Latest CAREER articles

Getting laid (off): Diaries of a copywriter gone rogue

I felt a bit bad for the HR woman. But just a bit. And I got over it pretty soon. When I started feeling worse for myself. Her job was like the angel of death. When she showed up at my desk and asked me to come with her, that look of pity on her face, I told her flat out no - I didn’t want to go with her. Handcuffs and chains crossed my mind. I could just refuse to go with her. I could totally chain myself to my desk and just not move. Ever.

How To Get Headhunters To Do Back Flips For You

Distinguish yourself as being one of the best that every headhunter wants to know.
1. Learn what we do and who we do it for.
Sorry to break it to you but, headhunters do not work for you ~ the talent. They work for the company that is seeking talent. Some might tell you they [...]

Oh, So Now You Love Me?!!?

Recently I presented what I thought was an overly generous offer to a young creative team who, I felt, were capitalizing on the current dearth of talent to artificially inflate their salaries. That said, the sun was shining at this point in their lives, so a bit of over-zealous haymaking was to be expected, [...]

Pay Them All

Since we were old enough to leave the house without our parents, many of us worked at a variety of jobs to earn some extra spending money. We marveled at the little bank-book we were handed when we deposited our first paycheck, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience of purchasing something for the first time without [...]

The Nothing - We’ll Bend Over For You

I’ve been contemplating writing a book for the past several years. This book, that we’ll refer to as THE NOTHING, would be auto-biographical and recap my life over the past decade. During those ten years, I experienced a volution* of my career in the ad industry. I say volution*, since my career did not really [...]

Moonlighting: How To Be A Successful Suit And A Brilliant Creative On The Sly

I never wanted to be a suit.
After a tourist’s education, which began in psychology and resulted in a degree in English, a stint in interior design, a diploma in creative advertising and an insatiable desire for knowledge - I set out, finally knowing exactly what I was meant to do in life. I would work [...]

How To Bed An Art Director

An ihaveanidea guide for commercial photographers.
Photographers that want to get agency assignments sometimes have it as hard or harder than hungry juniors trying to break in the agency. It’s not easy, there’s definitely more supply than demand, and from experience, when a job comes in, there’s very little time to have your pick, so [...]

Five Steps To A Job In Advertising

Advertising is a tough industry to crack. It took me over 5 months to finally land my first gig. Five months of interviewing, revising my resume, writing cover letters and endlessly pounding the pavement to finally start at a joint that would pay me, in a year, what they would spend on a single full-page [...]

Your Resume Is Recyclable

As a freelance creative, one of the things that I do on an ongoing basis is promote my services. This is done in many ways and one of them involves having my website address and company name listed on several industry sites, such as this one. Because of this, I receive resumes from graduating students [...]

Life In A Pharma Agency: The Ninth Circle Of Hell, Or Merely The Eighth?

I spent many years writing ads at consumer agencies. I got to write ads and shoot TV spots and go on nice trips and win some awards. And then I decided to do the thing that, apparently, no mentally stable creative person has ever wanted to do, which is to write pharmaceutical ads. Full time. [...]