I registered this URL for the first time 12 years ago. I had this idea for a content portal that would cater to women’s issues – not just beauty and makeup and fashion and weight loss, but jobs and careers and child rearing and self esteem. The idea was, no matter your lifestage or lifestyle, there would be something relevant to you. I was going to do a bunch of research and writing up front, my mom was going to contribute, and then eventually the content would be crowd-sourced (even though no one was saying ‘crowd-sourced’ in 1998).
Instead I got a job as a creative in a web design and development shop in North Hollywood.
We didn’t get along very often, but we did make some cool shit. A lot of what we were doing back then (1999) we had to pare back because our clients and their customers simply didn’t have the bandwidth to experience it. It really proved that William Gibson is right – the future is here, it’s just not widely distributed.
I also got really frustrated when the principals would respond to every client brief with “we’ll just build it.” I was convinced you had to have a plan, a strategy, to know what you were going to build. We spent some time making cool stuff and mediocre stuff and stuff that never saw the light of day. And then they sacked me because I ‘didn’t fit in with the corporate culture.’ Which I thought was pretty funny, since I was employee number 5. But they were right, I didn’t fit in with them. I wanted to do more than just build it, and I said then that what they mistook for cynicism was just me knowing the difference between what was possible and what we were actually doing, and that I thought we should care about closing the gap.
The world of advertising, at the time, was convinced that being a creative in ‘digital’ was in no way a qualification for working in ‘real’ advertising. I worked with some of the most creative and aggressive brands and people in the world. I attacked the problem from the angle of copywriter, strategic planner, researcher, innovations lead. And over the last 12 years, I’ve worked at some great places, on some great brands, developing communications strategies, repositioning brands, developing content and products, and so on.
It’s pretty easy to lose track of the stuff you wanted to do when you first started out – I mean, you forget a lot of the great ideas you once had, or you lose the juice to pull it off, or you get distracted by life. So, this site is the relaunch of those ideas (if you’ve been checking this site from time to time over the years you’ll note this is at least the 5th relaunch). This time, I’m going to really try to fail harder.