 Greg Kuchmek, who is represented by Aquent's DC office, has been working on the web since 1994. That's when he was hired to help produce a webzine, Stim, started by Prodigy. [Editor's Note: For an interesting flashback to 1996, read Ty Burr's review of Stim, which he gives a B+, and Slate, which he gives a C+]. When that gig ended in 1997 he discovered that, "3 years web experience was amazing. I was 'senior' automatically."
Flash forward to the present and Greg now has 14 years web experience. If you want to hire someone like Greg (assuming you can find someone like him), what do you have to offer him? He has a broad range of in-demand skills: in addition to ground-up experience with the full suite of web technologies, Greg is also an able photographer, animator, illustrator, and writer. When he goes on a job interview, the pressure is on the interviewer.
What is Greg looking for and how can you convince him to work for you? Listen to his words:
1. Trust
I'm looking for an employer that respects that I have my skills and trusts me to use them. They hire me because I can do something and they can't. It's great when they let me do it.
It's not always like that. I've done jobs where the client was really looking over my shoulder and micro-managing. I understand that everyone's got their personal style, but when that's happening, I don't feel free to be creative and really do what I'm capable of.
2. Flexibility
I don't wear a tie to interviews anymore. I don't need to dress up at this point. I've also got a full studio at home, so I'm even kind of shocked that I have to leave the house! I guess I've been spoiled by working in places like Boston or New York where it's more flexible.
More than flexibility about where work happens, though, I appreciate it when there is flexibility around how things get done. There have been countless little jobs where they needed a photograph and I've told them, "Look, I can spend the day combing through stock or I can go take one." It's great when people are more open to the "I can do this right now" approach, than they are attached to the "this is the way we have to do it" approach.
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 If you talk to marketers who have run customer loyalty programs, they can pretty quickly tell you the basic keys to program success. I've set them out as best I can here, though I recommend reading the last key first.
If you think I'm right on target, or way off base, please leave a comment.
1. Listen to the Customer
In order for the program to be meaningful and attract participation, you need to offer participants things they want. To find out what those things are, you have to ask them. Then, when the program is up and running, you've got to continually ask them if they are really getting what they want. Were they happy with the item they received? Was the customer service up to snuff? Were their expectations met? Is there anything else they'd like to see in the program? And so on.
The listening should never stop. You've got to keep checking in with them to update and expand your offerings to meet their changing needs and wishes.
2. Act on What the Customer Tells You
If you're going to go to the trouble of asking what customers want, and they are going to take the time to respond, then you've got to deliver. If they want pet supplies, offer pet supplies. If they want home and garden accessories, offer home and garden accessories. If they want it, and you can get it for them, do it.
More importantly, if there are problems with fulfillment, customer service, or the account management process, you've got to fix them. The program is supposed to be a benefit to your customers. If it turns out to be a hassle or a disappointment, it will fail.
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 You might not expect a graphic designer working as part of a program support center housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to say, "The majority of work I do gives me creative freedom," but that's exactly what Chris Spangler, who is represented by Aquent's Baltimore office, told me when I spoke with him last week.
I gave Chris a call because a poster he had designed on assignment won first prize in the Combined Federal Campaign of the National Capital Area (CFCNCA) Communications Contest. (To see his winning entry, you can click here.) As it turns out, designing posters, which he has done for everything from promoting IT security within the agency to celebrating Asian Pacific Islander Heritage Month, is just part of his job at HHS (or, more accurately, SAMHSA/PSC). He has also designed and illustrated annual reports, brochures, and info-packs, he's designed logos and updated brand identities for various governmental programs, and he's even had the chance to serve as photographer at meetings with ambassadors and other functions.
"Working for the government is great job security," Chris says, but what really appeals to him is "... feeling like your making a difference by helping people with the stuff you're creating. I've designed a book on preventing bullying, I worked for a year and half on materials related to 9/11, and I put together a publication on responding to bio-terrorism attacks. You've got to look for different ways to find satisfaction in your work and these types of projects help do that for me."
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 Laurie Baldwin, who is represented by Aquent's Richmond Office, has spent the last five years running a successful search engine marketing company with clients like Wrigley's, Lumber Liquidators, and the Christian Children's Fund. A self-proclaimed Web marketing "addict" -- she named her dog "DotCom," her license plate reads, "GOOGL ME," and even tried to name her family's gecko "Google," until her children rebelled - she has been doing work in and around the Internet since 1995.
Everyone knows that SEO and SEM are important components of contemporary marketing, but there is so much advice out there about how to do it right, that it can get pretty overwhelming. In the interest of cutting through the noise, we asked Laurie to tell us the five things that people most frequently forget about SEO and SEM. Here's what she said.
1. Content Is Still King
When trying to optimize their sites, companies too often spend a lot of time focusing on technical things like metatags. They forget that if you have an authoritative site that talks about relevant stuff, you will be ranked.
The technical elements that matter to the search engines are always changing - the importance of content remains constant. Your site should talk about who you are, what you do, and who you take care of. Forget the "leading edge, highly competitive, committed to innovation"-type copy. People are looking for specific things so you should say specific things.
2. Think Like Your Customers
We had a client who sold fake eyebrows for cancer patients going through chemo. These folks weren't looking for "cancer solutions" or something like that, they were looking for FAKE EYEBROWS. You've got to show up where people are looking and that means you have to know where they are looking and what they are looking for. Ask them.
And while you're at it, ask them, if they did happen to find you, did they find what they wanted? If they didn't, make sure that the search terms you are optimizing for and the actual content of your site match.
3. Traditional Media Still Matter
Let your different marketing pieces talk to each other. Use your keywords and the key marketing ideas from your website in your radio, tv, and newspaper advertising. People will often Google the words, characters, etc. that appear in your ads. In fact, they will generally Google before they go to your site or your store, so make sure you are taking this into account when you are buying search terms.
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 Upon reflection, I found my last post glib and platitudinous, and I apologize for that. Having experienced unemployment and under-employment, I know that it doesn't have to be a worst-case scenario for it to be pretty lame. Looking for a job because you really need a job can be stressful, frustrating, and even humiliating. Funnily enough, when I was in those situations, I generally found work through temp agencies. Although they didn't often find me work from one day to the next, they usually did have me working within a week or two. And that was a good thing.
Of course, a source of semi-regular income does not a career path make, nor is it the high road to personal fulfillment. To paraphrase Citizen Kane, "It's not hard to make money, if all you want to do is make money." The questions that I glossed over - "What do I want to do?", "Where do I want to work?", etc. - are really the hard questions. Finding any job at all is infinitely easier than finding the job you want. In fact, finding any job at all can often be easier than figuring out what you want to do in the first place. Which is why my last post annoyed me. Everyone knows that planning for the future will give you more control over your life, that networking is the best way to get a job (better than responding to an on-line job ad, for example), and so on, but that's not the point. Along those lines, it's easy to say, "Think of 5 people you could call on to help you find a job." It's not even that hard to actually do. In fact, it's probably just as easy to think up 5 people who could lend you money in the short term to help you make rent. Coming up with 5 people who can help you get exactly what you want, given you know what that is, then actually calling them, actually asking for help, actually getting them to help you, and all that, is, well, easier said than done. At this juncture, I could say, "Which is where Aquent comes in. If you're pursuing a career in marketing or design, we ARE the people who can help you get what you want." But I'm not going to, because that would be cheap and marketing-y. Instead, I wanted to take a second and advocate "the easy way."
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Back to the Blog
Jan 21, 2008 @ 2:01 PM · Matthew Grant
 Greetings, loyal followers and coincidental visitors of Aquent's Talent Blog!
I know I only did one post last week and I extend my heartfelt and sincere apologies for my shortcomings and unworthiness. I'm back in the saddle this week, though, and vow to return to my 3+ posts pace. Wish me luck!
In any event, I blame my other marketing duties for my blog-wise slackness . We've been pursuing a kind of "thought-leadership" strategy for the past year and I've kind of become "chief thought leader" (what else would a Minister of Enlightenment be?).
In addition to this blog and the Talent Blog Podcast, not to mention the numerous webcasts we sponsor, host, and produce, I edit several newsletters that we send out to clients and talent. Getting all the details wrapped up on those can eat up time faster than a dog eats homework. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the newsletters ate my blog-work.
The talent newsletter primarily features "hot jobs" and career advice while the client newsletter generally focuses on some particular aspect of marketing and includes interviews and insights from our talent and any relevant experts we can track down. I think the content in the client newsletter tends to be pretty strong - judge for yourself by checking out this article on expanding your brand's global footprint, or this one on building branded entertainment sites - though the newsletter has been "under-performing," in terms of people actually clicking on the links to the articles. I've got some ideas about improving things and will try them out over the next few months.
Wish me luck!
Image Courtesy of Photog*Phillip.
 We've been hearing about the credit meltdown and the bursting housing bubble for a while, but Fed Chief Bernanke was talking yesterday about a worsening economic outlook and even the President is finally copping to the notion that the economy "faces challenges". So what does this mean for folks who, for one reason or another, decide to work as "temps" (which, as I mentioned in my last post, is basically everybody)?
I'm not an economist or a policy wonk; I'm just a humble doctor of philosophy who has been working in the temporary staffing industry one way or the other for going on 20 years, but this is how I see it. Rising unemployment rates are rarely good for anyone, and if we glance back to 2001/2002, when a lot of people came to us looking for work, things weren't exactly hunky-dory. Be that as it may, there may be some upside for temps, at least in the short term, to an economic downturn.
Here's how it works, at least in theory. As the economy slows, companies start worrying about spending money. Hiring "permanent" staff becomes a dodgy proposition because you're adding an indefinite cost to your budget at a time when indefiniteness is more scary than reassuring. Still, you've got stuff to do and chances are you need to hire people to do it. So you turn to freelancers and temp agencies to find people who will work on projects and then leave when the projects are complete, thus making your costs more definite and predictable. In other words, towards the beginning of a downturn, temporary staff, thanks to its "flexibility," starts to look pretty appealing.
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Talent Spotlight
 You launch a new product and it doesn't perform as you hoped. What do you do? Well, you could turn to someone like Irma Salinas for answers.
Irma is represented by Aquent's Connecticut office and is currently working on the "Marketing Insights" Team at a large non-alcoholic beverages company (as it turns out, she actually started her career at an international spirits company importing beer from Latin America). She got involved in doing product reviews when working for a research company where she was very involved in reviewing and reporting on the performance of non-carbonated beverages (water, teas, juices, etc.). "I started working in this area when it was really getting competitive. It was a very exciting time. The market for beverages was changing and I learned a lot."
Irma was frequently involved in reviewing the performance of new products. I asked her both why new products don't perform well, but also how companies go about setting sales goals for new products in the first place. "Of course, there is a very extensive process that large companies go through to develop and launch new products," Irma assures me, "and since they have tested it with consumers, etc., you soon discover that the reasons for poor performance are not usually to be found in the product itself."
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 "If you're not thinking segmentation, then you're not thinking," Ted Levitt of the Harvard Business School supposedly quipped. While every marketer would readily agree with him, getting segmentation right can be as challenging as it is necessary - and getting it wrong can be downright disastrous: Working with segmentation schema that are irrelevant to your business is a waste of time and money; working with too few or too broadly defined segments means missed opportunities; and working with too many or too narrowly defined segments means stretching your marketing resources to their breaking point.
Since there are so many options and variables involved in segmenting your audience, it is best to rely on analysts, either external or internal, who understand your business and who understand how to match your needs with the myriad segmenting approaches. To sketch out a useable framework for getting the most valuable results from your segmentation provider, I consulted Ben Ben-Baruch, a Senior Business Intelligence Consultant represented by Aquent who got his first contract assignment with General Motors in 1997 and has been there ever since.
"Whatever segmentation provider you use and whatever methodologies and data they employ," Ben says, "the key is ensuring that you can use the segmentation to meet your business goals. Finding a provider that thinks in terms of your business, presents the data with an emphasis on its proper use, and makes it easy to keep the data fresh, is critical not only to the success of your segmentation process, but to the success of your marketing efforts in general."
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 Many moons ago, a friend of mine sent me a book entitled, Disciplined Minds, the subtitle of which reads, "A critical look at salaried professionals and the soul-battering system that shapes their lives." I actually read the book straightaway, but my feelings about it were so conflicted that I kept them to myself until now.
The book is really two books in one. Part of it, the best part, is a detailed critique of the process of achieving a doctorate in physics and what happens to doctoral candidates along the way. The other, less convincing, part is a broad critique of the division of labor, capitalist society, and the role that salaried professionals play in maintaining and perpetuating the status quo.
Schmidt views the working world in classically Marxist terms in which there is an inherent, exploitative conflict between employees and managers. The problem for the managers lies in the fact that they cannot tell everyone exactly what to do all the time. Some jobs require independent thinking and creativity. "Beyond a certain point on such a job," Schmidt writes, "the worker faces a blank sheet of paper and th boss can't tell her exactly what to do. Here employers simply expect their creative workers to act in the corporate interest..."
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An Aquent Talent Spotlight
Article by Anne Stuart
 Figuratively speaking, our planet is smaller than it used to be, thanks to jet travel, the Internet and other inventions that reduce the historical limitations of distance and time. But when it comes to global product launches and marketing campaigns, it's a big world after all--and going global involves serious challenges as well as significant opportunities.
Cindy Dyer understands that reality all too well. Dyer, who is currently in an Aquent placement as senior manager of consumer strategy and insight at Frito-Lay Inc. in Dallas, started out as a food scientist, but moved into marketing while at Pizza Hut Inc. She's also worked for global giants like General Mills Inc., Campbell's Soup Co. and Mead Johnson & Co., the infant-child nutrition division of Bristol-Myers Squibb. Throughout her career, she's been involved in international branding and marketing campaigns.
Following are a few of Dyer's tips for successfully taking your products and messages beyond your own borders:
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 Aquent held a contest a few weeks back inviting designers to create a Halloween-themed logo treatment on our homepage. We got about 40 responses and the winning entry, created by Kevin Bonixe, a native of Massachusetts but currently a resident of Portugal, debuted on Aquent.com today.
Reaching him via the interweb, I asked Kevin how he got into design and this is what he told me: "I started out taking a course in photography and got introduced to digital photography. When I then began image manipulation in Photoshop, a new world of imagination, color, and creativity opened up to me. It fed my eagerness to learn, evolve, and to search for even better tools to create my vision. Design was the answer."
The work that Kevin ended up doing for us was is in Flash, of course (if you are reading this after Halloween, you can view it here. I asked Kevin what he liked so much about that application. He wrote, "The coolest thing about Flash is the ease of translating your creativity to the stage. When you have a timeline where you can incorporate images, movement, sound interactivity, dynamics, your creativity is your only limit."
Although, for now, Kevin is pursuing a career in business management, he does do some design work on the side, such as this site for a Portuguese hip-hop band, S. Clemente. If you are interested in working with Kevin, he can be reached via Aquent's Barcelona office.
Image courtesy of szlea.
 Minh Nguyen, a Southern California-based web designer currently working for Sony Electronics, has been represented by our San Diego office for a little over a year. Interestingly enough, his entrance into the Aquent world was fairly coincidental. "A friend of mine was looking for work and I told them about Aquent," he tells me. "I was walking them through the application process by setting up a profile of my own. I didn't think much about it but pretty soon someone from Aquent contacted me."
Minh got into graphic design at an early age. As he puts it, "I owe it to my family. My grandfather taught me how to draw when I was 3. My mom taught me how to color inside the lines when I was 5. My dad taught me HTML and introduced me to Photoshop when I was 14." He was doing web-design casually as a teenager, but by the time he got into college realized he had a passion for it.
Having a hard time getting a full-time design job after graduation, he started his own studio with some friends. Although the studio did fairly well - garnering clients from Jack in the Box to the Surf Rider Foundation - he decided that he was more interested in doing design work than running a business. He turned to Aquent to get back into design and eventually found a permanent position through us.
Since running one's own studio is a choice that many designers make and even more consider, I asked Minh what he learned from his experience doing so. Here's what he told me:
1. Don't just take any job you get, do things for free, or do things on the cheap.
Not only does this lower the bar for other people working in the field, the sites usually aren't that great, and the client will ultimately be dissatisfied.
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An Aquent Talent Spotlight
Bonnie S., who is represented by Aquent's Philadelphia office, got into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) the honest way: by working hard to optimize her own website. "I got a degree in architecture and then worked as an architect for several years before deciding I had to get into something else.
"I set up a design studio with a friend and we went into business providing design services to architecture firms. I created a website for our studio and then worked hard to get us to #3 in Google search results for 'graphic design' and 'Philadelphia.' I knew I was on to something when a friend called me out of the blue and asked, 'How did you get to #3?'"
One unexpected by-product of using SEO to promote her design business was that it actually led to SEO business. "One day I was talking to one of my clients and he said he was paying $3000 a month for pay-per-click advertising. I told him he could pay me a lot less to boost rankings through organic optimization [optimization that's driven by the content of the pages]. He hired me to do that for him. He saw results and began referring me to people, and things took off from there."
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 Terence Thompson and Katie Kenney are in-house creative services managers who utilize Aquent resources. Terence, who has specialized in consumer packaging for over 25 years and is an Aquent contractor himself, is a studio manager of internal design resources at Colgate. In addition to creative supervision, he is responsible for the intake of all new projects, billing estimates, and hiring. Katie, who has close to 25 years of experience in print design and branding, is one of 10 studio managers at the in-house studio of Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). Her specific team of designers is responsible for the overall look and brand of individual pharmaceutical drugs during their clinical trials phase.
Running an in-house creative services function can be uniquely challenging for several reasons, but the most pressing is this: You've got to provide creative solutions and customer service at levels comparable to those of external agencies while saving your clients and your parent organization money, and those cost savings can be substantial!
Terence and Katie describe a three-pronged strategy for addressing this challenge:
1. Provide structured account management
2. Attract talented people
3. Employ efficient processes
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 A passion for visual communication "of any sort," an "inner sense of professionalism," and a sincere interest in "people asking me to do something new," characterize Betty W., who has been working through Aquent for the better part of 10 years. Having done her time in the design and agency world in Boston, and run her own design business for 14 years, Betty told me, "When the last company I was working for went belly-up, I realized that I was not meant to have a full-time job. I started telling people to call me 'Betty D. Temp,' because I knew I was meant to be this way."
"This way," has meant going into high stress environments, such as the office of the chairman at a major accounting firm, and to consistently succeed. "At that place, there were no weekends, you were on-call 24 hours a day, and it was a real pressure cooker. We had to produce proposals that were like annual reports in terms of their quality - they even had their own high-end, duplex color printing equipment. They made you take a test when you first got there. They'd give you the materials and you had from 8-5 to put together a proposal. I passed the test and was off and running."
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Do you ever talk to people who are genuinely psyched about their work, sincerely committed to doing a great job, and who seem to pursue their career with an infectious passion? Well, that's how I felt when I had the chance to speak with John Nullmeyer the other day. John is a marketing communications manager represented by Aquent's Washington, DC office. Having graduated from the University of Hartford seven years ago with a degree in communications, he's steadily carved out a career for himself as a marketing professional. "I really enjoy being a marketing generalist," he told me. "I like the collaboration and the creativity. I also like working on marketing problems and coming up with solutions."
Most of the "problems" that he's tackled have called for solutions involving effective communication strategies. He started out working at CIGNA where he served as an associate product manager responsible for developing and producing materials aimed at educating employees on various retirement offerings. After several years, he moved over to Prudential Financial. There he continued his work on "participant education," creating collateral, managing content for the participant website, and developing educational programs to help "demystify retirement plans." One such program, "Women and Investing for Retirement," even won an industry award and was featured on PLANSPONSOR.com.
By the time John left Prudential, he was working as a senior copywriting associate producing everything from financial newsletters to video scripts. This experience positioned him perfectly for his current role with a large financial services company "serving the American home mortgage industry," as their website says. Among his other responsibilities, he was asked to take over and "fix" a newsletter that serves as the company's main vehicle for communication with its clients.
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 Suzanne is a product manager currently working for Kraft through our New York office. As is the case with many people who work with Aquent, Suzanne's choice to work as a contractor came at a midpoint of her career rather than at the beginning. As she puts it, Aquent gives her the opportunity to "keep up her skills and get experience with great companies without the pressure of a full-time position."
Not that Suzanne is any stranger to said pressure. On the contrary, she's managed brands that generated tens of millions in revenues and in her role at Beiersdorf Inc. launched 34+ new products & upgrades (including one that became and remains #1 in its category). In other words, she knows what it's like to have P&L responsibility and spend 50% of your time traveling. It was just that after getting to the point where she was heading the Global New Product Development efforts for a $79 million healthcare product line, it became clear that the next step for her was to assume the role of director. Instead, she decided to pursue a different course working on some of her own product ideas and pursuing her interest in theater. Working with Aquent gives her the necessary flexibility to do just that.
It took Suzanne a while to get to this point. Starting out in Marketing Research generating consumer insight data for Unilever, she soon realized she wanted a bigger role. "I like to see the whole story," she says. Continuing her research work at Cadbury Schweppes, her boss soon told her, "You can go anywhere you want here." She took that vote of confidence and segued into a Field Marketing position serving as a conduit between marketing and sales in support of store-level execution of programs and promotions. This experience taught her an important lesson: "If you want to get to know how to get a product on the shelf, you have to work closely with sales."
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 With Memorial Day safely behind us, summer has officially begun (well, technically, summer begins on June 21, but let's not quibble). While businesses in the U.S. don't generally shut down for the summer, things do sort of slowdown as school lets out, college kids go home, and people go on vacation.
While some full-time employees may be able to breathe a little easier because the boss has gone off to Europe for the month of July, free-lancers eye the dog days of summer with not a little trepidation. As a case in point, I received this question as part of a comment on this post: What is your advice during the slow months of the Spring and Summer when business is slow? How can you reinvent yourself?
While I would like to suggest that, if you are hitting a slow patch in your freelance business, you should give Aquent a call and use them to supplement your workflow, I'm aware that this might not actually address the problem (and could be perceived as fairly self-serving). That being said, wondering where your next gig is going to come from is a fairly typical worry for freelancers, and one that can be tackled in several ways.
Way 1: Never Stop Looking for Work
Most companies have a division of labor between the sales team that spends all their time drumming up business and the service or production team that spends its time doing work for clients. When you're freelancing, you've got to be doing both and unfortunately you can't stop looking for work just because you happen to be doing work. The best way to perform this juggling act is to schedule regular weekly (or daily, if you can swing it) business development activities. If you can think like a salesperson from time to time and maintain a heatlhy sales funnel, fueled by regular networking, you may be able to avoid the work doldrums altogether.
Way 2: Get Some Steady Gigs into the Mix
Many freelancers, particularly freelance writers, find that they can provide themselves a baseline of guaranteed work by getting teaching gigs here and there. While competition for adjunct work may be stiff at the big name universities and colleges, community colleges and adult education centers are often looking for part-time faculty or instructors. In addition, adult ed centers will usually allow you to recommend potential course offerings, which they'll include in their catalogs if they believe there will any interest in them. Of course, most schools are on some sort of quarter or semester schedule, so these teaching engagements will have to be set up several months in advance.
Way 3: Plan NOT to Work
The best way to deal with slow times workwise is to plan on not working. Naturally, this means making sure that you have money squirreled away for the dry spells, which is why you should be taking this "time off" into account when budgeting. Of course, since it is always a challenge for freelancers to find time for honing their skills or acquiring new ones, these slow times could be the perfect opportunity to take a class or "woodshed." Heck, if you can swing it, why not actually go on vacation?
Do people out there have any other suggestions of tactics for handling the slow times when freelancing?
Photo courtesy of OctaviusPie.
Talent Spotlight: Doreen, Aquent Chicago
Doreen's career started in the advertising world. Graduating with a degree in journalism, she spent 4 years in account management at a couple specialty agencies before trying her hand at field marketing management for a restaurant chain. Discovering that this wasn't exactly the right fit, she decided to chart a new course and re-entered the advertising industry on the creative side as a copywriter.
After taking a few months to create a "spec" portfolio containing hypothetical campaigns for a broad range of consumer products she hit the streets. Finding work was a challenge and over the course of the next year she went through "60 or so interviews." Although interviewing was a hard slog, Doreen also found it to be a real confidence builder. "After a while you stop taking things personally. You take into consideration what someone has to say about your work, but in the long run you have to have confidence to listen to your creative instinct. So, if you happen to catch someone on a bad day, rather than getting down on yourself, you end up thinking, 'What was that about?'"
Pounding the pavement eventually paid off and she landed a job with Frankel. "That was a real turning point," she says, "because I'd actually gotten a job doing what I wanted to do." Not only that, it turned out she was good at it. The next several years found her doing award-winning promotional work for department stores from Marshall Field's to Target. Following her position at Target she worked at another prominent promotional agency on brands like Kellogg and Kraft. Gradually, her role morphed from copywriting to creative direction as she moved into TV and radio as part of Publicis Mid-America, working on successful campaigns for Del Webb and OfficeMax.
When Publicis closed their office in 2003, Doreen started free-lancing. Although she was able to find work through her many contacts, she also chose to register with Aquent. She made it clear up-front that, as she was planning on having a child, she would only be open to off-site work. The folks at Aquent were flexible and set about finding off-site opportunities for her. Among them was a gig through a national design firm concepting and writing copy for a leading, "cloth like" paper towel brand. This role was a particularly good fit for her since, as a working mother, "I was writing for myself. I was the demographic they were going after!"
"You can change if you put your mind to it," Doreen says when asked if she has any career advice for marketing and creative folks. She also encourages anyone making a career change to take the inevitable rejection in stride and remember that everyone's pretty much making it up as they go along. "It sounds corny, but don't listen to someone else's opinion of you, listen to your heart. If I had listened to other people's negativity I would never have left my house."
Doreen's experiences have taught her that passion and perseverance can ultimately take you where you want to go. "If you're happy doing what you're doing, keep it up," she adds, "And if you're not happy, find out what it is that'll get you there."
"If you feel comfortable in a situation, start looking around," a senior graphic designer who works through our Philadelphia office told me, "Comfort and stability breed stagnation."
She came to this conclusion after working 8 years as a creative services manager for a major healthcare organization followed by an 18 month stint with a consulting firm. Although in her career she had gone from serving as a graphic designer and art director to managing them, the work eventually became predictable and, well, boring. She had been "tinkering with the idea" of going freelance for most of her career and so she took the plunge.
She was pleasantly surprised to discover that there is "life after the corporate world." Thanks to her own network of contacts at regional hospitals, and a couple positions that Aquent found her, she says, "I'm busier than I've ever been." Although the hourly rates can run higher when you are self-employed, she's found that contracting "offers you the opportunity to try something and see how it fits. It can be a good segue between working full-time and freelancing."
Leaving the safety of a full-time position can be unnerving, but, as she puts it, "There's something to be said for instability. I find it motivating."
Do you?
Talent Spotlight: Holly Goodrich
When I started working as an agent in Aquent's (then MacTemps') Boston market, Holly Goodrich had already been with them for four years. She did presentation work and print production and was known for her technical ability and reliable professionalism. Ten years later, we're both still here.
In a way, Holly has made a career of working for Aquent. Since she first registered with us in 1989, she has grown with the technical innovations in graphic design and production, doing time on everything from print layout to package design to web development. She has also worked in diverse roles with over one hundred of our clients in a variety of industries. We even once flew her down to North Carolina for ten 17-hour days working in a massive airplane hangar with "its own weather system."
By now, Holly has worked for "every kind of business:" financial institutions, hospitals, universities, studios, start-ups, high tech, pharma, manufacturing; you name it. She's worked for companies with one employee and for companies with 21,000. Along the way her experience has taught her, among other things, the relative benefits of working in organizations large and small, and in environments structured and chaotic.
"Larger organizations tend to have more money and so they are able to hire more people," she explains, "The drawback is that often you are brought on to do one very specific thing and nothing else. At smaller companies, the money is tighter. But that usually means that you get to do more, see more, and learn more."
Looking back on the path she's followed, Holly identifies two major turning points. The first came in her career as a graphic artist when clients began giving her more than "production stuff." "When you're first asked to make design decisions on your own," she says, "it really boosts your confidence." The other turning point came in her career as a contractor. "It was that moment when I stopped being 'the temp,' or a hired gun, and became the specialist called in to solve problems."
All the while she she's been navigating the world of creative work, Holly has, of course, also been creating things. In fact, you may have already unknowingly encountered one of her many creations. Perhaps you saw the splash screens she designed for the post office in the Mall of America. Perhaps you saw her package designs on the shelves of your local electronic game store. (Or, perhaps you saw the counterfeited version of her package design on that bootlegged game you bought at the flea market.)
But then again, maybe you just underwent brain surgery and noticed, hanging on the wall of the operating room, the laminated poster she designed, the one telling your doctor how to correctly use the latest in quick-healing brain surgery technology.
Which is another way of saying that, though the ongoing career of Holly Goodrich contains many lessons for the aspiring and the established creative professional (never stop learning; be flexible; remember that you're there to help others), the most important lesson is undoubtedly this:
Graphic design IS brain surgery.
(At least indirectly, sometimes.)
This blog was initially conceived as a resource and forum for Aquent talent (the folks who work through us for our clients 'round the globe). The focus has primarily fallen on the ins and outs of marketing careers, from the nitty gritty of preparing for interviews and creating a resume to concrete examples of choices made by professionals pursuing careers in marketing and design. I've also taken the time here and there to talk about trends and issues in the world of marketing, design, and advertising, based on the assumption that this is the sort of stuff that marketers, designers, etc., care about.
Am I focusing on the right stuff? Should I be talking more specifically about working with Aquent and leave the lofty discussions of 21st Century marketing to the established pundits and veteran campaigners?
I've thought all along that, essentially, Aquent's business is local and that any questions potential, current, or former talent might have should be directed to the local office. All our local offices have their own clients, their own orders, their own recruiters. If you want to know what skills are in demand, what really matters are the skills in demand in your city or region. If you are experiencing difficulty on an assignment, you should let the person who found you that assignment know. Benefits? Timecards? Scheduling? The people who are most in a position to help you are the ones you met when you came in for an interview or who call you about availability or who check in on you when you are out working. In other words, specific, local people, and not a guy sitting at his computer in Boston mouthing off about this and that.
Are there general "truths" about working with Aquent? Certainly. Successful talent are flexible and demonstrate a strong commitment to customer service. Successful talent think of Aquent as a partner in their job search and career development. They provide updated resumes and portfolios, or whatever else is needed, in a timely fashion so that we can present them in the strongest light to our clients. And when they are on an engagement, they often strive to uncover and even create new opportunities for themselves.
Is that sort of information more interesting to you than my thoughts on Second Life or the perpetual tension between marketing and creative? What else are you curious about? Help me help you!
According to Nietzsche, our conscience tells us, "Become what you are" (advice not to be confused with transversal theorist Bryan Reynolds' recommendation to "become what you aren't"). Unfortunately, when you work as a copywriter, it's more likely that you will become what you've done.
I was reminded of this while speaking with a writer named Karen who works through Aquent out in Los Angeles. Karen got her start at a fairly well-known agency working on automotive advertising. While she enjoyed it and learned a lot, after a while she discovered that everywhere she went they "put her on a car account."
Eventually, she left the agency world and went in-house at a company specializing in hair care products. How did she do that? Well, as a junior writer, in addition to car stuff, she also got projects here and there in the field of skin care. When it came time to branch out and work on something that didn't involve city miles versus highway miles, or rich, Corinthian leather, she was able to use this other experience as a starting point for a new direction.
There are probably a lot of lessons here but the one Karen emphasized when I asked her was this: "It's really important for young writers to take everything; you never know where it's going to lead." Though it's not always obvious at the time, those random assignments and odd jobs from way-back-when can turn out to be the first steps down a new path.
When you wanted to change course career-wise, what did you do?
Once upon a time I was talking with a fellow, a Flash developer by trade, who had worked through Aquent from time to time. He, like many freelancers who work with us, saw Aquent as a business development partner who could connect him with new clients and opportunities when the need arose.
Ironically, even though I was speaking with him in order to better understand the habits and behaviors of Flash developers, who he told me prefer to freelance and work "off-site," he was at the time ensconced in a full-time role at a publishing company. Why?
Well, as it turned out, his title there was, "Creative Director," a position he hitherto had not held. So, although he preferred working freelance and, ideally, off-site, he had taken a full-time role in order to acquire official experience as a ""Creative Director."
If you are a freelancer, your experience is your primary asset. Unfortunately, experience takes place in real-time: If you want experience doing creative direction, you have to spend time doing creative direction.
And sometimes "putting in the time" entails forgoing the many benefits of the freelance lifestyle, for a time, and joining the full-time masses.
On his blog, Scott Berkun provides managers with several reasons why contractors deserve special attention. First of all, he asserts that managers should treat contractors well because, once you see them in action, you may actually want to hire them full-time. He also believes that managers can benefit from the fresh, "outsider" perspective offered by contractors, if they are willing to ask their opinion and listen.
While I think that Berkun is right on both counts, the most interesting point he makes is that, "Contractors are true worker bees. They fly from place to place spreading reputations..." Contractors circulate and accumulate contacts throughout an industry. They are mobile nodes in ever-expanding networks. When you are looking to expand your team, they can be valuable sources of new talent... if they had a positive experience with you and your company.
Ultimately, it would seem that Berkun's opinion stems from a sort of heroic view of contractors. As he writes, "Some contractors run circles around their FT counterparts - in fact that's why they're contractors: they're good enough to make a living freelancing and taking part of the year off - something many full-timers don't have the talent, or the guts, to do."
Does that seem extravagantly harsh? Does it mainly apply to "technical" contractors? What do you think?
Rebecca worked with Aquent for a little over a year before taking a permanent job as a designer with one of our clients. I gave her a call to ask her about her experience with us and to find out why she had decided to "go perm."
The answer was fairly simple: "Fit." First of all, she liked the company, which happened to be in the healthcare field, because she was herself a client of it. "The person we market to is a lot like me," as she put it. Secondly, she got along well with the marketing reps. Finally, it was conveniently located near her home.
Given that she liked the company, liked her coworkers, and liked the commute, it was little surprise that Rebecca liked the job. At the same time, it quickly became clear to me why this company liked Rebecca: She has a natural inclination to do more than is asked of her.
Here's a case in point. She was called on to create a marketing piece for a hospital. Although the piece had to be of relatively high quality, she was only expected to produce some basic sketches with flowed-in text. Realizing that seeing the finished product would help sell the client on her concept, Rebecca actually created and presented them with hand-made comps. The client "got it," was duly impressed, and approved the design.
No one asked Rebecca to do what she did. She just took the time to understand what the client wanted and did what she thought was going to be best for their organization and the project. Ultimately, she says, "People want quality. Just because there's a budget, doesn't mean you shouldn't present something that goes beyond."
When asked what advice she would give up-and-coming designers, Rebecca replied simply, "Be fearless. There's never a time you can look bad for doing too much."
Talent Spotlight!
Julane Marx calls herself "a natural editor," although she admits that it's kind of a curse - she can't read the newspaper, for example, without spotting typos. With an MBA and a career that took her through a range of tech-oriented companies involved in technical training, software, and Web-based business services, she finally found herself ensconced as a VP of Marketing spending 90% of her time doing things she didn't enjoy like sitting through endless meetings and agonizing over spreadsheets.
Striking out on her own, Julane's love for words and interest in the English language led to one of her first freelance editing gigs. As a subscriber to Michael Quinion's "World Wide Words" newsletter, one day she stumbled across a mistake in it, which she duly brought to his attention. Being a stickler for proper syntax and usage, Mr. Quinion appreciated Julane's eagle eye and American viewpoint and enlisted her as an "Advisory Editor," setting in motion a "series of fortunate events" that has turned into a second career as a freelance copyeditor.
Julane has found freelancing to be a "fun way to make a contribution" while retaining the freedom to explore new possibilities once the project has ended. She came to Aquent back in 2002 thanks to a clever ad for proofreaders our Los Angeles office ran and successfully passed the fairly challenging proofreading test that we administer interested candidates. She worked for Aquent here and there, eventually landing a long-term assignment with a Fortune 500 biotech firm specializing in human therapeutics.
Starting out as "one of the troops," she later moved into a role as manager of the proofreading team, then took responsibility for training the vendors our client brought in to take over this function as our contract was phased out. Overall, Julane found the environment particularly rewarding, partly because she enjoys working with really smart people, and partly because proofreading for products with medical applications is beyond mission-critical. As she put it, "If you get certain things wrong, someone could actually die."
Her successes on the proofreading front led to a new role as a marketing communications manager for the company's brand protection department, the main purpose of which is to combat drug counterfeiting. During this temporary assignment, she updated the department's public position statement on drug counterfeiting, created a fact sheet about the department, penned newsletter articles raising its profile in the organization, commissioned two logos and a multi-use tabletop display unit, and worked on a plan for rolling out an important new product security feature to be launched in the fall. She enjoyed flexing a number of different muscles she has used in the past in an interesting new setting, plus there were "a manageable number of meetings and not a spreadsheet in sight."
Having worked in a range of environments and worn a series of different hats, Julane's primary advice to others pursuing a career in marketing is to "try everything." "Variety is a value in itself," she says, "and it's the ideal way to discover what you do best and what makes your heart sing." Exploring the possibilities in order to find out what you love to do isn't just about following your passion, as we're so often told. More importantly, it's about becoming a valuable and engaged participant wherever you work; someone who understands not only his or her own function but also how it fits in with the big picture. In Julane's words, "You aren't going to be effective if you don't care about what you're doing."
Gino Bona, Part 2
Feb 5, 2007 @ 12:02 PM · Matthew Grant
Several weeks ago I used this forum to congratulate Gino Bona for successfully pitching the NFL on an ad for the Super Bowl.
If you, like me, did not get to see the game in its entirety and therefore missed Gino's ad, then join me in thanking your lucky stars for the miracle of YouTube, where you can watch it.
I agree with a commenter on my earlier post, who thought it was a shame that Gino's idea of showing fans reacting to a $6000 end-of-season bar tab did not make it into the final cut. Maybe the NFL found it too unrealistic. After all, who associates football with drinking?
When I entered grad school 20 years ago, I got to know a fellow who was just wrapping up his graduate career and preparing to go on the job market. He told me that his personal motto had become, "I am a box of Tide."
I was reminded of this quote this morning when I read, "Copy Writers: See Yourself As The Product," by Chris Marlow. Written with the intent of helping freelancers create for themselves a "lead generation machine," she writes, "The first step requires you to see yourself as a product or service, because in fact, that's what you are." She puts a finer point on it by continuing, "If you think of yourself... as a commodity, it becomes more apparent what you must do in order to market yourself effectively."
If you are going to build a clientele as an independent contractor/consultant/freelancer, you could certainly do worse than heed Ms. Marlow's advice and take the time to identify your unique selling point and articulate your particular offering(s). In fact, unless you are already famous, you will have to do this in one form or another if you want to attract people who will pay you money to do what you do.
It was just that her turns of phrase, "a product... that's what you are" and "think of yourself... as a commodity," hit a long dormant academic nerve with me, and not only by reminding me of the cynical/apt words of my erstwhile co-inhabitant of the Ivory Tower (who is gainfully employed as a professor in San Diego and just recently published a fascinating book on representations of the "Mexican" in American culture).
You see, a long time ago I read a book called History and Class Consciousness, which, in its well-known chapter on "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," asserted that, in capitalist society, relationships between people increasingly take on the appearance of relationships between objects. (This was meant as a damning criticism, for those of you who have not studied early-20th century Marxist thought.)
The point is that there is something de-humanizing about thinking of ourselves as "products," "services," or "commodities" - and something disturbing that we don't even notice it. Shouldn't we think of ourselves as people who have certain skills or talents that could be "commoditized" and marketed to other people who have need of them? "Think of your clients as data-points, because that's what they are," would be a strange thing to say, right?
Erin Malone, editor emeritus for the awesome online journal for information architects, Boxes and Arrows, wrote an interesting essay on the lessons she learned when moving from the role of designer to manager of a design organization. This is recommended reading for any designer who has recently assumed such a role or who is currently considering the "move into management."
Several things that Erin writes struck a chord with me beginning with this line: "When I made the shift from designer to manager, I had no idea how to make the transition nor did I have anyone to guide me through the changes to my role." Unfortunately, new managers, regardless of industry, often feel this way; I for one could relate. Her recommendation to find an experienced manager to serve as a mentor is sound advice that I heartily second.
As a design manager, she says, "Your job is to create that space [for your team to be brilliant] and to deflect and filter the distractions that could create roadblocks." That Erin uses the word "filter" is significant. Designers can be sensitive to criticism and very critical of non-designers who don't "get it." Strong design managers don't shield people from external criticism or tacitly underwrite their dim view of others. Instead, they function as mediators and translators, making sure that business objectives are appropriately addressed by design solutions and that creative perspectives are persuasively articulated to business leaders.
Finally, Erin addresses the fact that, when designers become managers, they often stop "designing." She does so by emphasizing that as a manager "you are designing something different." Specifically, you are designing an organization capable of creating great design and an environment conducive to that activity. While certainly of a different order than graphic or interactive design, few would argue that organizational design is any less challenging, complex, or rewarding. Erin's strong implication is that it in fact the opposite is the case.
Designers can certainly have lengthy and fulfilling careers as individual contributors and becoming a manager is not a necessary or by any means inevitable career move. Still, some designers do decide to explore this avenue. If you are one of them, what influenced your decision to do so?
"Art school taught me that design's not just about making something beautiful; it's about taking something beautiful and turning it into a clear message." I was speaking with a talent represented by Aquent's Detroit office, Dan Koenig, who recently took a full-time job with an ad agency. Dan started out as a print designer but overtime has come to focus more on interactive design, particularly creating algorithm-based animations in Flash. His experiences in both the print and web worlds reinforced for him the importance of creating things that can speak for themselves.
This was brought home to him in an especially pointed way early in his career. After presenting some work to a creative director, and going over the significance of each element in detail, she asked him, "And where's the little man?" "What little man?" he asked puzzledly. "The little man we send along with the design to explain it to the client." Oh, that little man...
Of course, Dan didn't have to rely on snide colleagues to teach him that the things we design are sent off into the world to face their destiny alone. It's a given on the web where people come to our work and, if it's not intuitively clear how to use or interact with it, very quickly click away. But even before he got into the web, he'd learned this lesson designing packaging.
Dan put it like this, "Package design is a very unforgiving medium because your competition is right next to you. The customer is standing there with their money in one hand and they're reaching for a product with the other hand. Will they choose yours? All marketing comes down to this moment of truth."
Creating and visually representing messages that persuasively influence behavior in "this moment of truth" constitutes both the challenge and true art of design. Because it's an intensely do-or-die way of learning how to do just that, Dan adds, "Every designer should do packaging."
As every sports fan knows, and has been reported all over the place, Gino Bona won the NFL's "Best Commercial Ever" contest yesterday.
Aside from being a "winnah" - as we say here in Ye Olde Newe Englande - and a talented, funny writer, Gino has been registered as a talent with Aquent since way back in '01.
In other words, if the NFL had only called us, they wouldn't have had to run a big contest just to find him! Oh, the humanity!
Alls well that ends well, of course, so let me just say this: Gino Bona, we at Aquent salute you!
Creative and marketing careers can take strange twists and turns and you never know what will lead to your next job. This lesson was brought home to me when speaking with a talented copywriter and marketer represented by Aquent's Nashville office, Christienne M.
Christienne, who has written copy for everything from science fiction films to gastric bypass surgery, also happens to be an actress and comedienne. As it turns out, her pursuit of these latter passions has shaped her career path in at least two ways. On the one hand, since artists often have to pursue some sort of freelance trade in order to supplement their income, participation in an artistic community has frequently provided Christienne with a valuable network of contacts in a variety of fields when it came to looking for work. On the other hand, and more surprisingly, she has also landed jobs while actually practicing her craft.
Once upon a time, while doing stand-up at a club in Los Angeles, Christienne came to the attention of a brand manager at Mattel. Impressed by her sense of humor, she brought Christienne into Mattel to write scripts for new members of the Real Talkin' Bubba Bear family: Bedtime Bubba and Bathtime Bubba. When that project drew to a close she spent the next four years working for Mattel writing copy on Malibu Barbie and kin for toy fairs and other events.
Aside from reminding us that there are a number of ways to market our skills, including the frequently overlooked "public performance," this story also illustrates the importance of using the current engagement or project to lead to the next one. We are often hired to do one thing in particular - putting words in the mouths of talking bears, for example - but in the course of doing so, we inevitably end up demonstrating a broader range of abilities, making new contacts, and, ultimately, creating new opportunities for ourselves.
The fact of the matter is, when our clients and their colleagues find out that, in addition to writing, for example, we can manage people and projects, communicate effectively across the organization, and are fun to work with, they'll find new things for us to do. If you don't believe me, just ask the lady behind Bathtime Bubba.
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