Randy Jones Content and Communications Manager

The 5 Best Things About Being A Writer At The Bloom Agency

1. There's very little heavy lifting.
Having done jobs that involve a great deal of heavy lifting, I appreciate the fact that at Bloom I only occasionally have to move furniture or large potted plants. The rest of the time I sit in a chair and type, just as nature intended me to do.

2. Free pens.
The first writers used a stick in the sand or berry juice on a piece of wood, and were probably critics (commenting on the latest cave paintings or a local restaurant's mastodon stew, no doubt). Today we have computers that check our spelling and suggest better sentence structure, which is nice. But all I really need is a pen, a piece of paper and a thesaurus, and at Bloom all of those things are supplied free. I just have to show up.

3. I get to play with words all day.
I love words. I love what you can do with words. You can make people laugh, you can make people cry, you can make people buy paint. Words guide our life, be they from the Bible or Shakespeare or Peanuts. Being paid to sit and move words around to create new phrases, convey new ideas and tell new stories is a privilege.

4. I get to learn new things all the time.
Before I came to Bloom, I had no idea what spray foam insulation was or how a sweep-to-line account worked or how much the average plumber made as a starting salary. But now I do. And tomorrow I may have to learn about a whole new industry and find out a bunch of new stuff. I like that. It makes life interesting.

5. The people I work with.
I've been places where I enjoyed the work but not the people, and that's hard. I've been places where I liked the people but hated the work, and that's hard. At Bloom I like the work and I like the people. That's easy.

Back when I was in college (just around the time man learned to walk upright), I had a radio show. I had always been a fan of radio and that show gave me my first chance to really play around with the medium. That experience stuck with me, and today working on radio spots for our clients is one of my favorite assignments.

Southern Community's ME Banking has been a rich source of radio ideas, and I've chosen three of my favorite ME Banking spots to represent "work I like." We've done a lot of different spots for ME Banking, and these are three of the more conceptual ideas we've used. In them, we have iconic figures—Your Money, A Leading Economic Indicator, and a generic Guy On The Radio—telling the listener the benefits of ME Banking.

I like these spots because they're fun (and, I hope, funny), but they also really get across the benefits of the product. They also represent, to me, one of the best aspects of working with Southern Community—their willingness to do something different. ME Banking is a great product, and they could easily have said, "Look, just do a straightforward commercial that tells people what we have to offer. That's all we need." And given the benefits of ME Banking, that probably would get them some business. But I believe—and they agree—that a funny, ear-catching commercial that also sells the product well gets them even more business. And the results have shown that to be the case, as ME Banking has been one of their most successful products over the last few years. (To read how successful, go here.)

When writing and producing the spots is fun (which it was), and the client likes the spots enough to run them two years in a row (which they did), that's pretty much the definition of "work I like."