Congratulations on your redundancy

Look, redundancy is never fun. Especially at this time of year. But with the benefit of hindsight, I've realised that my first redundancy in 2009 was a crucial moment in my career that's still paying off 14 years later.

It’s 8:30 am on a Wednesday and I’m walking through Sydney Airport with testicles drawn on my face. My creative partner Shane Dawson is trailing behind me, filming on a digital video camera (remember them?). We’ve been flown to Sydney to be interviewed by a brand new advertising and media publication Mumbrella. We’re being interviewed by Mumbrella founder Tim Burrowes because a web series we’ve been making for the past two weeks has become an unlikely hit. And we’re making the web series because we just lost our jobs.?

A detail that didn’t make Episode 15 of our web series The Sack is that while I walk through the airport with balls drawn on my face, I bump into TJ, a music industry friend who had been the record label guy for my band Klinger a decade earlier. He looks at me quizzically and says, “Ben, what’s going on?” I don’t really know how to answer him. “Our web series about being made redundant is an unlikely hit” doesn’t really explain the balls scrawled on my cheek in texta. It was kind of a long story, one that started five years earlier when Shane and I got our start in advertising at The Campaign Palace, and ended with, well, The Sack.?

On September 9, 2009, Shane and I were given our marching orders from The Campaign Palace. We had come into advertising hot and immediately made big TV ads. But since then, we hadn’t really topped it. We’d made more TV ads, sure but there were no choppers or B Grade celebs like in the early days of our career. And in between the TV ads were lots of catalogues. On top of that, we still hadn’t won any awards, which is a pretty good barometer for your success as a creative. We had probably gotten too comfortable, and we’d seen management changes, new creative directors and most importantly, the agency had lost some clients. Culminating in quite a big client loss. So on that one day in September, 11 people were made redundant from a staff of just over 40.?

The day had started with the Managing Director Tom calling everyone into the boardroom when we arrived. Nobody was surprised that the tone wasn’t celebratory. We’d lost the big account a few weeks earlier and this meeting had hung over our heads like some Damoclean sword. Tom told the assembled, nervous group that there would be redundancies and that people would be called in to see him throughout the morning. So we all filed out and sat at our desks to wait. It was a weird feeling. Every few minutes you’d hear a phone ring and someone would file into Tom’s office and come out 15 minutes later, puffy eyed. We sat and pretended to work as 9:30 passed. Then 10. Then 11. Had we got away with it? Nope. At 11:03, our phone rang.

We walked up the sweeping curved staircase (which had just been installed and would be ripped out 18 months later when the agency moved offices, only to shut down a few months later) past the wheelbarrow of awards (from previous decades) and into Tom’s office. His executive assistant was perched next to his desk. I remembered hearing somewhere that, for legal reasons, there needed to be a third person in the room when you’re handed your pink slip. We sat across from him and Tom said, “guys...it’s your turn.” It was hard to argue with. I for one wasn’t as excited to show up to work as I had been a few years earlier. And we hadn’t troubled the jurors at the Cannes advertising festival that year. Or the year before. Tom was right. It was our turn. He went through the particulars – most importantly we’d get three months pay. He thanked us for our five years and shook our hands and out we filed.

Then we went to the pub and got absolutely shit-faced. Tom included. It had been a rough day for him, too.

Hell, it had been a rough day (and month and year) for the whole industry. We all needed a drink. After the 2008 stock market crash, the advertising industry had nose dived. Newspaper advertising spend in the US fell by 27%; radio, 22%; magazine, 18%; outdoor, 11%; TV, 5% and online, 2%. The entire ad market declined by 13%. (Source: The Drum) In Australia, total advertising spend declined by an estimated 8% for the full 12 months in 2009.?

The first few days after you’re made redundant are pretty crucial and pretty telling. What redundancy gives you is a form of terrible freedom. You’re being paid not to work. So what do you do? My first thought was ‘I can always be a musician.’ Sure, music had cost me way more than it paid me, but it was who I was. Losing my advertising job couldn’t take that away from me. I could still be me.

We came in together, we’d go out together.

But something else had happened in Tom’s office. They had made Shane and I redundant together. We came in together, we’d go out together. This was important. Because I think if we were honest, the months leading up to our redundancy, we weren’t really gelling. Maybe we were a bit worn out on each other. Having a succession of bosses hadn’t helped. Neither had the lack of big, fun TV ads to work on. But here we were together in Tom’s office, getting our marching orders together. And going to the pub together. To drown our sorrows. Together.

At the pub we did something that would shape our next 26 days, which in turn would shape the next few years for both of us. Instead of going into our shells, we laughed about our redundancy. It’s incredibly insensitive now, but we had a friend take a photo of us in the gutter out the front of the pub, a dart poking out of the corner of my mouth, looking like meth addicts. (Yes, I understand the utter blindness of white privilege it took to post this. I’m still working on that.) We posted it on Facebook, advertising that we were unemployed. And the internet lit up with comments of solidarity, of condolence, of support. It was a bit of a lightbulb moment for us. We didn’t need to go into our shells. We could share the experience on this new social media thing and create something. We could do something that we hadn’t done enough of for the past few months. We could pull together and actually create something.?

So the next day, our hangovers throbbing in our heads, we went to JB Hi-Fi and bought a video camera. Then we went to our office and re-enacted that moment from the day before. We packed our things into cardboard boxes and said to the camera, “I’m Shane...and I’m Ben. And we just got The Sack.”

The Sack was, I guess what you’d call a vlog of our redundancy. After recreating our initial pink slip moment (we weren’t quite quick enough to catch that), for the next 26 days it was a live record of us dealing with our newfound freedom, getting our folio together, going to meet with agencies and draw testicles on each other’s faces (ok just my face). We’d start the day with a rough plan (Today we pretend we’re ‘concept busking at Fed Square! Today we get our folio together! Today we have our first interview!), we’d record all day and Shane would edit until the small hours. Then I’d get hold of the video, post it on YouTube, upload the link to our Tumblr and share it on Twitter. Some of the highlights are a segment we called ‘Sack Watch’, where we called The Campaign Palace and pretended to be someone looking for us, to see if we were still sacked. We drew up a plan for the agencies we would be targeting (our ‘Plan of A-Sack’) and made sure those agencies knew about it. And we redesigned our folio in time-lapse (to make sure our new viewers in the industry knew we came up with ok ideas, as well). After a few days, we noticed the view counts going up from dozens to hundreds. Advertising publications like Campaign Brief started posting about it. Creatives began debating its merits and slagging us off.? The hundreds became thousands. Industry magazine B&T gave us a quarter page ad for free (the design and photoshoot for the ad became another episode). The numbers weren’t huge, but the people watching were the people who could possibly, maybe give us a new job.?

Eventually media publication Mumbrella flew us to Sydney for our fifteenth episode, to interview us for founder Tim Burrowes’ video blog, Dr Mumbo. The now-deleted interview is basically a sales pitch, where Tim lobbed us easy questions, (“How would your colleagues describe you?” “Handsome.”) let us spruik our best work and outline what we were looking for in an agency (Good people who can sell good work to good brands – that holds pretty true to today). And being in Sydney allowed us to cold-call a bunch of agencies (we didn’t get to meet any CDs). After Mumbrella, media interest in us spilled outside the advertising bubble, and we were interviewed for Melbourne’s The Age newspaper (“Duo a hit with sacks, lives and video japes”, October 3, 2009) We were invited onto ABC local radio to talk about redundancy and promote The Sack. Tabloid TV show A Current Affair even filmed a story about us (which was never shown. This is probably not a bad thing).?

The upshot was that doors were opening for us. We got interviews with big agencies (most of whom let us film them, although some didn’t). Agencies even began calling us to ask us to come in for an interview. We got invited to industry parties, as long as we rolled camera. We were even offered free Dyson vacuum cleaners if we featured them in one of our episodes. If the term influencer was being bandied about then, that’s what we were becoming. Of course, there was no word for it then. But what we knew was that before we were made redundant, we were a tired creative team who were hiding away in a second-string agency making retail ads and having long lunches. Now we were getting invited to things and being interviewed by people we had seen on hit ABC advertising show The Gruen Transfer.?

Older heads in the industry were intrigued by the DIY aspect of what we were doing, and the foreign concept of ‘celebrating’ our redundancy.

Looking at it now, The Sack represented different things for different parts of the ad industry, and of the media. Redundancy was looming large over the entire industry, as it is again right now. Our peers liked the idea that you could have some agency after your job was removed from you. Older heads in the industry were intrigued by the DIY aspect of what we were doing, and the foreign concept of ‘celebrating’ our redundancy. We weren’t acting like they had. They had gone about redundancy quietly, behind closed doors. Here we were filming ourselves having doors slammed in our faces. But of course, the entire industry was shifting under their feet, and we may have offered some clue as to what was coming next. Outside of advertising, we offered a window into the industry at a time where this was becoming a trend, thanks to Mad Men and The Gruen Transfer closer to home. We were also, to some extent, authentic. This was to become a buzzword in years to come, but we had a version of authenticity. Our series was unscripted and we were playing versions of ourselves, at a pretty vulnerable time. While we had our share of unearned confidence, it was also pretty scary to hang our failure out in public like we did. But we did.

And above all, it showed that we were willing to give things a crack. Shane and I weren’t actors. We had never written a web series before. He had taught himself video editing software After Effects. I had never uploaded anything to Tumblr, and had only tweeted a few times. But here we were, shooting, cutting, editing, uploading, sharing, seeding and PRing a series. And I know what you’re curious about: Is it any good? Watching it back a decade later, without the urgency and uncertainty we felt at the time, I’d have to say not really. By day 21, it’s essentially in-jokes and us giving pointless cameos to our mates. But the quality is kind of beside the point. Most of the agencies we were meeting with hadn’t watched the whole thing. Or maybe they’d never watched any of it. But they knew about it, they could see the views ticking over (although they’re laughably small by today’s standards, in the early YouTube days, we were classed as a viral hit for cracking 15,000 views), and they could see how motivated we were. Nobody had handed us a brief, or a neat strategy, or even a product. We were the brief, the strategy, the product, the message and the medium. Sure, it was incredibly hubristic, and embarrassing and baselessly overconfident. But it also anticipated the selfie generation, the influencer phenomenon and the erosion of the divide between the real and the digital self. Baseless overconfidence was about to become a commodity. The smart agencies could tell this was going to become the battleground of the next decade.?

Although I’m a borderline Gen X and Shane is barely a Gen Y, we were on the cusp of something interesting, generationally. Boomers, and to some extent Gen X, were familiar with the concept of a ‘job for life’. Even if it wasn’t for the same company, it’s pretty likely you’d do a version of the same thing for your whole career. You’d get a job in a garden supply warehouse and move up the garden supply ladder and retire as the Chairman of the Garden Supply Association of Victoria (GSAV). A more uncertain workforce forced Gen Y to grapple with the idea of ‘skills for life’. You would learn a skill, say marketing, and that skill might take you from marketing garden supplies to marketing pool equipment to marketing retirement villages. You move jobs and?even sectors, but you take your toolkit with you.

What we’re seeing now is something more akin to ‘life for life’. Everything you do, from side hustles to Instagram accounts to recipe blogs come to bear in your career. How you live is how you earn. The concept of a ‘personal brand’, once something that made everyone vomit in their mouths a little. It still does, kinda. But it’s also definitely a ‘thing’. And I know that because I use people’s ‘personal brand’ when I’m hiring them.??

To this day, when I’m interviewing creatives for a job, the first thing I ask about is their side hustle.

Anyone (well almost anyone) can be handed a brief and come up with some decent ideas. Not everyone has the tenacity to follow it down the dead ends and false dawns to actually make something for themselves. And even fewer have the initiative and drive required to put it out into the world, particularly without a guaranteed financial outcome. So ‘life for life’ is a thing that hirers (like me) look at. A tidy CV is no longer enough, particularly in the creative industries.?

What did The Sack do for us? It reintroduced us to the advertising industry. It got us a bunch of interviews. It got us freelance at a few top level agencies for a few months. We got to write a Mazda ad and put 80s AFL has-been Warwick Capper into a Nando’s ad. It eventually landed us at arguably the best Australian ad agency of our generation – Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, under Creative Chairman James McGrath and ECD Ant Keogh (the guys behind the Carlton Draught ‘Big Ad’). But it also shook something free in me. Something that wasn’t about advertising. Something that was about earning people’s attention, rather than doing something with attention that was paid for. Something that used my own experiences and stories and passion for creative culture outside of the advertising bubble. So half way through the making of The Sack, when I got a call from RRR Breakfasters host Fee B Squared asking me to try out, lightning struck. Although The Sack had brought Shane and I back together, there was something I needed to chase down on my own. I crossed my fingers that it wouldn’t mean things were over between us. And I got lucky – Clems were happy to not schedule any meetings first thing in the morning, and were always incredibly curious about the things I was doing outside of advertising. In a lot of ways, James in particular seemed intrigued by me. Or maybe he was just irritated. Hard to say. When he eventually hired me permanently after months of freelancing, it wasn’t a typical interview. He spent most of the time convincing me to take the job. That’s not something James typically has to do.?

There was no uni degree, so everyone was watching TED talks and reading Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuck blog posts like they were oracles.?

And so my next three years were about juggling ‘earned attention’ from 6-9am, and ‘bought attention’ from 10:30am-7pm at Clemenger BBDO. And so when social media content creation and content marketing became a vital part of advertising agencies, I was better prepared than just about anyone to make that my area of specialisation. I transitioned from a copywriter at Clemenger to a ‘Senior Content Editor’ in the social media team, eventually landing the title ‘Social Director’ and running a team of social media creators and strategists. My qualifications for this role were my 5000 Twitter followers – many of them picked up during The Sack, and the rest because I was a part of a long-running and successful radio show. I was able to learn on the job because in the early days of social media (Facebook, really) everyone was learning on the job. There was no uni degree, so everyone was watching TED talks and reading Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuck blog posts like they were oracles.?

The fact that I was itching to get out of advertising made me more useful for advertising agencies. People like me – restless creatives without a deep area of specialisation – were about to take over the industry, and I was on the front line, tweeting about it.?

Post-Script, March 2010

It’s the 2010 MADC awards, the Melbourne ad industry’s night of nights. We’re there with our new agency, Clemenger BBDO, who are about to enter a new golden age, becoming one of the world’s most awarded agencies for the next half decade. We’re relative unknowns at Clems, having been there for a few months, and with me arriving late every day after a morning of breakfast radio. Halfway through the night, the winners of a new category – best viral content –? is announced.?

The winner is The Sack, by the agency ‘The Sack’. Shane and I go up to accept our award. We slide back to the table, statue in hand and the Clemenger BBDO CEO greets us as if seeing us for the first time. “I’m sorry, who are you?” he says. He’s genuinely apologetic to have never noticed us before. He wants to know us now. In 26 days and a budget of a few hundred bucks, we did what we couldn’t do in five years and with a few million dollars at our disposal at The Campaign Palace.?

We finally won an award.??