Advertising Crooks of the peaceful city -MCT

“It's like a duck on a calm lake,” he said in French. “On the surface, he looks like he is idle, but under the water, his feet are really busy.”

There are many types of crooks and hustlers thriving and running their small time businesses by underhand dealings all around this peaceful city!  This article is a brief account of “Ad Crooks” whom you can possibly come across in the field of advertising freelancing (whether copy or art).

      To begin with, from the 1^st crook’s point of view: let’s say you are a “single man army” and you take up Advertising/PR tasks bigger than your size or abilities – thanks to the merit of your skin and your good, trimmed, trustworthy looks! - (From a greedy/ inexperienced client who is expecting or promised paradise for peanuts) and in order to make a reasonable profit -to patch up for a long excruciating Drought- you have to hardly pay any of the people cooperating with you to get this boon job done!... So, How to go about it?

 Get a new Freelancer (who was an ex-colleague but you have not dealt with before on a private business level), promise him a lot or agree to his “wishful” fees without discussion; get your difficult, time consuming job done and dodge him for eternity!; if cornered for whatever reasons, just start a postponing phase; and in between, you can even pull another job done from the same person, depending on how convincing you are and his or her level of naivety!

   A Second form of crookedness: agree to the freelancer’s / small time service provider fees, get a long tedious job done in weeks and even months, and then postpone payment for months, and when time comes that you “have to” pay something- before the “angry mob” try and raid your office as the tone of voice on phone starting to change to be more sinister- just get it down to 50% or even 60% and always say: this is what I have in my wallet right now!, then the freelancer finds himself in a situation where he has to accept this 60% better than nothing!

     The Third type of city slickness you come across in the realm of moonlighting, is a call from someone familiar, Hello!, Need you for some new project for our company, can I see you tomorrow? Sure. You go and see work scope, doable! Agree and go ahead. Then in due course, the work lot doubles and triples!, month after month, you discover it’s a bone crushing trap, or in best cases a hamster wheel where you have to keep running if you want to get paid for burning the midnight oil for weeks!

In this case it is one of two, either he didn’t know the amount of work, which is unprofessional; or he knew but he tricked you into doing his humongous job, which is skullduggery! Talking of money boss, after he gets paid only he pays you, how long does it take? Half a calendar year passes before you are able to see the first installment of your money! After too much of waiting, follow up visits, angry emails, pleading and even threatening!

The Fourth type of hustlers you may come across as a freelancer is a marketing communication executive, whose negligence and uncaring attitude makes the whole situation looks like trickery! You agree – over several emails - on a certain way of payment i.e. “Bank account Deposit” for instance, and in the end you find payment got fixed in a different form i.e. “Bank Cheque”, which can’t be fetched due to long distance between yours and the client’s location! What do you call this?

Lesson learned for freelancers: only do business with people you personally know, and have easy access to their offices; or at least when you have a way at hand to put some pressure to get your hard earned money, in case you suspect deliberate delay or met with an absent-minded project manager or a lazy “always out” accountant in charge of the whole case.