Approaching Magazines/Designers
Let’s get started with some more research ideas for those of you who may live in very populated areas. I know a few of you drew your first circle and thought, “Yeah, Manhattan, or downtown Boston” Great. And that is good. That is called density. Density can work in your favor as well as reach works in the favor of someone who may not be in a very dense area.
Density means close proximity of clients.
Density means less travel and more opportunities per square mile. Density means a hell of a lot of competitors. Sorry about that last one, but seriously… who cares? All competitors tell us is that there is a lot of work available. And someone other than you is getting it.
That, as they say, has to change.
Big markets mean you have a much more specialized approach to your work. Big markets mean you can work one niche at a time to develop your cash flow. Working one area while marketing to another area is also possible if the density is high and the competition is great.
By the way, do you know who your greatest, most fearsome competitor is? I do. He looks back at you in the mirror each morning. She stares at you from the mirror in the hall.
You. You are the biggest competitor you have. Your priorities, attention spans, efforts (or non efforts), delaying tactics, motivations, insecurities, over confidences, and plain old inertia control will do more damage to your business than anyone you see on a blog post or in a magazine.
And we need to work on that. The great news about working on that problem with ourselves is the fantastic job security it offers. We will be doing it every day for the rest of our lives. There is no “achieved”; there is always the pursuit.
Fun. Yeah…I know.
So let’s get to the bigger markets and what to do there as we initially start out on our journey. Big markets mean big agencies. Big clients. Big opportunities. Big budgets. Even bigger budgets. And “I can hardly believe my eyes” budgets. Starting out…well, they are not where we want to be.
What would happen to you if you landed a gig that would require $25,000 of expenses based against the client billing. Since many agencies (most) pay after 60-90 days, how are you going to pay your vendors before you get the money from the agency?
And, quite honestly, I do not suggest we even go after assignments that large. Without the benefit of a lot of completed assignments, we may not even understand how a shot like that can be produced. And missing the billing or estimate just screams ”amateur” in a world that has very little tolerance for anything that may cause them some discomfort.
I think making an art director, editor, art buyer, creative director, designer or public relations person choose you has as much to do with how comfortable with their choice you make them feel as the images themselves.
So where do we start?
Magazines for one place of entry, designers for another.
Magazines may be more open to trying out new talent than ad agencies are. Their risk is much smaller, and their constant desire to find and promote new talent is a great asset to them.
Design agencies are another point of entry. The difference between an ad agency and a design agency is sometimes as simple as the way the work is handled after it is created. An ad agency usually places the ads in magazines, radio, TV, and Internet. Designers usually do the work and it is then handled by someone at the company or passed on to their ad agency for distribution.
Graphic designers are more approachable than art directors in big agencies. It is a fact.
Choosing magazines means we must do some research into the work we want to do for them. And, by the way, this applies to all of you, whether in the big cities or the smaller suburbs, so pay attention and do the exercises.
Hitting the magazine stand in order to do some research can be kind of fun. You will be steeping yourself in the work of others as well as starting to get a feel for the magazines that you want to work with — and a few you maybe don’t care that much about.
Personally I would love to shoot for Real Simple, a magazine for interior design and lifestyle, and wouldn’t spend much time courting Skin, a magazine for the tattoo industry. Your choices may be totally opposite. And that is cool.
So we grab an issue of a magazine we want to work for and do some scouting. The masthead is going to be very telling. On the next page we have the masthead of Martha Stewart’s Living magazine. Let’s see what that tells us:
We have a wealth of information right there.
We have names and job classifications along with their ranking within the organization. (It’s a corporation – being first is important.)
The head of the Photography and Illustration part of Living is Heloise Goodman. Who is she?
Well, here she is on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/heloise-goodman/4/953/888
Here she is on Facebook, although I probably would be very careful about adding her to market to her at this Facebook page. It is a personal page.
https://www.facebook.com/people/Heloise-Goodman/684857345
The Martha Stewart Living Facebook page has a good amount of activity. What is happening there?
https://www.facebook.com/MarthaStewartLiving
Another page with some biography info on it:
http://www.yatedo.com/p/Heloise+Goodman/normal/f02f1fbef133734efaabd4a02d0b5171
It is not stalking; it is research.
This is only one person at one magazine. You will want to get more information on who to send your work to in order to get it in front of the people you want to see it. The best source for that is the phone. Simply call the magazine, ask for the art department, and ask who to whom to send promotions. (Far easier is the Agency Access method, where they have done all this heavy lifting for you…,but for now I think it is important to actually do some heavy lifting so you understand what is involved.)
And look at this page:
https://www.linkedin.com/title/art-director-at-martha-stewart-living-omnimedia
How often and what we send to the people we want to reach has a lot to do with our own practicalities, but I believe once every other month with an email and on the in-between months a direct mail piece may be quite effective. Send imagery that will get noticed, of course. Send images that have a great deal of visual power. The noise is quite loud in the marketing world, so you have got to cut through.
That part of what we do will be covered later, but for now let’s gather some names and get some research on who we want to work with.
Five magazines you have identified as being a magazine you could/ should work for:
Magazine:
Style:
Why they need me:
Who will I market to?
Understanding why they NEED you to work for them is easy for you to see — we only have to convince them — and that is only 50% of the equation, right?
We can do this.
Fill out form linked above on this page and make a couple of copies of it for yourself if you need to.
Graphic Designers:
Small design studios are everywhere. One person to 20 people — they are in every city in the nation. Even a few smaller towns have graphic and information designers.
So let’s find a designer to work with: Studio Hill Design, Albuquerque.
A look at their website shows that they do a fair amount of print work:
http://studiohilldesign.com/about/print/
Some product, some people, and some architecture.
The principle is Sandy Hill, and the art director is Sean Chavez.
So you now have a lot of info to use to be marketing effectively to the clients you want to reach. And you have identified them as well as know something about them and their work.
Yes, there is more to it than that, but this is the basic stuff we must have to be successful in the marketing of our work.
