they faced the task of doing the same work but with dramatically smaller staffs.
As a result “brush fires” were breaking out all over. And the use of freelance exploded. They could have run ads that said: 'Wanted: Experienced Firemen', on call, ready at a moments notice to help put out the flames.
Like a vast Kuwait desert covered with oil well fires that keep springing back to life no matter how much water you throw at them, the enormous sums agencies spent on freelancers could not stop the searing changes that were happening to the American advertising landscape. David Mamet made a film called, “Things Change.” Like the characters in the movie, art director and copy writer careers were suddenly being up-ended by rapidly shifting circumstances. But I don't believe it was a change ad agencies anticipated.
Crisis du jour
It was the perfect environment for entrepreneurial minded freelancers. All it took was a good portfolio, a PC and a thick skin. And talent helped, too.
The winter holidays were the hottest time of the year for freelancers. Most agencies close for the holidays and many of their staff take extended vacations. The need for help from Thanksgiving through New Years was so great, that for an industrious freelance team it wasn't unusual to answer three alarms (freelance projects) at a time. Some in fact were quite alarming.
Just before the Christmas of ’93, DDB/Needham, a large well respected Madison Avenue agency, still remembered for, but lacking the talent of its Doyle, Dane, Bernbach days, hired 13 different freelance teams. They were paying $1200 a day, (per person) to quickly come up with new ideas for Excedrin, to replace the agency’s storyboards that had tested poorly. Ironically, as the frustrated creative director and account supervisor confessed, the client controlled the testing. And the way they were running the tests, they could not determine whether or not the advertising ideas they were presenting could sell the product.
Each freelance team submitted perhaps a dozen new campaigns. Two weeks of last minute scrambling to save a $40 million piece of business. Jack Mariucci, the creative director, had spent his entire career at the former Doyle, Dane, Bernbach and knew what great creative was. But like so many agency CDs trying to satisfy a client who didn’t know what good work was, he was powerless against the testing. The client chose two storyboards from the new batch to put into the test. They eventually ended up running a TV spot created by another agency. DDB was toast. Excedrin moved on. Jack has since retired. I hear he prefers Tylenol.
The price of fame
The price agencies are paying for running their offices leaner and meaner is that many have become just that. Overworked, chaotic work environments are now the rule not the exception. Hanging on the wall of one of advertising’s more famous creative shops, Chiat/Day, I sighted a large handmade paper barometer with its arrow pointing to the agency’s clients listed around its perimeter. It was aptly labeled Crisis du Jour.
If there’s low morale and a lack of esprit de corps it starts at the top. You might call it is the trickle down theory of disloyalty. Having survived the age of hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts we’ve all read about how agency fat cats bought and sold each others agencies like so many pork bellies, behaving like commodities brokers on amphetamines, while their employees worked late nights in an environment of diminishing returns.
Saatchi & Saatchi (UK) bought William Esty, Backer & Spielvogel and Ted Bates (all based in NY) then merged them together and renamed it Backer Spielvogel Bates. With so much chronic disruption most of their clients left. The final reorganization in a last ditch attempt to hold onto what few accounts they had left, they recast what was left in the U.S. as Bates Worldwide. Unlike their international network, however, in the U.S. Bates had a reputation as being truly anti-creative. So keeping, much less attracting, any top creative talent without paying a lot, became impossible. There was however, a Saatchi & Saatchi subsidiary, but not part of Cordiant PLC (formerly part of Saatchi & Saatchi) before it was changed to M&C Saatchi. Confused? There’s more.
Any ad agency that continues to rename itself in hopes of attracting new business, either doesn't like what they've become, or doesn't know who they are.
Doyle Dane Bernbach, and Needham Harper Steers merged to become DDB/Needham. RSCG (France) bought Messner, Vetere, Berger, McNamee, Schmetterer and various other agencies across the country, BBDO is part of OmniCom which includes Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Merkley Newman Harty among others. Interpublic Group merged Ammirati & Puris into Lintas to become Ammirati Puris Lintas. Also part of Interpublic is Lowe & Partners/SMS, formerly Scali McCabe Sloves and Lowe Howard Spink (UK), also the Martin Agency (Richmond) Gotham (NY) and their flagship McCann-Erickson. Ogilvy & Mather bought by WPP (UK) also bought J. Walter Thompson. Waring & LaRosa was folded into Young & Rubicam, and Grey. Y&R also includes many smaller agencies including parts of Dentsu (Japan’s largest agency), Wunderman Cato Johnson, The Lord Group...formerly Lord Dentsu, formerly Lord Einstein Oneill formerly Lord Federico Einstein before it was bought by J.Walter Thompson. TBWA a well respected international agency, mostly known for its Absolut Vodka print campaign was unable to build a strong presence in the U.S. so they bought Chiat/Day (Venice Beach, CA) notorious for strong creative but financially on the ropes. Prior to this Chiat/Day had merged with an Australian agency and for a short time renamed itself Chiat/Day/Mojo. Now its TBWA/Chiat/Day. Neither founder, Jay Chiat or Guy Day remain. These mergers, acquisitions, takeovers and alliances involving billions of dollars have, in less than ten years, have not only displaced thousands of people but has turned a respected craft into a firesale commodity.
At the end of the first Gulf War in 1992 President Bush proclaimed the world had changed for the better and called it the New Order. For ad agencies you could call it the New Disorder. The recession that followed that war was felt all across America but no industry was hit harder than advertising. It’s been estimated that a third of the advertising community were out of work during that period on any given day. Many who were fired never returned while others freelanced or worked part time. Many of the best people today continue to freelance.
Unless you just moved here from Bosnia it’s obvious that the standard of creativity also suffered. Because when the priority is to save the building from burning down, it’s the occupants who go up in flames. At some ad agencies priorities get very mixed up in the heat of battle.
At one former large American agency, N.W. Ayer, I overheard an ACD point out to his pre-occupied Creative Director that 5 freelance teams were working on Summer’s Eve Douche, a tiny unprofitable account while a General Motors assignment to promote their year end sales event worth potentially $50 million in billing had gone unaddressed for weeks. So, in a mad rush after a few days of intensive work, ideas were hastily storyboarded, mounted and flown out to Detroit for presentation to the client. The project was quickly awarded to another GM roster shop. This is the same agency that years before had produced famous work for AT&T (Reach out and touch someone) and The U.S. Army (Be all that you can be), both having moved on to other agencies as well. Summer’s Eve may yet still be there.
The Big Lie
For years agencies were understandably very reluctant to let clients know that freelancers were working on their accounts. For some agencies it can be embarrassing. It can reveal their shortcomings. One result is that there’s less client contact by the people actually creating the ads, which arguably contributes to the compromise of the work. Unless your name is Hal Riney, no one can sell a great idea better than those people committed to it, who are with few exceptions the people who created it. For a creative minded freelancer to produce their own work they’ve got to sell it themselves. An often rare and privileged opportunity.
On the other hand, freelancers don’t particularly want to attend agency meetings more than they have to, much less meet with the client for hours on end hearing about their inflight movie. It’s not that freelancers don’t want to present their work or defend it, or handle agency requests to change it, or client concerns to revise it or rethink it or even start all over again. That’s par for the course. Freelancers freelance so they can avoid the stress of everybody else’s stress.
To a freelancer, or to staff creatives for that matter, there are two kinds of advertising projects.
The real ones: From a client that needs to run advertising immediately. A client that’s ready to see your ideas, approve them, go into production and run them.
And the other kind: Which account for most assignments. Generate ideas for meetings, focus groups, strategy re-evaluation, preparation for selling an idea up the corporate ladder to bosses and bosses of bosses, eventually to never get produced. Or it gets quickly produced for a test.
My portfolio, like many other creative people who like to show original thinking, in addition to containing produced ads is also comprised of “comped” ads. Ads that look like the real thing, are photographed and written like the real thing, but have never been seen by the real thing: The Public.
One potential drawback is that comped ideas can be and often are “borrowed” from a portfolio. Bill Clinton may have had an inappropriate relationship with the truth. Unfortunately, so do some creatives.
I remember once showing my portfolio to a headhunter for the first time when she casually commented that she liked the work but had seen it before. The only problem was she was referring to very expensive full-color highly complicated to produce spreads for Gallo wine. As anyone knows who’s ever worked on Gallo, 99.9% of the work presented to them in Modesto, California is killed. These ads never ran. Apparently a young assistant art director who briefly worked for me at Armando Testa where I had produced the work had secretly taken copies of the campaign and put it in his portfolio. I later heard it helped him get a job at Ogilvy & Mather. The icing on the cake was that this kid wasn’t even working at Testa when I produced the work. I pointed this out to the headhunter who shrugged it off and subsequently told me she’d also seen a version of a BMW commercial from my reel on someone else’s as well. This was surprising as well, as I was the only creative who’d worked on it except for the copywriter and she wasn’t talking about him. I later found out that another writer from the agency where I’d produced the spot had been asked to change a word or two for legal reasons and so apparently felt it was ok to put it on his reel. A $675,000 BMW spot that took me 6 months to get approved and produced.
The other side of the truth is that freelancers are as guilty as anyone of recycling good ideas. Most ideas go through so many changes at big agencies that by the time they are produced they no longer resemble the original idea. Understandably, when given very little time to be brilliant, for some creatives, freelance or otherwise, it’s easier to raise a great idea from the dead then start from scratch. It would seem ethics and talent are at cross purposes when there’s recognition and money involved.
The price advertising paid
Ammirati & Puris, famous for being a tightly run ship diligently built an enviable reputation in the business with clients like BMW, UPS and Club Med was merged with Lintas, a foundering arm of the Interpublic Group of Companies. Lintas had recently lost Diet Coke worth $100 million, MasterCard for $85 million and part of IBM for $50 million. By 1995 the newly formed Ammirati Puris Lintas, reorganizing from the merger within the Interpublic Group reportedly spent $2.7 million that year alone on freelance help. Consequently, they won the $200 million Burger King Account, the MasterCard business back and moved into modern newly designed offices at One Daghammarsjkold Plaza near the UN.
Then several years later to cut costs they virtually eliminated freelance help.
By May 1997, they'd lost MasterCard, Aetna Insurance, Nikon, and Compaq Computer was in trouble, and they didn’t win any new business pitches. Since Ralph Ammirati retired Ammirati Puris Lintas has changed creative directors three times. Just prior to the merger they’d lost BMW and Club Med.
Then, in 1998 they began employing freelance help again. Within one year they started winning new business pitches again. They won Iridium for an estimated $125 million. GMC Trucks for $90 million and Ameritech for over $100 million.
Sadly, APL is no A&P. Their cultures were in complete conflict. Ammirati was built on creativity. While Lintas was created many years before simply as a way to handle large European package good clients when it was formerly known as SSC&B.
To keep those gigantic clients happy, creative suffered. The well healed, finely tuned Ammirati Puris had been swallowed up by a fiefdom of account people and research departments that had little understanding of what it took to maintain creative standards. And more important, didn't care. Creatives had to work around the clock to satisfy the new big client needs. Meetings to plan for presentations to address meetings about presentations. Not an easy place to work for some.
The $400 million Compaq global account became a revolving door for art directors and copywriters and subsequently moved to DDB/Needham without a review. In other words a $400 million account was taken away without a formal creative pitch. With all due respect to the APL creative department, as a freelancer all I can say is, God bless them. The more accounts move around the more work there is to go around.
Producing your own work
As the only freelance art director in the history of Ammirati & Puris to produce a BMW Tv commercial I must confess in retrospect how lucky I was. Producing a television commercial on that account at that agency at that time period was a career boost by any standard... freelance or staff. The creative director, and I might add the person who has his name on the front door, Ralph Ammirati, apparently trusted me enough to have me follow through and produce the work I’d created. Several teams had worked on the assignment before me but no one had sold an idea. The two ACD partners on the BMW account were struggling and were unable to handle the workload by themselves. James Dalthorpe, the art director was a collector of WWII Nazi memorabilia and had moved to New York from Texas the year prior and Ken Segall, the copywriter had briefly been my partner at Chiat/Day, New York ten years earlier.
In the middle of the Tv production in L.A. Dalthorp unexpectedly showed up on the set from covering the print part of the campaign shoot in northern California. I was on location outside Los Angeles with the agency’s executive producer, Ozzy Spenningsby and the director, Lesley Dektor. Dalthorp walked up and stood next to me between takes by a trailer near the set. As I greeted him and attempted friendly conversation, like a petulant 8 year old at a playground with arms crossed over his chest he stared straight ahead ignoring me pretending I wasn’t there. I was the only other person standing there. Looking back I assume that this was his way of showing me how displeased he was that I was producing the Tv while he was off shooting the print. It may have occurred to him that I had also created some of the print he was shooting. Dalthorpe departed just as quickly not to be heard from again for the rest of the production. Later, back in New York at the edit, Ken Segall, unexpectedly showed up interrupting the sound mix and loudly proclaimed his displeasure that I hadn’t invited him. The owner and Creative Director, Ralph Ammirati, known for his calm and professional demeanor happened to be sitting there. Mr. Ammirati, uncharacteristically lost his temper for a moment and told Segall to shut up, or else. After the project was finished, Ken Segall was fired. I was kept on for another assignment. I was told later that he blamed me for getting fired. As Ken departed I remember him nervously shaking my hand as we passed each other through the building entrance saying ...no hard feelings.
When the BMW Tv commercial ultimately appeared and was reviewed in Adweek Ken Segall took credit as the writer. Bill McCullum, a freelancer who was no longer working there had been the writer. Creative people like Dalthorpe and Segall are so desperate for recognition and respect that they’re willing to sacrifice their self respect to get it. A pervasive pitfall among creatives that may help explain the proliferation and desperate pursuit of advertising awards.
What Segall never understood was that as a freelancer the reason I survived through it all was that I never complained. Creative directors hire freelancers because they need help. Complaining is not helping.
Client Conflicts
Unwittingly, clients are as guilty of throwing gasoline on the fire as anyone. Perhaps it’s because they’re also working for companies that were busy merging and acquiring each other for the past two decades. Fact is, clients are ambitious people, too. And they change jobs as often as the average award winning 32 year old copywriter who’s looking for more action and a bigger piece of the pie up the street.
Ironically, when a client fires its agency because of a client conflict, they’re unaware that it’s common practice for their future agency to hire the same people from the previous agency. But having been layed off, they may reappear as freelancers and so remain invisible.
Strangely, account conflicts aren’t an issue when hiring freelance art directors and copywriters to work on a competitive account. For example, when agencies pitch an automobile account they want creatives with car experience. And by wanting the best talent available at that moment competing agencies find themselves hiring the same freelancers. It’s understandable. If you were pitching Mercedes Benz wouldn’t you want people who had first hand knowledge of BMW, Porsche or Jaguar? And vice a versa?
Pitching New Business
New business pitches that require creative presentations may be the most incendiary activity of all. The talent, money and energy it takes to pitch a new piece of business today is burning holes in agency pockets so big that the failure to win often means the crippling of an agency or at the very least serious cut backs to the unfortunate staff left to clean up the mess.
Amil Gargano, a Hall of Fame art director and creative director calls new business pitching “organized lying.” Perhaps organized arson would be more appropriate.
At Ammirati & Puris, where I, along with many other freelancers spent considerable time helping to pitch new business, it was typical for their studio to be so overwhelmed by the presentations that unable to handle their regular business the rest of their creative department came to a stand still. The worst part was when they didn’t win. Like dying embers, the staff so burned out from lost weekends and all-nighters, took an entire week to recover.
Creative leaders versus creative directors
There is a rare breed of individual in advertising whose biggest talent is that they know how to get hired as a creative director. These people possess a very special kind of ambition. Like a blind man lighting a match in a dynamite shed in order to help their seeing eye dog find the door, these self-made men (or women) visionaries see only one thing: Being in charge. For them, running a creative department is a lot like being a committee chairman in the U.S. Congress. No matter how self-serving or partisan they may be, once they’re in... they can run it any way they want.
Though these creative directors may have talent and in fact have created advertising at some point in their early careers that got noticed, they are for the most part incapable of sharing credit with other creative people. They move from agency to agency leaving bruised egos and unhappy staffs wherever they go. But they always seem to find another job as creative director somewhere else. Because irregardless of the bad advertising that is created under their watchful eye there is, particularly in the big agencies, pockets of good ads that get produced too, and in any given year an ad agency will eventually produce something respectable, and the creative director can take credit for it.
Fortunately, this kind of creative director cannot survive without freelancers. Because as their creative staff gets wise to them, eventually they have to find outsiders to do the work.
Jabba the Hutt
David Nathanson began his career at the feet of a famous art director, Helmut Krone at DDB/Needham and briefly worked at a famous hot agency, Chiat/Day. Weighing in at over 300 pounds he thought of himself as a heavyweight in every repect. He always wanted to be a creative director and felt he was ready to be a creative director. With the help of a headhunter and a short film he put together showing how he and Helmut Krone shared the same creative pedigree David Nathanson finally got his chance.
The IBM PC and mainframe business had been successfully serviced at Lintas for years, but after a series of unfortunate events, including the fact that there was no creative director on IBM for over six months because he’d had a brain aneurism... the account was up for review.
After hiring a freelance creative director to handle IBM's ongoing creative projects, Phil Gier, the CEO of Interpublic, and the parent company of Lintas, decided it was time to hire a fulltime creative director. The freelance creative director was offered this staff position but turned it down. Having already been putting out raging fires on IBM for months at Lintas he knew the proverbial building was lost... so why move in?
Enter David Nathanson. Upon getting the Creative Director reins at Lintas as IBM was in review he proceeded to surround himself with the best creative freelance talent money could buy.
To help him hold onto the business he had Lintas spend hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up new offices in the former Chiat/Day building downtown. He had them rent extra Macintosh computers with technical support around the clock. He then put all existing IBM assignments on the back burner that the freelance creative directors were handling and put all of his 300 pounds toward the task at hand: Mounting a giant speculative creative presentation so IBM could behold the breadth and weight of his new vision for them and the agency. Unfortunately, as each ongoing assignment became lost in the shadow of his grand scheme for the future David Nathanson failed to notice one important fact: IBM specifically and emphatically requested that the incumbent agency not do a new creative presentation.
As the freelance creative director who preceded Mr. Nathanson's arrival and followed his departure, I can only attest to his capacity for spending money the agency didn’t have. By helping to create a small spin off agency named L2, to demonstrate to IBM that he would handle their business completely differently from Lintas the big incumbent agency, he presented IBM with exactly what they were looking for: A confirmation of why they put their account up for review in the first place. Lintas couldn't handle their business. And by creating the spinoff L2 and insisting on giving them a big expensive unwanted creative presentation, Nathanson demonstrated that Lintas clearly wasn't listening to them.
IBM took their business to a smaller more creative agency, Merkley Newman Harty. A year later, Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM consolidated all of IBM’s business at Ogilvy & Mather. Nathanson's ride at LIntas' expense was over. He went back at DDB/Needham to work on Compaq Computer as a creative director.
The moving Target
Tony DeGregorio began his career at McCann-Erickson and subsequently left for a smaller more creative agency, Levine Huntley, Schmidt & Beaver. Then he moved to Ogilvy & Mather, Chicago, and then to Lintas, New York as the ECD. As an established ECD, he got a similar job at TBWA, until it was merged with Chiat/Day. He then moved over to Publicis New York (formerly Bloom), and then to Tierney in Philadelphia. As executive creative director of all these agencies he was personally responsible for losing Suburu, Diet Coke, MasterCard and Aamco among other accounts. But despite all this, Tony was still a well regarded and highly sought after ECD. His experience and enthusiasm for talking to important clients and presenting work served him well. And until he retired, he was one of my greatest sources of agency freelance work.
Headhunters
Although headhunters prefer to fill the more profitable staff positions they are sometimes asked by agencies to find freelancers, too. It’s common for freelancers to work with several headhunters at the same time, so over the years everyone has grown to know each other and will recommend jobs to one another. Some agency creative personnel directors are former headhunters and vice versa. Occasionally a headhunter has helped get me an assignment without even asking for a commission from the agency.
Timing is everything for getting projects. Some agencies screen portfolios and interview people over a period of months for a one week assignment, while others hire freelancers on the spot for several months at a time based purely on their reputations.
Negotiating
Compensation. The law of supply and demand still applies: When the penthouse atop the towering inferno invites you over to the barbecue there’s no question you’re going to get the money you’re asking. On the other hand, during the cold, cold summer months when agencies shift to four day work weeks, freelance can be as scarce as a B Train at 2 a.m.
At $500 to $1500 per day you might think some of us are overpaid. Read on.
Agencies don’t pay freelancers for health insurance, unemployment insurance, profit sharing, sick leave, vacation time, personal days, jury duty or even office space for those of us working off premises.
In addition, freelancers have to pay unincorporated business tax and quarterly estimated city, state, and federal income taxes. My accountant figures that I’m in a 43% tax bracket when all was said and done. New tax laws specifically single out independent contractors (freelancers) so that quarterly tax filing now has to be fully calculated instead of based on the prior years income. In other words, we now have to calculate our taxes four times a year.
An agency lawyer at N.W. Ayer, fearing IRS penalties for possibly incorrectly identifying me as an independent contractor ordered their personnel director to have me submit written proof of my status, including signing an affidavit and a disclaimer giving up all rights to any ideas I created for them, as well as a TIN number (different from a social security number). After the work was finished, the personnel director lost the signed original and told me that the agency would not pay me until I signed and returned another original, which she immediately Federal Expressed to me from her midtown office to my home, downtown.
Showing the Book
Long before the digitization of media and the invention of the world wide web, where most creatives post their portfolios these days, art directors and writers had to drop off heavy, bulky, expense portfolios.
At J.Walter Thompson anyone dropping off their portfolio, was expected to sign a release form for all the ideas inside it, just in case they coincidentally showed up later in some of their agency’s advertising. If you didn’t sign, the receptionist was instructed not to accept your portfolio. No kidding.
To make the rounds, smart freelancers had several portfolios available to drop at a moments notice. They had to, because while one agency may want to see you with your book, it's common for others to keep it for a month. A small agency no one has ever heard of might spend months looking through dozens of portfolios being very critical of the contents, while a well known agency will hire a freelancer on the spot simply from word of mouth. Experienced creative directors understand that just about every creative person is better than the work in their book... it’s usually just a question of how much better. Personal chemistry is vital.
Few creative directors will hire Attila the Hun for an assignment no matter how talented he may be... because long after Attila is history they’ve still got to live with their staff. Dropping off your portfolio in the mailroom and then waiting weeks for a response became the drill. I literally had my book collecting dust at an agency for a month never getting it looked at because either the original assignment changed, the person looking at portfolios went on vacation, or the project died and no one had the time to call and ask to have it picked up.
Personal websites has permanently changed this.
A face to face interview with your portfolio is rare for freelancers but it does happen. Usually, it’s because the interviewer is curious what it’s like out there. Every staff employee wonders if the grass is greener or if you’re lucky they’ll want to hire you and brief you on the spot.
Credit, Fame & Notoriety
Freelancers usually aren’t asked to follow through on the production of their ideas.As soon as the fire is put out so are you.Perhaps one of the least admitted oversights in the business is that some staff creatives take credit for ideas generated by freelancers. True, many times they’re asked to follow through on the production but when was the last time you saw credit shared with a freelancer at an awards show?
One popular explanation is that freelancers are believed to be only in it for the money, are well paid for their ideas, and have therefore relinquished all rights to them. Or the agency doesn’t want the client to know who really created the work because it might be embarrassing for them. Sour grapes? No, just a candid observation after spending 22 years diligently putting out fires at over five dozen ad agencies.
On the other hand, there are still creative directors out there who appreciate talent, seek it out, and then reward it– regardless of where it comes from. I’ve been fortunate to know several of them. Ralph Ammirati, now retired, is one. Unfortunately, they’re the exception. These days, the general rule on Madison Avenue seems to be: Please give me something brilliant. Immediately. Thanks. Bye. Then they don’t return your phone calls until the next firestorm hits.
A freelancer’s reputation is more valuable than their portfolio. The best portfolio stuffed with award winning work is worthless if nobody wants to work with the person it belongs to. On the other hand, a well liked idiot is quickly found out and put on the invisible blacklist. It’s called word-of-mouth. And every Creative Director who’s ever hired a freelancer knows that getting a glowing reference from someone they trust is worth more than all the awards in Minneapolis. Unfortunately, this being a mercurial business, you might catch someone on a bad day and have to live down being bad-mouthed about something you don’t have a clue about. Bill Hamiliton for years had an assistant working for him named Chris Becker who used to judge creatives literally by the way they had typed their resumé. In 1987 I was working at Chiat/Day, New York where she told me that. She was married to a lawyer at the time.
Freelancing on premises at certain agencies can be like lighting a match in a dynamite shed. Being brought in at a moments notice, expected to be attentive, sympathetic and instantly brilliant in a crisis driven environment can test anyone’s patience. A good Creative Director knows this and generally accepts a degree of quarrelsome behavior for the sake of the work. Account people are another story.
Young, inexperienced account people often find themselves in overwhelming situations.
At Ammirati Puris Lintas, a young account person was asked by her client for a creative presentation to their 80 board members to give them an idea of their new corporate Tv campaign that was just beginning production. A freelancer was brought in, briefed and proceeded to get things going for a very short one week deadline. Two days later a meeting with the production department revealed that it would cost money that would have to be billed to the client to accomplish this. She didn’t know this. She didn’t have a budget. The project was immediately scrubbed. The freelancer billed for his time. The agency had to eat the cost. Everyone ended up looking bad. No one got what they wanted. Particularly the client.
Driven by love versus working for Money
There are two kinds of ad agencies. Creative driven. And account driven.
Ironically, an experienced freelancer can make more money at a large account driven agency. True, doing award winning work at a Creative agency is more satisfying but an experienced freelancer knows that ultimately it’s about making a living. And because account driven agencies are more likely the ones that purged their creative departments of highly paid talent during the mergers and acquisitions era they’re also the ones that need more help now. And the bigger they are the more they can afford to pay.
Bates Worldwide is an account driven agency. It used to bill over $6 billion. When new freelance creative people are assigned to work on business they must also be approved by the account person in charge of it. Account people at agencies like Bates are unanswerable to the Creative Director so creatives in a sense work for the account department. As unacceptable as that is to a staff creative person, to freelance creative people this is actually a blessing in disguise. Because Account people at agencies like this have lower creative standards and the work can be fairly easy once you accept the system. In freelance terms this is called a cash-cow. Big money, long term, mindless work. They also tend to pay quickly. It lets copywriters save energy for that play they’re working on. And work-a-holics can take on more than one assignment at a time. If you don’t mind compromising your creative standards and giving up your social life, it can be very lucrative.
Another unfortunate consequence, is that by their very nature account executives at places like Bates can wear down even the most talented copywriter or art director. The evidence is in the work. As their production budgets balloon to mind boggling proportions to help cover their tracks eventually the criteria they conjure up with their clients begin to take over. It's the classic tail wagging the dog scenario.
Big budgets can hide a lot of poor decisions at first... until the advertising begins to appear on television and the world reacts to the dull, small-minded committee driven pap that is the result of endless meetings that compromise everything from the simple turn of a phrase to the kerning of the type that’s been reset overnight for the 20th time... to the re-casting of a voiceover for the upteenth time until the life of the poor print ad or Tv commercial has been beaten out of it to the point of unrecognizability. Until finally, the client needing someone to blame for the embarrassing debacle eventually takes his business to another agency. This happened with the EDS account. With nonstop last minute changes, the client spent over $2 million to rush producing a 30 second TV spot in London, only to put it on hold. The account eventually went on to Fallon where they produced some very highly regarded work and won many awards.
Since emerging as a post-merger goliath Bates Worldwide has lost the $400 Mars business, $100 million Prudential account, TWA, Magnovox, all the Miller Beer business including Miller High Life, Lowenbrau, Miller Genuine Draft, Miller Lite which Backer & Spielvogel helped invent and a few other accounts I can’t remember. Freelance heaven.
Comrades
Sometimes when a freelancer gets their work bought by a client, competitive staff creatives feel threatened and may show it in covert ways.
It was the Fall of 1990 during the Gulf War buildup, Operation Desert Shield. Earlier that day I’d sold a Tv campaign to Arrow Shirts, a new client of Ammirati & Puris. I’d been freelancing there for a few months. Prior to the presentation I was unaware that another creative team, staff members Steve Stone and Kevin McKeon were also going to present work. However, they didn’t sell their work to Arrow that morning. Later, back at the Ammirati offices I noticed Steve and Kevin were also working late so I went down the hall to suggest we all go out for a beer. Just as they declined my offer, a mouse ran down the deserted hallway. They said they didn’t see it. I should mention that Ammirati & Puris is famous for having some of the cleanest, most pristine designed offices in the business. The next morning, I came in to find the mouse lying dead on my desk. Also, my temporary nameplate on my office door was missing. I assumed it was some kind of practical joke, but when asked Steve and Kevin denied any knowledge about it. And from then on whenever I ran into them they only referred to me by my last name. One of the mysteries of freelance. I continued to freelance there for most of the year. Steve Stone, openly ambivalent about New York later quit and moved back to San Francisco. Kevin was eventually fired and went to BBDO.
Moral: Freelancers are hired help. They aren’t there to make friends with the staff.
A Team Player
When fighting fires it helps to have the right partner. When I work at home... off-premises, my writer/partner and I can work more productively than on-premises because we’re not encumbered by the daily hallway schmoozers and bored creative staffers who want to know what it’s like freelancing, not to mention the interoffice paper chasing that swamp a lot of agencies. Paper being highly flammable, not surprisingly agencies like to team a freelancer with someone on staff. The downside is that a staff creative may be reluctant to work with an outsider who could be politically inconvenient. On the other hand, someone on staff knows the terrain and can be more available to help sell the work. They also appreciate new blood as much as anybody.
I prefer to bring my own partner. We don’t feel the need to impress each other and we already agree on the best places to eat.
Through pure chance I’ve found myself teamed up with another freelancer who’s a complete stranger. And after working with them some have turned out to be even stranger yet. The depth of insecurity and the lack of talent any one individual can possess is only as mind boggling as the reasons they get hired in the first place. Some creative people are hired simply because they know someone who knows someone. The fact that there are copywriters who don’t know how to write a sentence and art directors who cannot express a complete thought in English tends to make an experienced creative person freelancer or staff, who knows the difference very wary about who he or she is going to sit in a room with for hours on end. On the other hand once in awhile a minor genius will come along that expands your thinking and makes work a pleasure. The right chemistry with the right partner can make you more prolific in one afternoon than an entire week with a doofus.
The Pros and the Cons
When asked to work on premises the freelancer is occasionally given an office that resembles a closet. If provided with a PC it’s usually obsolete or doesn’t work. We’re often not invited to important meetings or given relevant interoffice messages that pertain to the assignment because the people in charge of dispensing the information don’t know what we’re doing there or who we are.
Agency studio and computer department managers, the people responsible for helping creatives put together presentations and mechanicals generally give freelancers their lowest priority. After all, we’re not going to be around long and we have virtually no authority within their organization. Ironically, these days half the people working in their department are freelancers themselves paid by the hour.
If a freelancer is fortunate enough to have an agency enter our work in an awards show getting our name on it can be very difficult because we’ll have been long gone by the time a creative director’s secretary’s new special awards assistant fills out the entry forms.
Having a Life
Firemen are by definition, heroes. An elite group of highly trained individuals ready at the drop of a match. Respected members of the community.
For about the same income I’d get on staff I have more time off. I’m not embroiled in office politics. I can sleep late. I have less job related stress. A more diverse social life with friends who aren’t just ad people. And I have the time to write this.
By working everywhere I’ve been able to meet some of the best and brightest people in the business. I believe I’ve worked on a wider variety of assignments, too. Within any given year I’ve worked on everything from automobiles, fashion, liquor, food, airlines, computers, telecommunications, politics, pro bono causes and even fire insurance companies.
Like fire extinguishers, freelancers have become permanent fixtures around agency corridors. For many art directors and copywriters freelancing is simply the best way to face a future nobody can predict.
Gina Schulman, the wife of the writer Bob Schulman who I worked with for years, put it succinctly: “When you’re freelance you’re part of the solution. When you’re on staff you’re part of the problem.”
Agencies will continue to need special help. Fortunately, it isn't hard to find. Like calling the Fire Department, all they have to do is pick up the phone.
