Trading With The Natives

So the word out of Hollywood is nothing but grim. Frantic emails from former colleagues desperate for any leads on any work. Oy. If they only knew where I was. Advertising in general has been in crisis ever since we lurched into the digital age. Traditional advertising just doesn't work anymore. Newspapers and magazines are in a death spiral, taking print advertising with them. Television commercials have been Tivo'd into irrelevance. People have been flinging money into the online world for years now, with little or nothing to show for it. Even the most lavish website needs people to actually visit it. Phony "viral" ad campaigns can be sniffed out fairly quickly and end up being met with derision. And no amount of dancing ducks is going to make anyone click on a banner ad - banner ads are essentially visual noise to most people and generate no results.

And as bad as the general Adworld has been, the entertainment side of it has fallen off a cliff. All the studios and networks are now owned by multinational conglomerates, and to them, marketing movies should be the same as selling light bulbs. Not to mention, having suffered crushing losses in some of their other businesses, they've tended to treat Hollywood as their personal rainy day fund, forcing massive layoffs and slashing budgets to cover their asses elsewhere.

My business started crashing a couple of months before the meltdown of Fall '08. Panic set in as work dried up, and what little there was was paying a fraction of what it had the year before. First went the savings, then the 401K. And then... everything else. I've actually maintained a fairly steady work load, albeit at Malaysian sweatshop prices. It wasn't enough to save my house, or my former life. But it appeared to be more than enough to pay the freight here in Bako. Until recently.

My meager stream of work from Hollywood has dwindled to a trickle. So drastic measures were called for - looking for additional ad work in Bakersfield.

I approached this with quite a bit of trepidation. Were there even any ad agencies here? And if so, selling what exactly? And would I be treated like a carpetbagger, bigfooting all over the local talent?

So imagine my surprise when my very first attempts to crash the market were met with... WORK. I'd become so jaded and cynical in LA that I didn't realize how much cred all the Hollywood work generated. "You worked with Nicole Kidman and now you want to work with us!?!?!?!" Well, not exactly, but any port in a storm.

So here I am. A Bakersfield Mad Man. I was prepared to be shell shocked, grinding the gears as my creative life suddenly downshifted. And you know what? Not so much. Oh sure, the first tractor ad was a bit of a, oh what's the word... disaster. Who knew there were so many different kinds? But the transition has been fairly trauma free.

One day I'm selling Eddie Murphy films, the next commercial grade fertilizer.

In essence, no change.