Wanted to share a couple of thoughts that began as an email thread.
My #1 rule of freelancing:
Freelancing is it’s own profession, and it takes time to learn, maybe a year. That’s on top of the marketable skills that you already bring to the table.
Here are the other things that I think I have learned in the last year or so as a freelance strategist for various agencies, design firms, and a couple of my own clients:
2. Never say no to any offer to discuss potential work.
This came directly from my friend and former colleague Michael Beavers. Deadlines change, projects get pushed back or canceled, clients find someone cheaper/better/more familiar. Early on I was unsure if a promise of work a couple of weeks away meant that I should turn down other opportunities that came my way. But MB told me that nothing is ever solid until you are walking in the door on your first day. So keep your options open.
3. Don’t confuse being part of the team with being a short-term contract employee.
In particular, set boundaries on your scope and your hours.
This has probably been the hardest for me. My natural tendency has been to take my fulltime mentality into contract work- treat it as an extended audition, help out wherever I can, agree to do an hour or two here and there for other projects. It’s a slippery slope and very hard to figure out how to manage. Don’t forget that at the end of the day you are going to get shown the door (and hopefully be invited back later).
4. Figure out what your optimal schedule is, and then try to build your practice around it.
This seems like a no-duh but I think I have only been clear recently that personally I am trying to work as many hours as possible. I thought for example that having a day or so off a week would be rejuvenating, good for scheduling additional work etc., but it my case I rarely enjoy that extra day and instead would prefer to schedule a longer block of time off between gigs. Your mileage may vary on this.
5. Start by working with one client at a time
Ideally you should ease into freelancing by working with one client at a time. When you’re a freelancer, especially early on, every new project is like starting a new job- you have all the additional burdens of being the new guy/gal. It’s a lot on top of being expected to perform immediately.
Inevitably though you will find yourself juggling 2 or more clients. Managing multiple projects, clients, and agency relationships is an advanced skill that you should work up to. A (former) 10-yr freelancer gave me her rule of thumb: a maximum of 2 agencies regardless, and three projects total.
Be up front with clients if you are working on more than 1 project at a time. Agencies often want to hire you at around 20-25 hrs/wk, which theoretically should allow you to have an additional client. One thing that MB taught me is to be upfront with clients when they hire you less than FT that you will want to use their space, their phones etc to work on either you own business development or other client work at such times as you are not on the clock. It’s fair and much better than hiding out in conference rooms or taking calls on the street.
6. Heed the aura
This is another one of those skills that you figure out over time. An “aura” is actually a term from my wife’s work (she’s a neurologist). People with epilepsy usually have a sixth sense, an “aura”, right before they are about to have a seizure. There is a point when things are humming along in a long-term contract when (with experience) you can tell that things are coming to a close. Meaning, at least for Strategy, that my gigs have tended to be open-ended and I have swung from project to project. When you start to feel the aura, it’s time to go back into sales mode and start figuring out where your next project is coming from. You don’t want to be starting at zero when your project has wound down.
Superbowl Ads offer an amazing window into the public consciousness, or at least what advertisers and advertising agencies believe that the public should care about.
My favorite commercial, by far, was Eminem for the new Chrysler 200. I have never understood why US automakers don’t make more of a big deal about buying American, and I thought this spot struck just the right balance between U-S-A! nationalism and serious-mindedness.
It’s not trying to beat European (or Japanese) automakers at their own game, it says “we stand for something singularly American”- and I think that something that resonates with everyone from Tea Party-ers to inner city minorites. I thought the choice of Eminem was inspired, although adding the Black choir seemed a little heavy-handed.
Eminem is sort of the reverse Obama for hip-hop. Ironically, he makes it safe for Middle America to enjoy rap. Maybe a decade after the NBA, hip hop has come to the Superbowl- but in the sanitized version of a white rapper and The Black Eyed Peas. It’s no coincidence that Eminem was featured twice in the Super Bowl ad line-ups, first as himself for Chrysler and then as a Claymation version for Brisk Ice Tea.
I’m not sure what to make of the fact that user-generated ads held three of the top-five ratings in the USA Today ad meter. I am always amazed the “winners” are (a) humorous (b) sophomoric (c) always star animals. But I guess when it comes to light entertainment and foot-in-the-crotch jokes, amateurs are as good as (or better than) the professionals. I think there is also a disconnect between what ads consumers enjoy, and which ones will get them to break out their wallets. There is still a place for sophisticated emotionally-driven advertising, but I guess for the broadest demographic, the Super Bowl is not the place for it. I just know that I am part of a class that is highly coveted by advertisers, and that I rewound the Tivo and watched the (2 minute!) Eminem/Chrysler twice. I’m not worried about people’s jobs in the agency world, at least not the amazing folks at Wieden + Kennedy.
(L to R: Kal Penn, Nikki Haley, Aziz Ansari, Bobby Jindal)
Not since Apu stormed these shores in 1990 have we seen such a surge in Indians in the popular consciousness. I’m talking about Kal Penn on House (and later in the Obama White House), Aziz Ansari on Parks and Recreation, Bobby Jindal back to national prominence in New Orleans, and most recently, Nikki Haley as GOP candidate for governor of South Carolina. What distinguishes all these Indians is that they’re portrayed as American first. No “thank you, come again” accents, no jokes about all being engineers or 7-11 managers. It’s like all of a sudden they’re the go-to ethnic group to demonstrate how far we’ve come in the post-Obama, post-racial America.
Then there’s the counter-directional examples. First MetroPCS’s bizarre Tech & Talk ads featuring Ranjit and Chad, two walking racial stereotypes. The first spot ran during the Superbowl, and I think The Richards Group is walking a very fine line. And then in the Fall we can look forward to Outsourced, an NBC show from the creator of The Office that plays the immigrant fish-out-water story for laughs (a la Balki from Perfect Strangers) - in this case it’s a gang of (heavily accented) call center workers and a well-meaning, white call-center manager teaching them the ropes of American culture. It’s like Indians are the last ethnic group that’s safe to make fun of.
So which is it? I think India is in a very interesting place in the American consciousness- simultaneously exotic (Slumdog Millionaire) and familiar (Jay Sean).
Is Chat Roulette a milestone in Web history or is it destined to become a footnote that will be forgotten as fast as the Winter Olympics?
A quick recap of the site (and you should definitely visit Chat Roulette yourself): a Russian teenager named Andrey Ternovskiy has created a simple interface that connects your webcam to a random series of strangers from across the world. You or the stranger have the power to move on to the next random encounter at the click of a mouse. It’s populated with bored teenagers, sexual thrill-seekers, and some genuinely creative and interesting people exploring a new medium. You can guess at the rough ratios of each.
Is this the next big thing? I don’t think so, but here are a few thoughts on what Chat Roulette is telling us:
Publicity on Internet time
Ternovskiy launched the site in late 2009 for his friends to mess around with, it was featured in New York Magazine on February 5th, and it reached some kind of apex of publicity with a front page article in yesterday’s New York Times Style section. In between, it’s been reviewed by everyone from hipster satire site LATFH (where I first heard about it) to late middle-aged blogger Claudia Feldman of The Middle Lane: Between Adult Kids and Aging Parents (“I’m not sure what I make of all this except I’m not big on depravity or extremists, and I like our special spot in the Middle Lane.”). From the teen perspective, by the time it gets to this point, it’s so over. I think the more popular the site becomes, the less interesting it will be. When I’ve been back, I see a lot of bored people on the site, waiting to be entertained.
Teens, Sex, and Technology
There’s no question that the focus of this site is on sex. Whether it’s good for anonymous sexualized interactions and therefore has drawn teens, or if it started with teens and they naturally gravitate towards sexual themes is open for debate. But I don’t think Chat Roulette is going to evolve significantly away from this central focus. This is speed dating, Craigslist Casual Encounters style. I think most non-teens are shocked at how explicit it is, but it opens a window into the way teens use technology to express their sexuality to their peers away from the prying eyes of their parents. CosmoGirl and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancies completed a national survey on Sex and Tech in 2008 showing that 21% of teen girls and 18% of teen boys have sent/ posted nude or semi-nude images of themselves. Stickam, “sexting”, and now Chat Roulette all reflect a modern teen’s view of their sexuality – a casual, hook-up culture where anonymous nudity is not that big a deal.
Internet Ageism
Chat Roulette is one the first technologies that I have encountered on the Internet where ageism has come into play. The kinds of people who typically blog about technology- white men in their 30s and 40s – have shall we say not been so warmly received by the younger Chat Roulette “community”. The democratization of Facebook didn’t create this kind of backlash because college 20-somethings could maintain their own closed networks within the community. But Chat Roulette is open by design. Look for Chat Roulette (or a competitor) to add an age filter – the equivalent of tying registration to a college domain on the early Facebook. I wonder too if looking back we won’t see this as the start of a more general trend toward segregated “neighborhoods” online after many years of all-ages sites.
Will we be talking about Chat Roulette three months from now? A couple of years down the road? What else makes Chat Roulette significant, fascinating, or trivial?
I have no idea what this has to do with contact lenses or eye exams or whatever the hell this is for, but as an execution it’s awesome:
Full Screen Video
Really nice retro cinematography
So-so use of Facebook Connect data
This is one of the better and more to-the-point presentations on building a successful iPhone app that I’ve seen. A few highlights
iPhone AppStore Secrets - Pinch Media
Cobra Starship!
Race is a topic on everyone’s mind again with the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, the beer summit, and (Justice) Sonia Sotomayor’s “Wise Latina” comments, which by now may have even become a catchphrase like “Black is beautiful”.
Here at my advertising agency we coincidentally had a “Diversity Job Fair” where a number of woman- and minority-owned vendors came in to talk to us about potential partnerships. It had the empty feel-good vibe of a top-down corporate initiative, and the awkward intensity of an episode of The Office. Twenty or so vendors from around the country shuffled through the office for a series of short meetings. I met a guy who specializes in recruiting micro-communities for research (Hmong in Minnesota, anyone?), an LA-based political consulting firm that specializes in turning out the vote in the black community, and inexplicably, the heads of an economic development not-for-profit in Oakland.
Minority groups are historically under-represented in advertising, and the matchmaking was well-intentioned if not totally effective. What was great is that it gave me an opportunity to think about race in the context of business relationships, and I had a couple of observations.
First, these vendors really stuck out. I don’t mean because of their race (and ironically many of them were white men representing minority firms). It was more that they were clearly out of their element. For a start to a person they were all over-dressed (suits) - which reminded me that there’s a certain arrogance required to dress down. As in, we in the creative class are so confident in our abilities that we have transcended the need to dress up for other people. The political consultants, who create marketing campaigns of their own, didn’t understand the way our business works and had a hard time articulating their value to a big ad agency. The Hmong guy kept talking about how hot or cold various places he recruited from were. These vendors weren’t smooth like advertising people. They didn’t seem like peers, they seemed like people from some other part of the economy, some other walk of life. (Assuming I had the need anyway), it would require a major leap of faith to partner with them.
It all came together for me when I read this commentary on the current race debates by Helene Cooper, an NYT White House Correspondant and a Liberian immigrant. Writing on Sotomayor and Gates, she reminds us that these folks are cultural elites- products of affirmative action yes, but also products of Yale, Princeton, and the vaguely meritocratic machine that grooms America’s leaders. Our diversity vendors were not elites, at least not advertising elites, and it made it very hard for them to bridge the gap to become potential partners.
Writing about her own experience as an affirmative action student at UNC, Cooper says “the principal thing I learned was how to make [white friends] feel at ease around me”. This blew my mind, because I think the ability to blend in to mainstream cultural norms - what Nicholas Lemann of Columbia calls the “double consciousness” of minority elites - is too rarely part of the dialogue on race.
I attended my first Comic Con this year and came home wanting more. If I have one impression from the show, it was how incredibly diverse the offers are. From comic books (duh) to toys to LARPers to anime to costuming to movies, what holds the whole thing together nowadays. It’s about fantasy and an escape from the mundane.
Nothing encapsulated this better than a long conversation I had with this lady, a noblewomen from The Adrian Empire, which is “like SCA, but we fight with steel”. She was intelligent, passionate, and articulate. But what I most got from her was a sense of longing about how things might be in the world, as opposed to how they are. The community for her represents an opportunity to reshape the world. She told me how the Emperor of The Adrian Empire is a janitor “in the mundane world”. She started to tear up when we talked about how it was too bad that he wasn’t able to apply his obvious leadership talents in his day job. I heard the same sentiment in Darkon, an excellent documentary about The Darkon Wargaming Club, a LARPing group (they use magic so it’s not strictly a reenactment; she hadn’t heard of it).
Comicon is for people who, for one reason or another, find fault with mundane world and want to escape to a better one.