Rubber Stamp.

I've had a heckuva busy week and I expect next week to be busy as well, so around 4PM on Friday afternoon, I headed downstairs to my office to try to write a blogpost or two so I'm not behind the eight-ball when Monday rolls around.

Yes, I'd rather have headed upstairs to my bedroom and rested for a bit.

But whether or not anyone reads these words, I've made this blog a thing. 

For years I've been haranguing clients about the need to be consistent. The need to run ads. The need to be ubiquitous. The truism is "you have to be in it to win it."  

I usually say something like, "for my entire life, Tiffany's has run a small space ad in the upper right hand corner of an early page in the A-section. No one's buying off the page. But they serve to remind people that Tiffany's exists. That's way better than the alternative."

I suppose you could call that a media strategy. I just call it smart. And I realized when I went out on my own that I wouldn't get phone calls if no one thought of me when they needed help. So how could I get people to think of me? Especially at a time when it's considered annoying to phone people. And when work can come from virtually anywhere.

Not too many hours ago I went for a walk along the seacoast that girds the little Connecticut town I split my time in. Minutes in, interrupting something melancholy by Ben Webster, I got a text from a friend who's a planner. I get a lot of texts like this. These texts are very often from people I like a lot, so they hit me hard when they express the typical ad-agency level of career unhappiness.

Where do you begin with the above?

I've spent a lot of time thinking about the business and its commoditization, how essentially, it's turned itself from a collection of independent "mom and pops" to a centrally-run and technocratically-managed big box store. Like big box stores, it's hard to get service in an agency. What they sell is usually undifferentiated. They compete on price. And they pay their (temp) workers low wages. Also, they ship about 70 cents out of every dollar to Bentonville, Arkansas or its equivalent.

As I've said so often, Etiam si omnes, ego non. Even if all others, not I. 

In other words, how can I resist my own personal commodification? While the capital that controls the industry is pushing wages down, how can I maintain my standard of living? 

Basically, I wrote myself a brief.

1. How can I get picked?
2. How can I get paid?

This post that I'm writing now is, in part, an answer to that tough brief. And is, in part, an answer to my friend's plaintive note. When you work for yourself you don't always get to work with decent human beings, but if people are asses, you can usually find a slightly punitive way of charging them. If you've lived a fairly impecunious life, you might even be able to walk away from jerks entirely.

My Account Director and I are dealing with one of those less-than-salutary people now. But the money involved is good enough for me to be uncharacteristically tolerant. Charitable even.

I did, however, investment-spent $48 to get two rubber stamps made. One for me. One for my Account Director. I designed the stamp myself. We'll use them to remind ourselves that money isn't everything.