29 years in the biz. Never seen it this hard. Omg.
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22 years, but agree. It’s like a switch just went off this year, and having a large network, a history of great shops and award winning work doesn’t much help. Easy to say it was fun while it lasted but that doesn’t pay the bills.
18 years in biz and yes, it's been a terrible year thus far. Although not my first. Here's a quick recap: 2020 - 280k, '21 - 325k, '22 - 70k, '23 - 15k, '24 - '270k, '25 - so far - 0
Enthusiast
I love your big numbers. Happy Thank You More Please. Have you reached out to everyone who employed you during those years? (“Ofc I have shut up”) Have you reduced your tittle (on LinkedIn) to CD to make yourself seem less expensive? Have you connected w your old clients and tried to go in house?
The last 2 years have been brutal. This year has been better for me than last, but not good by any stretch of the imagination. It started out good. My partner and I started off in February with a longish gig that ended in May and got to shoot two decent spots (though the production budget got cut severely halfway through).
We are trying to see this situation as a way to flip the tables to our advantage. Clients still have needs. Agencies are struggling (especially the ones in large holding companies). Indies seem to be growing and attracting a certain type of client. More work is being brought in-house. Clients are seeing the larger agencies as bloated, overpriced and slow. They’re not wrong.
My partner and I are trying to work on ways to just bypass the agencies that used to give us work, and go directly to the client. There have been many times when we did absolutely everything in terms of solving the client’s problem and developed entire campaigns while the agency just sat there and collected the money and the credit. They were just middlemen who didn’t contribute much. We want to create a flexible and scalable collective with other freelancers to be able to pitch for projects against agencies. We will certainly beat them in price and most likely are able to in creative, since they hire us to solve problems they’re not able to solve. We know how to win pitches because… that’s what agencies hire us to do.
This is the opposite of “if you can’t beat them, join them.” This is “if you can’t join them, beat them.”
We are currently going through our contacts and previous clients to see how to leverage this situation to our advantage.
I would also like to get in touch, but it says I can’t DM you, ACD 1
It’s more pitches for individual projects as opposed to retainers—you need fewer people.
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💯
It definitely is a switch that got flicked, but I'm not dure that it was on/off in nature. Something shifted to make the BAU no longer work, and it seems nobody making the decisions has a clue about how to pull a different sail in order to catch the wind. The money is still moving like it always has; its route has been detoured, and it's probably up to us to locate it if we're going to survive.
Business as usual, "the way we've always done it."
End of 2023 to now has been brutal.
‘23 did it to me.
If you overlay inflation / interest rates it pretty much explains it.
Yes - the internet has been squeezing the life out of the advertising’s traditional model, but that’s been happening for 20+ years, at a slow drip.
Piling on top of that were the economic effects of the pandemic. Inflation and interest.
The wave that subsumed the drip.
Alphabet, Amazon and Google are about to hit 55% of global ad spend this year.
We’ve living in a tipping point. And it’s probably not going to get any better.
Not all AI yet (but that’s what Zuckerberg is promising) but what these platforms are selling is media, not creativity. And they work directly with clients.
So there’s simply less money for creative agencies because the pie for us is shrinking every year.
(And sorry, mean to say Alphabet, Amazon and Meta in my post)
What do you think it is out of interest? It’s not because clients aren’t spending - CMO budgets are flat y.o.y ? Is it more work being taken on internally - more shifting towards digital?
Yes.
There’s another thing at work here too. US talent is by farrrrrr the most expensive freelance talent. Generally we are finding people in our network in other countries before we tap freelance as a last resort. When we do tap freelance it’s art direction/ design from South America and copywriting conceptual from Canada and Europe. When freelancers are rarely in office anymore it’s hard to justify the nyc or even a Chicago rate. For reference a multi lion winner from Toronto will run you $650-750 USD a day. And that’s on the high end. Same sort of portfolio and award count on the design/art direction side from BA or São Paulo will be $450-500 USD. The bean counters are full on making these calls. I can’t remember the last time we had a US freelancer.
Freelance creative from Canada here. This is true. Sorry. Our dollar is just weak enough to make the bean counters notice and capitalize.