So You Want To Talk About Cold Outreach, Vol. 01

Advice for Finding + Contacting Your Favorite Art Directors



Intro


When I moved to Los Angeles in 2014 to begin my freelance career, I had no idea what I was doing. I had (what I thought was) a weird skill set mix of art direction, design, lettering, and illustration. It was confusing to me exactly who I should be selling myself to and how. I was figuring out who I was, what my work looked like, and how that operated in the larger scope of the communication art industry. 

I knew very little. But one thing I did know was who and what I saw from other freelancers around me. I knew that their lists of credentials, including awards and client lists, made them seem both legitimate and valid, two qualities that I did not identify with and sorely wanted to. So, for as much as I didn’t know, what I did lead me to believe that if I could acquire some of these credentials for myself, that I would also become the coveted qualities of both legitimate and valid in my design practice. And what I didn’t have in knowledge, I knew I could make up for with a scrappy and determined hard work ethic.

For me, the credentials that I felt held the golden key to my success were: Art Director’s Club (now The One Club) Young Guns, an award for creatives under the age of 30, and a published illustration in the printed version of The New York Times. Put those two names in my bio, I thought, and: BOOM. Success! Watch the work will roll in... I could write an entire book on the many ways I was wrong about this hypothesis on so many levels. Spoiler alert: There is no magic client or credential; and results of projects are infrequently what you expect them to be. (There truly is no substitute for putting out high quality, consistent work over time and pairing it with an also-consistent and focused work ethic.) However, the insatiable hunger that comes with starting a brand new business in a brand new city on the opposite coast of the country isn’t one for hearing “no.” (Arguably, in both a blessing and a curse of self, I’ve never been one for hearing “no” or “wait.”) So, I began asking, “How?” How do I get in contact with those able to hire me for the jobs I wanted?

I think I thought, in my naivety, that all of my friends would give me their contacts. Some did. But as I’d later learn, people spend years building their contact network. They have all sorts of varying relationships with those they work for that result in differing comfort levels and care for the privacy of their contacts, some of whom receive portfolio promotion emails en masse. Not to mention, people take their recommendations very seriously (as they should), since the results of that interaction reflects on them and their work. So it was left to me to fill in the blanks.


Part One: Research

Research is the first part of Cold Outreach.

I think that this is the part that mystifies people the most. They think there is some magical database or way to access people’s information, collectively, that they simply need to find out about. There are a number of companies that have services where you can pay for just this information. Personally, I did not find much help in this service. But others may have different experiences.Email, phone call or snail mail? Email and social media are my mainstays for outreach. Snail mail can be great, as most of us love a tangible piece of art. Personally, I send out holiday cards yearly that act as a print promo in part. But I only send them to people I have an existing rapport with. But especially now, no one is in the office, so attempting contact via phone or snail mail at the office seems futile. I’d recommend focusing on digital means of communication.


Finding your people. At the start, an illustrator friend recommended one of the simplest forms of research: go to a newsstand, pick out the publications I like, and find the names of the Art Directors in the masthead. I am always aiming for Art Directors. But Creative Directors, Associate Art Directors, Design Directors, and sometimes even the Editorial staff themselves, will hire artists and illustrators for their pieces. Sometimes, the mastheads include contact information. Sometimes you can find the names in the masthead, and then you have to go home and search their name online to find their contact information. Sometimes, much of the time, their contact information won’t be found anywhere. And you are left to your Online Sleuth Skills to find their information, namely their email address.


Online Sleuth Skills:

  1. Search your contact’s name online. You may have to include “art director” or the name of the publication they work for.

  2. If you find a personal website that contains an email or contact form, you can choose to use this. However, I try hard to find the work email in order to be respectful of that person’s non-work email inbox. I recommend holding this info to use only as a last ditch effort. And if you do use it, be respectful and considerate of the fact that you may be, depending on the person, taking up space in their inbox for a purpose that specifically is not intended for their day job’s work. Either way, a personal website can help you understand who someone is and what they’re about, which will be helpful for you to figure out if you’re aligned and/or to personalize your correspondence.

  3. To find the work email, you need to figure out the nomenclature (the system of naming) of the company’s email addresses. Some companies have multiple, and you may have to try a few out until you find the right one.

    1. The first thing I do when attempting to sleuth is to go to the publication’s masthead or about page and see if there are email addresses of any other employees listed where you can figure out the nomenclature.

For example:

If you are emailing Jane Doe at Fancy Magazine, you might go to FancyMagazine.com, navigate to their contact page, see that a PR or writer contact is listed as: Harry.Sally@FancyMagazine.com and learn that an informed guess for your contact may be Jane.Doe@FancyMagazine.com.

    1. If not, you internet search again. A site called Rocket Reach has been helpful for me. So I will search, for example, “Fancy Magazine Email Rocket Reach.” And it will pull up results like the following:*insert screenshot*

    2. If neither of these methods produce fruit, you guess.Jane_Doe@FancyMagazine.comJDoe@FancyMagazine.comJane@FancyMagazine.comJane.Doe@FancyMagazine.com

And so on until your email doesn’t bounce back.

This entire process is an exercise in how bad you want it. But it can also be fun! Because once you unlock the correct nomenclature for one person at a publication, you can then use it to email any other creatives you may want to contact at the same publication. The Spreadsheet. You are working really hard to find and collect information on a lot of notable contacts. Put them in a spreadsheet. I use Sheets on Google Drive. My process isn’t sophisticated, but it works for me.I have columns for the Company, Name, Title, and Email of the person, along with a space at the end for Notes. You can also include a column for social media handles if you like, but following them works well enough for me. In the Notes section, I record when I reached out to them, call to action of their response, or any notes on connections we have that I may want easy access to when I email them. 


Then, as I start my emailing or contact, I tend to color code the lines with Yellow (meaning: I sent an email), Green (meaning: they responded and we should keep in touch or there’s another call to action), or Red (meaning: this isn’t someone I need to follow up with for any reason). If I find out someone doesn’t work at a publication anymore, I make them Gray. But you can come up with your own system and add or subtract however works for you.*include screenshot*


So, get started on your research. And