Graduate Interactive Communications

I’ve been waffling on the project topic, working with Alex to try and come up with a final version. I’m going to write my thesis on Virtual Agencies. I now need to clarify who my target audience is going to be, as well as generate a 1-2 page abstract for the overall paper.

My basic idea comes from real life observation. While working as a Creative Recruiter, I found myself filling ’staffing’ requests for individuals instead of corporations. Or rather, single individuals with LLCs or else individuals well known to my boss. These folks weren’t working within the standard job paradigm for advertising. They were individuals who were all former Account Managers or Marketing Managers, the people who typically initiate and ultimately assume responsibility for the advertising process. The business face of the advertising and marketing world, in other words.

This business facing person was at a senior career level, but not affiliated with any one company. Instead, they used their extensive business networks to find out about potential project work. Sometimes the projects were for the clients directly, sometimes they were niche roles that were needed by traditional advertising agencies. They assembled a team that was hand-picked from among their connections to work on the upcoming project. Usually they pull folks in for comp-work prior to the pitch, with the understanding being that if the project is awarded to the impromptu team that this team will be awarded the business. Nothing so formal as contracts, just perhaps a few MNDAs between everyone until the project was awarded, and then formal agreements as to contractor payments driving budgets.

When the project was awarded, the head contact would then fill in any occupational or skillset holes with freelancers or friends of friends. The project would materialize, each person would do their job, hopefully deliver on target and budget, and then the “company” would split back up, with each person taking their chunk of the profits.

Zero overhead. Reputation-based business model built completely upon the networking model. Flexible, agile, quick to business, no extraneous employees, maximum profits for individual efforts. Professionals acting professionally or else getting quickly ditched from the project rotations.

Calling for Testimonials

I’m looking for examples of folks who work like this. I work with a couple of them in my current job, and I’m friends with a woman who has worked this way for a few years. I’ve been part of some of these teams, at least up to the pitch portion (the pitches I’ve been on haven’t materialized into projects).

My personal feeling is that this is the shape of things to come. I don’t think that ad agencies will go away, but I think that there is a long tail of business projects available for those who can offer the right services at the right price points. The Virtual Agencies are already cutting into agency profits in certain cases, and it would be impossible (yes, impossible) for traditional agencies to meet deadlines in many cases without these virtual teams.

I just need to figure out what the exact angle of attack will be. Who am I going to be writing this thing for? Should I focus on the threat that virtual agencies represent to traditional advertising agencies? Should I focus on the virtual agency as a continuing trend of the future, becoming a sort of new set of freelancers/supertemps? I mean, really… what if the temps all worked together to form their own transient companies? Combining and recombining as needed, a world where it really is all about who you know. I could focus on the role that the web is playing in making this kind of business model possible in the first place.

Time to figure it out. This weekend I’d like to write up the first draft of that abstract. Get the ball rolling.

We’ll see.

This time was particularly difficult for me on the South Beach diet. With extended houseguests, stress at work through the roof, difficulty sleeping, and betrayal by a so-called friend, it was easy to manage from the food point, but the stress just pushed the emotional buttons. ‘What’s eating you’ indeed.

Still, I’m going to be climbing back on the bandwagon (quick, before someone hitches me up in front of it) today. Back to induction phase. Again.

The thing that sucks royal ass about the diet is the time it takes to prepare anything for it. That and pepperoni pizza isn’t on the list of approved Phase 1 foods. Unfortunately, everything good for you takes time to make. And even with a loving and supportive partner at home willing to take care of the food prep most of the time, it’s still damned inconvenient and borders on an impediment to success. The time delay between hunger and satiation is too long, or you have to keep to a rigid schedule. I get to feeling guilty that food prep is relegated to my partner, and so I try to help as well, more often than not assisting with dishes and cleanup.

Makes me wish there were more healthy take-out options more readily available. Suburbia sucks for that. But then, with high food prices it would just make the check go faster.

Ah well. Back up onto the wagon. Back onto the program. I just wish that falling off didn’t taste so wonderful.

You all -do- realize that I just surf www.icanhascheezburger.com and repost the good ones on my site, right?

Part of my resistance to this job has been the whole routine associated with it. I don’t have enough time for myself, so work/life balance is called into question for me. I never quite understood it before, because I just assumed that I had to work like a dog for some bone that someone would throw me at a later point in my corporate advancement. It’s not like that, though. Very rarely do the promised bones manifest, and when they do they always seem to look larger in the advertisement. The rewards don’t match the hype. Which shouldn’t really surprise folks in advertising, really, but we’re all suckers for the sales pitch in one way or another, or marketing wouldn’t work.

Maybe this is part of the natural shift to the later third of my thirties. Maybe being back in college has dredged up the old emotions and need for variability that got ground out of me slowly back after my first time out of college. Maybe I’m just nuts and need to actually find some kind of work which allows me to be my own boss, give myself my own direction, and pick my own assignments. Well, not like that’s going to happen at the bottom end of the career. And like it or not, this is hitting the reset button on the career itself.

Well, the summer still marches on. I’m getting used to having a regular paycheck again. I’m slowly getting back to the doctors I haven’t been able to afford the past two years. It’s slowly coming into place for me. I just don’t want that place to be here in Connecticut any more. I really don’t. It’s crowded beyond belief. It’s way too expensive. Cost of living here vastly outstrips my salary’s ability to keep up. I know that prices are rising all over the place, but this was already an overinflated housing market, and it’s just getting worse.

Time to find someplace else. Time to go. Every fiber of my being is telling me that it’s time to pack up and ship out from Connecticut. Or at least from Fairfield County. No, Connecticut as a whole. I’ve gotta move. Pushing on. I seriously wish all of my final classes at QU could be finished in the new online program, because I just do -not- want to be tied to CT in any way. If I could move now, I would. If I knew where to move -to-, that is.

Must just be continued hatred of my job.

Tired of this all. Very, very tired of this all. Medicate for success seems to be the only way to make this work. One more semester. One more. Almost done. Just gotta tighten up the proposal for the Thesis. Just gotta get some time in which to actually work on the thesis. Research would be lovely. Time would be lovely, but right now any extra time is getting put aside directly for recovery from the work stressors. So much for work/life balance. Gotta keep looking for different work.

Apropos of nothing, I’m really coming to hate eating almonds. See, I’m South Beaching it, trying to correct some horrible eating habits of mine which are intricately linked with the pleasure response. A while ago my partner and I tried South Beach, and I have to say that out of all the eating plans out there I personally responded quite well to it. The induction period is the hardest, but that’s something that was pretty easy to get through. I don’t know how much weight I lost because I don’t weigh myself, but everyone noticed body mass shrinkage in the right places.

We left the diet because of unemployment. As anyone who has done so will tell you, eating healthier is much, much, much more expensive than eating junk food. Possibly because the amount of “actual food” inside the comestibles of junk food is much lower. This time around I’m already three weeks into South Beach, and would have been off the induction phase by now, slowly adding back in healthy carbs. Only problem is that we went off the diet just prior to the completion of induction during the July 4th weekend. Someone brought a pan of homemade, creamy/crunchy-topped macaroni and cheese. Like mom makes, but better (and don’t tell my mom I said that).

I just couldn’t. But true to the way that the diet was written, we didn’t gorge ourselves, and we didn’t overindulge. We just ate normal meal portions over the 4th of July weekend (we were up in a cabin in the mountains of New Hampshire with friends… miiiiiles from civilization, so there was only the food we had brought, and the mac and cheese was reeeaaaalllly good.) And then we went back to the induction diet.

Working and food prep and commutes, oh my

The biggest challenge to -me- on South Beach is all the food prep. It takes so much time to cook every single meal, every single day, that if it weren’t for my partner I’d be back to the pizzas and ice cream diet which has served me so conveniently for the past 36 years within a week. Luckily my partner has extra time to do most of the food prep… but it’s still work intensive. With my commute now up to a full hour and a half each way most days of the week, there’s no room in my schedule for anything outside of work, commute, food, and sleep. It’s like I live to work, I no longer work to live.

That’s why I’m sick of almonds. I know, according to the actual diet nuts etc. should be eaten in moderation, but I graze on them all day long. I did the last time and still lost tons of the weight. I need to graze, it’s just normal for me now. There’s stress releases built into it too… work is so frakking stressful that I self-medicate with food all day. At least with South Beach that food is better for me. I’d rather have a whole stack of chicken strips (baked is fine, no breading is fine) or a whole bucket of Hummus and a pile of cheese. But instead, here I have nothing but almonds.

I’m really coming to hate almonds. I’d get nifty salads, but my company is in a very overpriced region where the illusions of downtown America are finally fading away, despite every attempt to make ‘quaint’ into the new ‘chic’ by folks who still seem to think there’s real value for Americans to study French as a foreign language (ignoring the fact that their children would be better served learning Spanish, if only to speak with their servants and neighbors).Salads here cost upwards of $15 for the same thing that you can get at McDonalds for $5. No, really. McD’s relies on the same produce distributors as do the other ‘trendy’ lunch counters, and food that is not processed at all is roughly equivalent no matter where you go.

Killing time at work

I’m still trying to figure out what exactly it is about this place that makes me want to go home as soon as I walk in the front door. It doesn’t help that there’s already an hour and a half worth of resentment just struggling to get here. Commuting really brings out the worst in people, and it shows folks for the arrogant, stupid sons of bitches that they really are. Escalades jumping ahead one spot in line because… well, like that one car length actually made a difference. Folks closing ranks to try and force the merging traffic to get behind them. Merging traffic trying to ride the shoulder to squeeze in a few more cars ahead. Folks weaving between the lanes because one lane moves and the other two stop, and that moving lane rotates seemingly at random.

All pointless. All to go to a job that is designed to crush the living spirit and suck the life out. At least the salary is a living wage here. I guess that’s something positive to go on. Finally. Took me almost 15 years and $30K in debt to achieve it, but that’s still something. Three years from now I might actually be able to be free from that debt.

I guess I just don’t want to grow up. I want variability AND stability in my life. I like the theoretical, but we have to live in the practical. I like playing with ideas, but… but whatever. I’m still struggling against this job because it’s so mundane. It looks just like what I just left, only with more yelling and less understanding of what it is that we’re trying to do here.

Yeah. I really do think I’m coming to not only dislike and hate, but also resent almonds. I could be eating meals, but instead I graze on nuts. No time for anything else. Preparing food ahead of time is a nice thought, but at the end of the day and the end of the week I just don’t have the energy or the willpower to prepare all that much food. And when I do, and try to keep it, it just goes over the weekend because… hey! Prepared food that’s legal on the diet! Weekends mean no work, right? So let’s not work and let’s eat from this stockpile.

Yeah yeah. Change my habits. One thing at a frakking time. First we change the habit of what it is we’re eating. Then we change the habit of how we’re preparing it. And finally, if we’re lucky, we’ll get to the point where we change the patterns of life and subsistence which require such crappy commutes and unrewarding jobs.

But for right now, I’m just going to blame the almonds.

I have to laugh. I just have to laugh. In the Disadvantages of an Elite Education post and comments on Alex Halavais’ blog, I mentioned that several of the new generation of college students entering the work force were having real issues adapting to worklife culture in corporate America. Arguments over whether flipflops are appropriate office dress codes (they’re okay in advertising unless you’re meeting with the client) are the least of it. The hardest part is the sheer flakiness that the Millennials seem to be showing toward work life in general.

Well, the cause for my mirth is that one of our paid summer interns decided yesterday that work was too boring, and he didn’t want to come in today. That was his reasoning. He went to the head of the division and calmly announced that he would be taking a day off to head to the beach with friends. When the pushback came and it was indicated that the work was more important than the beach from the company’s point of view, the guy walked off the job and said that the work was too boring, not as exciting as he had thought it would be, and he wasn’t interested in it any more.  He wasn’t the first to flake out on the job scene… he’s just the most recent.

And the real irony of this situation is that the Boomers said that Gen X had screwed up work ethics. I guess this means great things for me in my future… as the Baby Boomers retire and their children slack, Gen X’ers should have their picks of job positions in upper management. The downside is that we won’t have anyone around to actually do the work.

I smell a generational wakeup call coming in the next three years, and I think it will look an awful lot like a temper tantrum and pouting fit when it happens.

Yeah. I’m stressed out already for the upcoming semester and it hasn’t even started yet. I’d love to just take the three classes and push out my thesis until the spring, and do it the way that I had originally intended… a full semester working on nothing but the thesis alone, by itself. The trouble with that plan is, I’m working at a job that I really have grown to resent, and I’m planning on heading out of the area in the summer after graduation. If I push out the thesis, then I won’t be able to get a semester of adjunct teaching under my belt before moving away.

Me and commitment, not so much right now

I just don’t want to lock in to a topic yet. That’s what it comes down to. I found out that I can use the ‘thesis’ option to produce a substantive white paper or article. That helps. I can wrap my brain around the concept of an article or a white paper. It was the “make a website” or “do original research” which was confusing the hell out of me. QU’s program is awesome, but they have no Methods training coursework for original research, and they do not offer enough substance on the coding/artistic side to allow for “make a website” on a professional scale.

Well, even with the new formats available, I don’t want to commit to anything right now. And I really feel pressured to do so, internally and externally. This year has been insane. Absolutely insane. Do I push back and cut myself some slack but give up the opportunity to get in a semester’s experience developing a curriculum and teaching collegiate courses, just to give me a less stressful thesis writing experience? Or do I continue on full steam ahead, torpedos be damned?

Where do we go from here?

One of the scariest things about this all for me is the periodic waves of despair coming from the knowledge that despite how awesome it is to study Interactive Communications, applying the theoretical into the practical meets with profound resistance at all industry levels. We talk a looooooot at work about how education is one of our primary duties, but I have to tell ya… no one is listening. No one is even really interested at all in hearing anything aside from “You’re right, I really *am* just making all this crap up to bother you and prevent you from doing anything on time.”

I’m scared that this is what it’s going to be like, whether on the client side or not, whether in advertising, marketing, PR, what have you. I left TracyLocke voluntarily in a bad economy because of one project. One single project where Account was so cocksure of themselves that they steamrolled over me, ignored all of my emails, and pushed a project ahead without my consent and in direct opposition to my advice. It ended up blowing up in their faces, and they had the audacity to come back and try to pin the blame on me. And when I produced the reams of printouts about the project and highlighted all my warnings, they tried to blame the vendor instead.

Is it always like this? I’m hoping that this is just symptomatic of working in a place where one paradigm is butting up against a competing paradigm. I’m really hoping that this $30K in graduate education is going to pan out with a career field which doesn’t require constant attempts to educate coworkers who neither listen nor care, but sure do shout a lot when it comes time to blame.  Maybe it’s different in a completely interactive business environment, but outside of software development houses and interactive ad agencies, what are those? Maybe I need to move further west, to find a place where the interactive paradigm has gained the upper hand. Maybe there I’ll find some kind of work which won’t stress me out all the time and make me want to throttle my coworkers for their arrogant pride in their own damned ignorance.

Maybe.

Otherwise I’ll have to up my medications seriously for the next three years, which is the amount of time it will take me to pay off the investment I just made.

Maybe I’m just absolutely exhausted and I need some time off. Completely off, no running anywhere or doing anything.

I don’t know what to dream for more… resolution on my thesis subject, a better career position that doesn’t require forced reeducation of coworkers, or time off to recuperate.

One of each, please.

Tick tock, man. Can’t afford to drag my feet too much longer on all of this. Yesterday the bill arrived for the fall semester and today the call went out to find out why my financial aid wasn’t on it… seems they want me to fill out forms for it besides the FAFSA… who knew? They went out today, too. All of this has given me the wakeup call that I need. Time to finalize my subject, select my choice of advisors, beg/bribe/coerce my advisor, and then submit the prospectus for approval.

In looking at the forms for the Capstone/Thesis, there were FAQ that included the idea of repurposing a project that has already been submitted for a grade. Not a bad idea, and already where I was generally circling back to. The easy thing is, there are only so many subjects I’ve done substantial research or work with that would possibly interest me in revisiting.

• Electronic Civil Disobedience and CyberTerrorism: This becomes very topically relevant when you look at the growing Cold War everyone is pretending isn’t going to happen between China and the Western World. Add in the fact that China has already been ‘caught’ (never the official government, of course) making cyber attacks on various Western targets.
• The Rise of Amateurism/Death of Professionalism: Still relevant, the internet and the digital revolution is encouraging simultaneously the resurgence of folk art while causing stress within the existing market models of professional communicators. I can focus specifically on the Advertising Industry for this one.
• The Open Source movement: Broad subject, I’d need to apply it specifically to something relevant in digital communications. Honestly? Not going this route.
• Flash Development and Programming: I still have my not-quite-completed project from Information Animation. The coding was sound, but at the end I encountered a logistical problem and ran out of time in the coding to make my project work. Environmental programming. Virtual ant farms, so to speak, with self-sustaining animated Flash environments. Iteration 1 is almost (ALMOST!) working, so I could pick that back up, solve the final logical problem, and then get going on the subsequent iterations and development of true environmental factors. This is honestly intriguing… but I’m more likely to make it a personal side project. Actually, I’m -really- looking forward to playing around in Flash more after graduation. So maybe this is a good thing. Though I don’t know that I would want to set the bar too high. I’m not very good at coding, but I have the potential to learn.
• Integrated Marketing: This isn’t a new concept, and it’s been bandied around the ad world for a while. I had heard of it before I got to QU, though it was always mentioned as a buzz word to help get more of the client’s money by trying to grab more than the ‘typical’ share of projects by promoting the agency as ‘full service’ and then hyping the need for ‘integrated marketing’. The argument being that if you go to the same ad/marketing agency, then we can ‘integrate’ everything. But the truth is, the reason behind Integrated Marketing as a business approach is due to the fact that the consumer is utilizing the web to interact with brands outside of the intended brand messaging. It’s the recipient who is in control of Integration, not the mass media. I think there’s real potential to create a Narrative project which provides a literature review on the subject of Integrated Marketing. I could add some interviews with key players and voices, try and find successful examples of Integrated Marketing case studies.
• Revisiting Copyright Historically: This would be an Interactive Narrative which took a look at the current Copyright crisis, and then looked at historical periods where copyrights were challenged by new media and see how that all worked itself out. It definitely ties into the concepts of patronage of the arts, too. As well as the Tragedy of the Commons. So… probably far too broad.
• Barriers to Wikinomics in the Current Advertising Agency model: Okay, so I haven’t done any homework on this, but I have read the book Wikinomics and studied the concepts behind it, and I have some strong personal insights on the ins and outs of the Advertising model of operations. Well, it’s a thought.

Okay, so what I need is a good month to just research all of the above options. The problem is that nothing really jumps off of the page, but there’s interest in all of them. Whatever topic I pick I will come to resent and hate in the extreme well before I finish, so I need to find something that really grabs me. Otherwise I’ll hit the hate period far too early in the process and not have the personal investment to want to move forward with it. I wish I were a better student in that way, but I know myself.

Narrowing Down to the Short List

Get rid of Open Source and Copyright, right off the bat. I haven’t done enough research on the Copyright thing in my past studies to position me well to choose a sub-topic narrow enough to focus on. And the Open Source, while fun, isn’t all that fun. Wikinomics and Advertising is an interesting angle, but I think I can work it into the Integrated Marketing more easily than I can break it out on its own. Electronic Civil Disobedience, while a fun project and side topic, does still feel like a side topic.

So that leaves me with the following short list to choose from:

• Flash Development/Environmental Flash coding
• Integrated Marketing (with a possible lean toward Integrated Communications)
• The Rise of Amateurism/Death of Professionalism
• Oh, and one more I forgot to list above: The Virtual Advertising Agency (there’s a new pattern of communications pseudo-companies forming based off of the networking model, not the incorporated or hierarchy model).

Actually… I think that it’s going to be the Virtual Communications Agency Model. I’ve got connections with a few folks who are operating on this model already… I can use them as case studies. It will end up being an Interactive Narrative more than a Thesis, so we’ll be going the Capstone route. I can draw from theoretical concepts of the new media, personal history in the advertising world, primary sources in the form of interviews and case study downloads, as well as pulling in top-level bits of Integrated Marketing, wikinomics, networking models, and the role of the new entrepreneur navigating between the Amateur and the Corporate Professional realm.

Well. It seems I’ve got a preliminary topic. Now it’s time to try and wrangle up an advisor. (cue evil laughter)

8:18 when I start writing this. I’m in the office, ready to go for the day. 8:30 is the official start time, so usually the phone starts ringing about then when there’s issues in the air. Today, there are issues in the air. Again.

I’m getting a bit shell shocked. I get the feeling that I’m a tennis ball in a volley when I’m at work. The Account team has little to no interactive experience and positively hates dealing with us in Interactive Production because to their viewpoint, we’re just being difficult. I’ve talked about it here before, and I’ll say it again… the offline job process and the online job process are inverted. Offline, the job can begin with a bare minimum of details being locked in. What do you want to produce at the end? How many colors/other physical specifications of the final piece? Good to go. Everything else can be decided along the way.

Not so in the online world. The discussions are rather chicken & egg, all the time.

“We want to build a web page.”

“What kind of web page?”

“A page on the web. I dunno. One with Flash.”

“Ummm…. what do you want it to be able to -do-?”

“I don’t know… what can it do?”

“What’s your budget?”

“$5,000.”

“Then, not much. And certainly not with any real amount of Flash.”

If you believed our account reps, the clients live in perpetual sticker shock. The interactive media has been around just a decade commercially and we’re already seeing the erosion of the concepts of professionalism. The client knows a guy in college who can do a web page with lots of stuff for much cheaper. The agency is a full-service agency. The two prices are going to be very, very different. But will the results?

I don’t think so. As long as you’ve got access to the right skillsets you need along the way, there’s no reason why 2 guys in a basement can’t successfully complete the same quality projects as the high end agencies. In fact, agencies seem to be making their money by being able to attract the right stable of talent.

Here, for example, you’ve got everything from soup to nuts. Video, sound, illustration, motion graphics, Information Architecture, web design, marketing, proofreading, copywriting, interactive strategy, Flash design and development, database building and back-end coding… you name it, we offer it. And because there’s so much being offered, they need Interactive Producers (like me) to coordinate the process.

But if you have 2 guys in a garage, and they can get the right mix of skills between them, there’s nothing to stop them from producing competing product.

Well… there’s the bell. Time to don the armor and enter the fray. I’m used to feeling slight tension between Account and internal departments, but it’s escalated to the point that it feels like a barely-contained cold war with occasional flare ups. Today promises to be one of those flare ups. Gotta stay calm, focused, and refuse to rise to the bait or to budge.  Quietly or screaming, order -will- be brought to this chaos, until the day I leave.