A Poem and More.

I got my first freelance assignment when I was just 22. This is back, if you can believe it, in the 1970s. I think Jimmy Carter was president. 

The assignment was from a guy who sold space in FSIs. Free Standing Inserts. Those sections of the Sunday paper that were an insert of about sixteen four-color pages full of coupons. Believe it or not, people looked forward to them.

The guy who I worked for had a deal with Colgate toothpaste or something, if I remember right. If you bought a tube of Colgate, you'd get to bowl a game at a local bowling alley for free. 

That was the general tenor of these things. They were about as high-class as mike pence's morality and/or foreskin.

I remember I wrote a line. Something like "Get bowled over with whiteness." Hardly Shakespearean but when I presented it, the guy who hired me was very pleased. 

It's been 45 years now and I'm still waiting for my check.

Since then, I've freelanced for a hundred agencies and a couple hundred pieces of business. Now that I run GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, the lessons I learned freelancing remain relevant and they are almost always the same. In fact, you can sum them all up in essentially one-sentence: "Easy money isn't."

No matter how much money you're slated to make, or how clear the assignment, or genial the client, it's always a slog. It makes Bataan look like a walk to the grocery story. It's always tough sledding.. I know of no prospector who struck gold with her first swing of the pickaxe. It might be like that in the movies, but real-life ain't tinsel town. 

Somehow, this scene from "The Sweet Smell of Success" comes to what's left of my mind.

As Bert Bacharach and Hal David wrote and Dionne Warwick sang (to perfection)

L.A. is a great big freeway
Put a hundred down and buy a car
In a week, maybe two, they'll make you a star
Weeks turn into years. How quick they pass
And all the stars that never were
Are parking cars and pumping gas

And that's who we are, today. As job security, and even jobs, are no more, and every week, it appears twenty-percent of the industry (new portmanteau: Undo-stry) is let-go, and even the best-regarded agencies and the biggest-global CPA-led holding companies no-longer have agency-of-record relationships, we're all free-agents now. We all make Sisyphus look like the very modern model of job satisfaction. (You should see his 360-review!)

With all that being said, with all that as an overture to the opera that's coming, where the great consolidation of spending and pricing power falls to a few malevolent and autocratic hands leaving the last of us fighting for scraps: vicious, hungry, desperate, I've written a short numerical poem that captures the "story arc." 

Business as she is broke.

1. Wow, this is a lot of money.
2. This is easy.
3. Shit, this more work than I anticipated.
4. This really was a bait-and-switch.
5. These people are assholes.
6. What if they don't like it?
7. They love it.
8. Damn, I worked hard for that money.
9. I'm not sure I asked for enough.
10. 90 days to be paid?
11. Next time I'm asking for more and getting half upfront.
12. Sure, I'll cut my rate.
13. That was great!
14. Let's do it again soon.

This is the pattern.
Advertising has always been about differentiation.
Are you different?