2 lessons from my leap into content, 1990s-style
This might surprise you but my big break wasn’t being scouted by Real Madrid. And it certainly didn’t involve lots of money — career moves can initially involve a pay cut, I came to realise.
But in the mid-to-late nineties I made it into the world of content. Specifically, I started out in journalism, as a junior reporter, just as the World Wide Web (as we called it) was taking off.
I’d been temping for about a year at a tech company. While it was a fast-growing hardware vendor, eventually bought by IBM, it wasn’t the right path for me but taught me about the world of Unix, Windows NT, service levels and logistics. I got good at this thing called email and even learned some basic coding.
But at 26, I was afraid the creative career I was desperate for was passing me by. Until two things happened.
First, like most people of my generation interested in media, advertising, film or anything creative, I religiously bought the Guardian newspaper on a Monday, for the job ads. My friends and I (not one of us with handily placed insiders or the money for unpaid internships) must have looked at those pages so many times that we even came to recognise serial hirers squeezing a lot of attitude into a 25-word ad, including the classic ‘Help me! I’m drowning’ and ‘Will you be my Man Friday’ (attitude, yes, but arguably sexist — unless it was some kind of Robinson Crusoe casting).
For whatever reason, one Monday I decided to buy the Independent instead, which had a similar media jobs supplement. I’m guessing it was a lot cheaper for advertisers given the newspaper’s lower circulation. And that’s where I found the ad for that junior reporter role, at a publisher called Cromwell Media, based in Hammersmith, West London.
Maybe they chose that outlet because they were being cash conscious (did I mention the pay?), but our stars aligned, especially as they wanted the tech knowhow, and I was called in for an interview.
“How did you know that?”
Then the second thing happened. One of my best friends worked at a market intelligence company and I asked him if he could run a search on Cromwell Media. What he came back with was gold.
In my first interview, I told the founder more about him than I think he knew about himself. The company had kept the rights to its online publication as it was spinning off its print arm to Dennis Publishing, and I talked him through that deal, too.
I left that meeting feeling pretty good. A second interview — reliably, it was the nineties, held in a pub — sealed the deal.
Things blossomed from there, as that company turned into online publication Silicon, itself a darling of the dot-com boom it covered. As that boom bust, we were snapped up by CNET Networks, which was then acquired by CBS in 2008. And by 2011 I’d learned what I needed to launch my own content business.
The most important point? I’d say more than the trick of trying something different on occasion (Indie rather than Guardian, in this case), always research to the nth degree any person or situation that’s important. I’ve gone on to interview a few hundred candidates over the years for jobs, and dozens of corporate suppliers. It amazes me how many only want to talk about themselves.
As I make clear in a parallel post to this one about great client-agency chemistry, you really have to care about the other party. Curiosity is so important and will win you that key account or job.
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If you’d like to chat about any of this or what I do for a living now, drop me a line here.
