Almost every art director or copywriter I've ever had the pleasure of working with -- that is, being on the same company staff -- is no longer working with the company and no longer working on staff.
A convoluted way of saying, "we're all freelancers."
This didn't happen overnight.
Nor did the process happen in a vacuum.
My good friend Mike Folino, who bills himself as the World's Greatest Freelancer, blames me. Not in totality. But nevertheless he lays faults on this blog, which had been running for close to nine years and which has regularly glorified the freelance life. Vis a vis my regular rants against the open office plan, the inhumane work/life balance, the salary inequality, and the general inefficiency of the holding company model.
"Mike," I would say, "You can't pin the overcrowding in the freelance pool on me. How many people do you think read this stupid blog, 8? 13? 21?"
Well, that little show of false humility no longer holds any water.
The happy truth is, in 2017 RoundSeventeen has enjoyed record readership. Five of the six previous months each had more than 20,000 page hits.
And that's without the normal spikage I would receive through irregular links and appearances in AgencySpy, which in the past would send web traffic through the roof.
But since the good folks over at AgencySpy dropped their anonymous comment section (always the highlight of any disgruntled ad worker's day) I suspect their site has been unbookmarked in inverse proportion to the number of people coming here.
Because if they're not going to purvey vile petulance and lob thinly-veiled insults at some of the drunken incompetent miscreants running the ad industry into the ground, somebody has to.
Anyway, back to my original point.
There's a shit ton of freelancers out there. And I may or may not have had something to do with that.
That's good news for those of you who may have been on the pointy end of one my past columns. Karma, and irony, could be coming around.
Because this monumental glut of creative mercenaries may end up sending me to a premature retirement and a one way ticket to a dirty nursing home.
In the words of the Bard, I could be hoisted by my own petard.
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