In the days before the Mac:
Schlep around town with portfolios bumping into each other in reception, hoping that our book was seen before the others.... took 10 weeks to see 10 Art Buyers. Then we decided that postcards were the answer.. so we sent these off into the unknown and waited, and waited... and waited.
The Source Book
Use your shiny new project in the ad - costs an arm and two legs and when it comes out you'll not remember the image and be uncertain if you want any more jobs like that!
The Dawn of the Computer Age, but not many early birds in the creative world...
Photoshop 2, Freehand or Illustrator 3, NTSC Mosaic.
Some Designer told me that computers would never catch on in design companies.
A Rep said "get this crap out of my office" when shown some computer generated montages...
In the "floppy" days:
Cram your work onto a 1.2MB floppy disk and leave it with the Art Director/Art Buyer to view after we'd left... They didn't, but we were sure it was better than leaving a postcard.
The first Homepage...
Netscape Navigator 2 saves the day - stick all your work on this new internet thing... print new cards with your easy to remember url (http://www.someisp.com/~yourname/mywork.html) and send it to the creatives and wait for the "hits" - they didn't come, usually because computers were still "just a passing fad" anyway.
The pen makes a comeback...
The pen drive: 10MB! now that's more like it - and it even looks like a pen!
So now all we had to do was build a mini version of your internet web site (now known as a microsite) and get that to work on the drive! Easy, it wasn't - and Art Buyers still didn't look at them.
Hey, send e-mails...
Send out electronic mail messages with 50meg attachments to crash the Creative Director's PowerMac - They remember your name after that, but you won't work in this town again...
Buy lists of art directors...
Buy a list of art directors, art buyers, designers, producers, in-house departments. You need a list of the accounts each company has - plus the kind of company each account is. So when you get the list as a printed document you have to work all this out before you can do targeted mailings. Don't have time for that! I'll just send the same postcard to the entire list... the scattergun approach. Hang on, the print pieces cost me £1 each and the postage is gonna be at least £1,000...
Build a Better Web Site
Homepages are for home people! I need an all-singing, all-dancing web site with snazzy navigation and cool graphics - my nephew knows about computers and he built that site for his football team... can't be that difficult - I'll do the layouts in Photoshop 5 and Image Ready and get him to build the pages. I'll even pay him to do it after school, let's see it's November now, we'll get it done before Christmas surely... ready for the big push in January.
Banner Ads...
Squeeze the opening sequence from Se7en into a 40k gif file... ok so maybe not, but you drive some traffic to your site... then filter out the non-interested tyre-kickers and techno-browsers. So what's the cost per job? er dunno.
AdWords... they're all the go... so I pay for every click-through to my website, hang on - that's like only having to pay a magazine for the people who actually look at my ad... sounds good - but my competitors could put me out of business by clicking my ads.... hmmmmmmm......
Social Media .... never catch on - just like the web...
all these people talking about what colour their socks are... but I don't want to be left behind - so better start twitting or whatever... everyone else is!
So what are YOU going to do?
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