To market to market...

I tried an experiment yesterday. To date I have focused my marketing efforts primarily on production companies and advertising agencies, but have been trying to pick up the pace in finding medical narration clients. I saw in last Sunday’s Boston Globe that there would be a life sciences career fair at the Sheraton Boston on the 18th. Admission was free but required business attire, 3 copies of one’s resumé and at least two years experience in the life sciences. I very much doubted they would be expecting someone like me in their midst, but I thought, what the heck, I’m sure to learn something. So I printed out my resumé, with information about my business on the other side, and off I went. I had a pleasant drive listening to Pat Fraley’s Tom Sawyer and managed to find the Sheraton without too many wrong turns.

What a great occasion for someone looking for a biotech job! Many big names were there – Merck, Genzyme, Wyeth, New England Biolabs, and many small, highly focused companies as well. I talked to lots of people, but none of them knew a thing about narration, had never thought about it, and did not get it at all – they kept trying to point me to full-time positions that might be vaguely related to it. A few twigged that their corporate offices in another state would be more likely to be involved in that side of the business. One gentleman from Mass General Hospital had a Powerpoint presentation running on a laptop at his table, with narration that it turned out his boss had done. We spent a pleasant quarter of an hour chatting, and when he looked at my resumé and saw I had graduated from Princeton he said “can we hug?” He had graduated 12 years before I did and we sang a few snatches of one of the fight songs together – he was awfully quick on the uptake (and I thought, egads, I never would have predicted this when I got up this morning).

Well, I finally gave up, after a valiant effort to hit as many exhibitors and get rid of as many copies of my resumé as I could. I made my way somewhat glumly out of the Sheraton, but as I did so I passed another on-going conference sponsored by the Harvard Medical School Department of Continuing Education which includes Continuing Medical Education and I swooped in like a harrier and got the name of the go-to guy at CME. I’m waiting for a call back from him. I grabbed a bit of overpriced lunch at Au Bon Pain, miraculously found my car again without any trouble, nearly fainted at the price tag of two hours in the garage ($24) and gratefully gave myself over to the final, gripping minutes of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I got home to find a job waiting from a brand new client in Madison, Wisconsin, offering much more money than I am accustomed to getting for a :30, only to find that because the email had been sent 5 hours previously with no word from me, the client had been obliged to find somebody else.

Aghhh!! Why do I ever leave my studio? Car crashes, expensive parking, burning excessive gasoline to drive my solitary self 100 miles from home, missed jobs – is it worth it? I dunno. I guess it gives me something to write about. Presently I’m in the red as far as my experiment went, but sometimes the payoff is way down the road. I’ll try to keep an open mind. And I'm seriously considering a Blackberry.