Cold Calling Day

I started cold calling agencies on my New York agency list today. It's funny because I'm a huge fan of technology, so I have the list on an InDesign file. I also love writing things down with a pen and paper (plus I don't have a printer right now), so I have all of the agencies on their own page in a little notebook that I carry around with me.

It was really important for me to do my research on each agency and the work that they have done rather than just going off of a well-known name, so before I called each place, I created a form that I forced myself to fill out beforehand. In general, it was as such:

Agency name
Address
Phone Number / Fax Number
Website(s)
Parent Company (if applicable)
Mission Statement (if found)
History of Company
Recent News
Recruiter Names & Contact Info
Established Contacts At Agency
Current Clients (and particular spots that I might remember)

I know what you're thinking. "Gosh. That's a lot of information to pull on each agency that you're interested in." Yes. Yes it was. Quite a few hours went into my search sessions.

Obviously, not every agency has easy-to-find information for each field, so it was a lot of pulling from a variety of websites. I know that a lot of other juniors and students are doing research on agencies (or at least I hope that they are), so below are a couple of sites that I pulled from - besides agency sites of course.

• Advertising Age
• Advertolog Advertising Archive
• AdWeek
• Coloribus
• Creativity Magazine
• LinkedIn
• Wikipedia - just be careful of the information that you garner from it.

As a reward to myself for making a chunk of the cold calls, I decided to pick up my package from the post office. This is my nerd-shirt I've been craving for months, but that I was finally able to order from Shirt.Woot . Huzzah! There's no Gameboy on the shirt, but there's plenty of controllers!