A Small Creative Task

I replied to an ad looking for someone to create short-form videos. Because they were getting so many applications, they had decided to move straight to a “creative task”: produce a three-to-five-episode vertical mini-series for free, then send over the finished videos along with my price. If they liked the result, they might buy it. A commission, basically, just without the part where anyone commissions anything. I’ll let you discover my reply in the image below.

The strangest thing is that this kind of proposal no longer seems particularly unusual. Clients receive hundreds of applications of varying quality and, unsure how to choose, ask for increasingly elaborate tests. Eventually they just ask for the project itself, which does remove any remaining doubt.

On the creative side, things aren’t much more sensible. We apply for everything, promise everything, and someone always agrees in the hope that it might lead to something else. Clients ask for more for less because creatives offer it, and creatives offer more for less because clients ask for it. Supply has become just as insane as demand, and the two keep pushing each other further.

Everyone thinks the other side is completely unreasonable. It may be the only point on which the market is still perfectly aligned.