How I stopped selling drugs | Nov 12th 2007
I spent the first five years of my online marketing career focused exclusively on one industry vertical - pharmaceuticals. Working with big name drug manufacturers was very exciting for me at first, but dealing with the strict rules and guidelines of prescription drug ads and focusing campaign strategies on sick, very sick or dying people quickly damped my enthusiasm and curbed my creativity.
When I worked full-time at an agency, I didn’t have the luxury of choosing my projects or clients. That added up to one soul sapping prescription drug campaign after the other. Direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical spending reached over 2.4 billion dollars in 2006. This meant there was no shortage of work for me even after I got laid off in 2002. At that point I leveraged my pharmaceutical experience out of necessity, thus some of my earliest clients were in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry.
In 2005 I’d been self-employed for three years and had a variety of non-pharmaceutical projects under my belt. Things looked good, but I needed more money. So I caved and accepted a full-time position at an agency with a large pharmaceutical account. I ended up managing 70 hours per week of pharmaceutical projects covering everything from endometriosis to throat cancer.
For months I told myself I could handle the work, and that it wasn’t really that bad. But the truth was I hated waking up and going to work each morning, even though I worked from home four days a week.
The final straw came when a colleague of mine referred to cancer sufferers as “low-hanging fruit.” At that point I gave my notice to the agency and made the decision to stop working on pharmaceutical projects completely. It still took another year to completely eliminate all pharmaceutical-related work.
I’m happy to say that as of May 2007, I haven’t peddled a single drug. My client roster includes a major publishing house, a small magazine, an e-commerce site selling a diverse assortment of consumer goods, a major daily newspaper, and a smattering of small agency clients that call on me for ad hoc assignments in a variety of industries.
Sometimes living my dream means I can walk away from something I hate and, in doing so, discover something I love. That’s a big part of what self-employment means for me.
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This article was originally published in the Poughkeepsie Journal under the title, “Confession of an ex-drug seller”