Posts Tagged ‘hiring’

Best to leave it to the pros

Lately, I’m hearing about many jobs and opportunities at various ad agencies. Surprisingly, there are jobs in the advertising business, despite the gloom and doom of the industry in particular and the economy in general. For those of us around Boston we have to be willing to relocate. For all of us, in the advertising biz, we apparently need to possess multiple skill-sets.

If you are an art director then you must now be able to concept, create great designs and help sell ideas to clients (standard job description) as well as know Flash with ActionScript and hopefully some HTML & CSS. I recently read a post by a young art director wondering whether she should learn HTML because some copy job descriptions now list coding knowledge as a requirement. I see jobs for my role, producer, that require knowledge of Flash with AS2 (not AS3, are you sure?), HTML/CSS & JavaScript, PhotoShop, Illustrator, copy writing, and great MS Office skills especially, Project and PowerPoint. A former colleague once complained that the designers on our job didn’t do front end development too, and wondered why not.

Whenever confronted with this attitude, or with job descriptions like the above I wonder in which year folks are living because it sounds like 1999. My next thought usually has to do with the evolution of societies. Back in the early days of web marketing many folks did many things like design and code and even write. An interesting thing happened, as it often does in evolving societies: things started to get complicated and division of labor within the (web marketing) tribes began to emerge. Granted, there are folks who have truly full tool sets, and the more that you can do, the better. Yet, I think it unrealistic to expect everybody to wear many disparate hats as par for the daily course. Sure it’s great from a bottom-line, head count perspective when you can hire one rather than two folks. In over a decade in this business I’ve met very few people who were conceptual thinkers, great designers, rocking Flash developers and good managers (in fact, I know one).

I do believe that everybody in an interactive agency who touches work that goes into the world needs to understand the medium, the platforms and the capabilities and limitations of same. Expecting a copy writer to write both the copy and the markup that holds the copy is asking quite a bit of that person and, frankly, not providing the level of service and work that we should provide to our clients. Many of us in advertising can do many things. We are gamers and are willing to tackle challenges. Perhaps the new business model –whatever it will be — will require us all to wear more hats (though, the old one did too) but I want to wave a caution flag. Unless that copy writer is very good at both markup and pithy marketing copy — and I mean very good at both — then she should not be writing both. There is a professional level of work that we marketers need to deliver to the people paying the bills. I’m not entirely convinced that hiring Jacks & Jills of all trades is the way to deliver that superior product. If an agency finds that multi-tool person, by all means, scoop them up, and pay them well. Otherwise, hire appropriately, let people do what they do well and deliver great work from within well built teams.

Built by and for pros

This is a release that I’ve been looking forward to announcing for quite some time. Please Feed The Animals, a  site where out-of-work advertising agency professionals can open a free account and post their resumes, work experiences, and  eventually, portfolios to connect with agencies that are hiring, has been released in Beta. The brain child of Erik Proulx, the site was designed and built by an all volunteer force of agency professionals. I provided project management and information architecture services as well as space on exUrban’s BaseCamp for the duration of the project. Through Erik’s connections, and mine, some of whom overlapped (unsurprising in a town as small as Boston) we pulled together Michael Durwin, Joe Morris, Liz DiPietro-Frazier, Amanda Talbott, Conor Feely, John Szalay, and Richard Haynie — rocking designers, all. Based in and around Boston, New York and Phoenix, AZ these folks designed and laid out the many pages that Skookum — who generously donated their staff’s time and is based in Concord, NC — needed to work their magic.

The designers went above and beyond and knocked the designs out of the park. From just a single, model template this geographically distributed team created 26 page designs (lots of forms and information presentation pages) that matched each other perfectly in terms of PFTA’s brand. This consistency is a true testament to their skill and their professionalism. As happens with a volunteer team of hustling ad-types the size and composition of the team ebbed and flowed as folks picked up paying gigs, but the design work was evenly distributed across team members and the bulk of the templates were completed in a few weeks — give or take some staffing ebbs.

The development and deployment of PFTA was a terrifically collaborative experience with plenty of spirited give and take, and a high level of trust that the pros on the team would make good decisions and do what was right for the job. The team did not disappoint. PFTA proved, yet again, the viability of social media as a connector (that’s how Erik and I met) and a tool that can be used to marshal resources and enable them to work together. Spread across the country, using email, cell phones, Twitter and a $25 per month, cloud-based-extranet/project management tool (two actually, Skookum has one as well) a talented bunch of folks brought to life a really cool idea. If I were a giant, publicly-traded-holding-company-owned-agency I’d look at PFTA as both a wonderful staffing resource but also a potential threat to my organization. The world’s biggest, most experienced agency is on the streets, and it has everything it needs to succeed and deliver value to customers. In a final, wonderful bit of meta-context, Please Feed The Animals was built by the people for whom it was intended: the talented, passionate, driven ad-pros who lost their jobs in the ad-biz blood-letting of 2008-9 (hopefully, it evolves into “just” a job site for talented ad folks, no more hemorrhages for a while, please). I am proud to have been a part of the genesis of PFTA, and completely thrilled at how well it turned out. May it be wildly successful.