From Deadline Hollywood:
Rhythm & Hues is filing for bankruptcy. The companny informed employees around 9 PM Sunday of the upcoming Chapter 11 filing. Many Rhythm & Hues employees were also told by management not to show up to work Monday. On Friday, the company preceded its bankruptcy filing news by announcing to workers that paychecks would be delayed indefinitely.
AdAge had this to say about AOL's Huffpo’s launch of HuffPost High School and its plan to solicit unpaid contributions from teenagers:
"Quite simply, AOL/HuffPo intends to monetize the work of minors earning $0/hour. On Patch and HuffPost High School, it will sell ads against content created by minors -- but it will not share advertising revenue with those minors.
Self-respecting advertisers have to ask if they really want to be a part of something like this."
Real success in entertainment has always come from word of mouth, so naturally the marketing weenies are chasing this elusive phenomenon by way of social media.
The underlying point in yesterday’s post was that all this “social opportunities” thrumming is in itself a means of diminishing the value of traditional advertising skills. It’s hard to imagine News Corp., Viacom, Time Warner, Comcast et al. wanting to continue picking up the tab for multiple six-figure-a-year-salaried art directors working on campaigns that may or may not be as effective in driving viewership as co-opting 40 or 50 million Facebook potatoes.
Still think the floodwaters aren't going to reach your floor?
From Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood:
Add Walt Disney Studios and Lionsgate to the companies laying off staff. Disney's will be roughly 5% largely in the distribution area... Lionsgate laid off less than 20 people as part of a reorganization affecting home entertainment and service areas. And, Viacom No. 2 Phillippe Dauman said this about Paramount Pictures signalling what may be layoffs there: "As the home entertainment stream is challenged, fewer DVDs are being sold, so you have to review your home entertainment overhead. That's adjusting to the business model. We’re very focused on that. We continue to work on the overhead there."
If you’re like most clients, you’re fed up with greedy graphic artists charging you thousands of dollars for design projects.
Well, good news, America. At Centuple Design all projects are budgeted at a mere $100! And just wait, because in another year or two, it’ll only be $50!
We know many of you creative types out there are asking, “OMG! How can I afford to keep my 12-cylinder Ferrari tuned up and send my gifted children to boarding school with budgets like that?” The short answer is, "Duh." (For those of you billing this time to a client, the long answer is, "Uh, duh.")
Here at MonKeyArtAwards noblesse oblige isn’t just something we say when we’re sending our food back in a French restaurant. It’s part of our Great Effort to lift our fellow wage apes up from the muck enough that - while you're still in the muck - you now have a clearer understanding of who will and will not be rewarded in the New New Economy.
Here’s a gleeful posting we found via LinkedIn on Last Century Fox’s Small Business Center site:
For Robert Gray, the owner of Matters in Motion in Cabot, Ark., finding people to help with graphic art design work, Web design and software development was a frustrating process.
After bad experiences with local hires, he turned to the Internet for help and hired a person in the Philippines.
“He did a fantastic job, he did exactly what I wanted and did it very quickly,” said Gray.
Gray was so happy with the job he ended up paying double the $8 an hour rate the contractor charged and hired him for additional work. Since then, Gray has hired software developers in India.
Read more at FOX BUSINESS
Click on image to enlarge.
If you're like us, you've noticed some chatter going on in our comments section here about
freelancers organizing a union.
This seems unlikely since none of us wish to give up the conceit that we are highly regarded professionals and concede that we are mere wage apes.
Besides, the only good reason to have a union is to strike for higher wages and/or benefits, and that sort of brinksmanship would only play havoc on all our insecurities about a younger, cheaper work force coming in to take our Wacom pens from our cold, arthritic hands.
So our advice is to just shut up, assume the position and be ready for May Day - and no, we are not referring to the May 1st celebration of the International Workers' Day, but to May 1, 2010 when Blue Cross Anthem doubles the premiums for individual policies.
In the meantime, you can satisfy your morbid curiosity at GlassDoor.com where they are attempting to provide some transparency in salaries for Art Directors.
Scroll to the bottom to click on links to salaries for Senior Art Director, Junior, Interactive, etc.
One of our European readers sent us a link to ZML.com, a movie
download site based in Russia. ZML has been around for a few years, stirring up
lots of chatter about how cheap downloads are a stockyard blow to Hollywood’s
home entertainment cash cow.
As we understand it, outsourcing jobs to cheap labor markets overseas is good for the economy because it drives down the price of consumer goods. But it’s bad for the economy when consumers outsource their purchases to cheap retailers overseas.
Nonetheless, a real sea change among the larger studios is beginning to look inevitable.
Francis Ford Coppola, said at the Beirut Film Festival last year
that he expected some of the studios would go out of business.
If you’re like us, you found the most striking thing about that statement is that there’s a film festival in Beirut.
Last month we posted a totally unsubstantiated rumor about a
certain big name entertainment advertising agency that was giving their old
AD's the heave-ho to make room for younger, cheaper ADs.
Many weeks later we noticed this late entry in the comments section:
So then I guess all you old Art Directors should stop checking your new Facebook pages and taking an hour and a half lunches and earn your 80K+ salary.
Posted by: young & hungry
And yesterday we received an email titled “Suggested Topic” with no text other than a link to Federal Laws Prohibiting Job Discrimination.
Is there something afoot here? Is it possible that ADs are being discriminated against based on assumptions about their age or their inability to get down with their bad selves?
More importantly, is it possible to eat lunch in just an hour and a half?
If you’re like us, you cancelled your newspaper subscription and now read articles like this one online - for free:
For photographers and graphic artists, not a pretty picture out there
Many fear that the technology providing entree to an unimaginable trove of art, images and information is also obliterating the boundaries that once allowed the creative class to make a living.
...Amateurs produce Photoshopped pictures that once wouldn't have made it out of a darkroom. Workers in India draw corporate logos for pennies on the dollar and e-mail them stateside.
Click on illegally downloaded image to enlarge.
While dumpster diving for canned marketing execs, we came
across this article in last week’s Variety about the sea change in media
budgets.
“One former studio exec says studios are still spending too much on trailers, sometimes commissioning three to six companies to create separate trailers, then picking one or two of the best from among the choices. While studios used to produce trailers inhouse, trailer production is now routinely outsourced, with costs ranging between $100,000 and $300,000 to produce each one, according to estimates.”
