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Near Misses at the Big Time
Three cautionary tales
Every so often, a freelance writer scores a big-time gig only to have it all fall away due to some unanticipated circumstance. I’m sorry to say that this has happened to me on a few occasions. Call me snake bit — or maybe just stupid — for the times I could have prevented the calamity had I been more circumspect.
THE NEW YORK PRESS
The year was sometime in the early 2000’s. I was working 80 hours a week selling adult advertising for a number of publications and websites in the New York area. New York had (and has) an army of sex workers who need to advertise in strategic places to attract customers.
Media outlets the likes of New York Magazine, the Village Voice, and New York Press were not morally above taking the girls’ money and advertising their wares to balance their bottom lines. But they didn’t want to deal with the throngs of women who ran these ads weekly, and were more than happy to let ad agencies like mine do the work for them — and pay us nicely for our effort.
On the one hand, it sounded like a seedy job to a religious church-goer. But on the other, what I did wasn’t a lot different from an agency that repped Coca Cola or General Motors.
I designed ads, wrote copy, recommended where the girls should run their ads depending on what demographic they wanted to reach, did the billing, paid the papers and websites, and all that stuff that ad agencies do. It was a serious job to make deadlines and run every ad correctly, I can assure you. Attention to detail was paramount, which is why so many of my competitors fell by the wayside what with all the temptations they faced in the form of available women and substances with which to enjoy themselves carnally and/or get high.
At the aforementioned time, fully 10% of the New York Press’s total ad revenue was filtering through me and my ersatz ad agency. The CEO and Classified Director both liked me and knew I entertained a writing fantasy (I’d recently written a cover feature for the Village Voice, their chief competitor). So they introduced me to the editor of their publication as a courtesy for all the cash I was hauling up to their offices.
