Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Cold calling makes my heart race...


And it's not necessarily "fun" or "exciting..."



So I've known for quite some time now that Baltimore would be one of my target cities post-grad. I lived there for two summers while I was babysitting in-house for family friends, and I loved the area and the young professional feel. What I did in the first phase of my search in Baltimore was to simply Google "Baltimore Advertising Agencies" and poke through the 20 something pages of companies that came up. I went to each website, and made a list. The list contained two headers originally: TO CALL and TO APPLY TO. I weeded out which agencies had information on how to contact them regarding employment, and the agencies that had nothing listed but a phone number as far as contact information. I've been putting off making all of those phone calls...until today.

17. The number of small agencies in Baltimore I called today. 14 of them gave me information on how / who to apply to, 1 of them was flat out not hiring because it was a one man agency, and 2 of them were incredibly rude (which I was prepared for). A lot of the people I spoke to seemed surprised that an almost grad from Michigan was calling their small agency in Baltimore, a call they probably don't get so often.

I'm not crazy I swear--my desire to work in a smaller agency stems from my internship over the summer at a full service agency run by less than 20 people: Motion Marketing and Media (tweet. tweet. @m3_group). My perspective changed because I was thrown into the industry and local projects so much so, that when I drove around I recognized the work that I had helped on. They do a lot of campaigns for various local Lansing initiatives, and have a real community impact. Lets be real and relevant to the US economy here though, if for some reason I get offered a job at a large corporate agency, I'll take it! I won't be short changing myself on this search by ONLY applying to small agencies, because it just isn't sensible.

No comments:

Post a Comment