Freelance for an Ad Agency
Many ad agencies regularly hire freelancers, either to help ease the workload on their full-time employees, or to assist with special projects. They hire a wide variety of creative professionals, including graphic designers, copywriters, web designers and developers, editors and photographers, so no matter what you specialize in, you can likely freelance for an ad agency on an occasional or ongoing basis.
Steps
- Have a portfolio and references. An ad agency will want to see what kind of work you can produce before hiring you, and work samples are especially important for full-time freelancers, who may need to sell themselves on the strength of their work alone, instead of citing other full-time ad agency jobs. If you have professional freelance advertising work experience, pick several of your best pieces and bind them in a professional portfolio. If you have little or no professional experience, create a few sample pieces to include in your portfolio. Also, have the names and contact information for a few clients you know will give you a good recommendation. You can give this information to other potential clients if they want to research you further.
- Be prepared for last-minute changes. Advertising campaigns frequently change scope and direction as the project progresses. Clients may decide they don't like the original proposal, or may want to keep certain elements and abandon others. If you freelance for an advertising agency, you'll need to be ready to alter your work or even start over if the client wants something different.
- Be willing to attend company meetings. When you freelance for a newspaper or magazine, you usually work from home, rarely or never venturing into the office for a meeting. Because of the collaborative nature of advertising, however, you may need to attend in-office meetings to discuss the project and talk with the client and with other people assigned to the campaign.
- Don't expect much creative freedom. If you've never worked with an ad agency, you may be accustomed to more creative freedom and independence than you'll have in an agency environment. If you're from a journalism background, for example, your editor may give you a few guidelines, such as word count or how many people to interview, but you may be free to choose what kind of people to interview and what angle to take. Projects for an ad agency are more collaborative. If you're a copywriter, you'll be working with everyone from graphic designers to photographers to ensure the campaign is unified. Your boss and the client have the final say in how the project is produced.
- Have a contract. When you freelance, you need to spell out the terms of your assignment each time you start a project. If you freelance regularly, you may already have a contract you use, but advertising agencies often have their own contracts as well. Whether you use your own or the agency's, make sure the contract is thorough and specific, outlining your obligations and the agency's. This includes terms like how much the agency has agreed to pay you, when you must complete the project, if you'll be paid even if the project is cancelled and if revisions or changes are included in your fee or will cost extra.
- Clarify how much contact you can have with the clients. Some ad agencies require freelancers to sign non-solicitation agreements, which state that the freelancer cannot contact the client outside of the project. You could not, for example, contact the client directly to ask for more freelance work. The non-solicitation clause may be in effect only for the duration of the project, for a specified amount of time after the project ends, or for as long as you freelance for the advertising agency.
