How did attending a professional advertising and design school enhance your career?
Putting together a professional-looking portfolio from a respected ad school (in 1990, it was Portfolio Center) gives you great practice for the hectic pace and deadlines of agency life. Although it's a two-year school, it also gives you roughly a four-year head start, and leapfrogs you past copywriters who used those two years working their way up the ranks.
A good ad school also offers the benefits and resources of a placement person who knows who is looking for writers and the track record of various agencies. While you were furiously concepting and creating ads, your placement person was keeping up with all those issues of Adweek and Ad Age.
One of the most common questions budding freelancers have revolves around setting their rates. What factors do you recommend a freelancer consider when putting together their rate schedule?
If you're a new freelancer trying to determine your rates, keep in mind that the agency you were working for was making a tidy profit on you, billing you out at possibly $125 an hour.
One conservative guide you can follow is taking your annual agency salary and removing the zeros for your hourly rate. If you were making $65K, charge $65 an hour.
Even if you decide you can't justify charging more than $65 an hour, when you're asked to estimate a job, think about how much you want to do the project, and remember that practically half of your fee will evaporate when it¹s time to pay quarterly taxes. Will you be happy with the $600 you'll have left after the $1,000 quote you gave the client?
Another possibility is to simply decide what your time is worth. Your "thinking time" is just as valuable as your writing time, so when estimating a project, make sure to include both.
What's the one piece of advice you can share with someone just starting out as a freelancer that you didn't do yourself?
Don't under-bid on project estimates just to get the job. Make sure you include time for (inevitable) revisions. Find out how many levels there are in your client's approval hierarchy, and plan accordingly. Put a line in your invoices that defines specific payment terms (i.e., net 30 days), or better yet, get a signed agreement before beginning work that outlines a payment schedule as the project progresses. Freelancers seem to be considered vendors, not the cavalry, and are often the last to be paid.
Many people think the "important" projects are saved for in-house agency copywriters. As someone who's worked on major campaigns as both an agency copywriter and a freelance copywriter, what's your opinion on this?
Sometimes, this is true, but it's not so much the "important" jobs, but rather the high profile or fun projects. For example, TV is rarely out-sourced, but technical copy and newspaper ads are.
Of course, this varies depending upon the agency or client, but it's rare that a major company will contact a freelance copywriter directly for a TV or national magazine campaign, and agencies are not likely to "give away" anything that could have "Addy" or "Kelly Award" potential.
After working on many major ad campaigns, which one are you most proud of and why?
Campaigns that get visible results for my clients are the ones I'm most proud of, but I believe projects that required intense, prolonged focus and creativity seem to be the real test of a creative. Spending long hours in dark editing suites made the dozens of Burger King TV and radio spots worthwhile every time the red line on their sales graph rose. Calls from local clients excited about my radio scripts that get their phone ringing seconds after they air is still gratifying every time.