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 1st 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.
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