Competition. It's good for the soul.

Job markets all over the country are suffering right now, so the last thing I want to do is complain. This is more of an observation about hiring trends specific to the advertising industry. When the economy was booming, the way to move up in the ad world was to get a foothold in some entry level peon position somewhere and work your tail off until you accrued a couple of years of solid experience. After a few years you could move up. It was a common practice to switch agencies to get peach positions with higher pay and more responsibilities and because of this, and because of the good economy, the entry level positions were plentiful, if not profitable for the recent grad. When I graduated in 2007, the recession had hit hard and people were being laid off left and right. I job searched for a calendar year with only 3 interviews the entire time. Due to my fantastic writing skills, one of those interviews was for GSD&M, however it seemed that they mostly wanted to mentor me and give me (very much appreciated) resume advice and then move on to candidates who they were serious about. I ended up taking a job in the marketing department of a seamless rain gutter manufacturer which was far from my starry-eyed dreams of a glamorous advertising job. However, it was a paycheck, and it was experience, and it has aided me well in my career. After I lost that job I was tossed back into the waters of a (somewhat) more forgiving job market. The agencies who had all had massive layoffs were finally regaining clients and opening up their doors once more. However, the feeding frenzy is, if anything, even more violent now than before. This is because in 2007 people were laid off who had years, like a decade or more, of experience and had lost six-figure positions. These people have been on unemployment, working freelance or as consultants, even waiting tables to make ends meet and now they're willing to take that $30,000 position just to get back into the ad game. These are the people I'm up against now. I'm confident that the market will stabilize, and these people, the elders, mentors and legends of my generation will find their way back up to where they belong and those entry level positions will open up once more, but in the meantime, it's a bloodbath out there, so I'm bringing my A-game.

Work Samples

You can access my work samples by clicking the links located at the top left hand corner of the screen. (Reach Campaign, Secret Campaign, etc). The first two are from my college portfolio. I did not go through the Creative Sequence at UT and so these were done on my own outside of class. Below that are some of the things I did in my internship with the local magazine, Capital City Sports Report. Below that are some freelance works I did along with some ads and logo designs I created for the Shane Howard Band.

Advertising Today

In school I learned all about the creative revolution of the 1960's and how it changed the face of advertising. Currently the industry is undergoing an equally revolutionary change. I graduated in 2007 and my degree was obsolete almost before the ink was dry on my diploma. Advertising degrees are actually a relatively new institution when you consider how old advertising is (I had a professor who joked that advertising was the worlds second oldest profession). It used to be that if you wanted to get into advertising you majored in art or history or art history or writing or some other liberal arts degree that today aren't worth the paper they're printed on. It seems like the modern advertising degree is following in those footsteps, going the way of the dinosaur. Ever since the commencement of the .com age advertisers have been trying to find a way to successfully institute the Internet as an advertising medium. Banner ads, email blasts and pop-up ads were a bust inspiring such programs as pop-up blockers and spam filters (though banner ads are currently making a comeback). And it seemed for a while that the Internet was advertising proof. Recently however with the new advertising methods such as Guerrilla Marketing* and Buzz Marketing** creativity has lept off the pages of magazines and bombarded us in the streets. No longer was it the job of the advertiser to get the attention of the public but it became their job to trick the public into enjoying the ads without realizing they were ads. Advertising became a funny email to a friend where you inserted their picture into a dancing elf head, or a website where you could make Santa do whatever you wanted him to do, or a viral video from Youtube sent to you by a friend, and you never even realized that the media you thought was entertainment was actually advertising. Advertising moved beyond the funny superbowl TV spot to the funny webpage, video or article virtually overnight. All of a sudden ad agencies were wanting their creatives to be versed in Flash, Dreamweaver and HTML while Photoshop and Illustrator practically became tools of a bygone era. What happened? Well, put aside the fact that humanity has become so technologically advanced that breakthroughs are made daily and look at the economy. When the Great Recession began to gain speed there came a frenzy in corporate America. A frenzy to start jettisoning the unnecessary lest the boat begin to sink. The most unnecessary, as viewed by CFO's all over the country was advertising. I could argue that until I'm blue in the face but the most eloquent (and brief) way that I believe it could be stated is as quoted by Henry Ford: "A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time". So the advertising industry had to adapt, overnight, to a country that viewed it as expendable. What sprang from this are some of the most creative works that the industry has ever seen. The lesson in all this is that advertising is not going to be dealt a mortal blow by this or any other recession. It adapts. And if you want to survive in the industry, you must as well. It is for this reason that I am looking into learning Flash, Dreamweaver and HTML as well as trying to immerse myself in the newest ad fad, namely social media. Look out ad world, I'm not beaten yet.

* Guerrilla Marketing - http://weburbanist.com/2009/05/31/13-more-extremely-effective-guerrilla-marketing-stunts/

** Buzz Marketing - http://www.contenus-en-ligne.com/en/e-marketing/26-bons-exemples-de-buzz-marketing

Unemployed

So the baby is sleeping right now, that is the one good thing about unemployment, I get to spend lots of time with Isabella. She is cutting two bottom teeth right now and also fighting off an ear infection and therefore very grumpy! So I was grateful when she finally nodded off. I'm in the process right now of posting my old campaigns. As I'm still under a non-compete agreement with my former employer I don't think it would be prudent to post any of my work samples from there but if you would like to see some just shoot me an email or give me a call to request them. I may post some of my ads from my internship with Capital City Sports Report or some of my freelance work I've done and in the meantime I hope to get some new stuff up here from work I'm currently doing. Hope everyone is enjoying all that sunshine!