This Digital Ad Worker Goes to "11"

Emily Steel starts out her Wall Street Journal article, "More Digital Ads are Produced Offshore", with this eye-opening statement:

Outsourcing has hit Madison Avenue.

I don't think that's exactly late-breaking news, but if that's what the WSJ implies, than in a sense, it is late-breaking news.

The article continues:

Until recently, Web ads were produced mostly by creative types in downtown lofts in places like New York City or San Francisco. But big marketers are now increasingly shipping off that work to little-known businesses in places like Costa Rica and Bulgaria.

One company reaping the rewards is avVenta Worldwide, which has 415 employees in San Jose, Costa Rica; Kiev, Ukraine; and London, as well as Charleston, S.C. Since avVenta launched in 2005, it has built a business out of doing behind-the-scenes production work on Web ads for the agencies that work with some of the world's biggest marketers, including General Motors, Microsoft and Bank of America, at rates about 20% to 50% lower than what agencies pay for similar work in the U.S., ad executives say.

The article then goes on to talk about exactly which processes are being outsourced, and how American advertising agencies view outsourcing as necessary for survival.

Of course, it isn't always about lower costs. Emily Steel nicely says that "The campaigns are labor-intensive to produce -- and most ad agencies can't find enough talent in the U.S. to fill their needs." The article then talks about a Charleston-based company that expanded into Costa Rica "...because its time zones are compatible with those in the U.S., and it has a high concentration of English speakers and a work force with experience in design and development."

I didn't realize that Costa Rican schools were producing such prodigious quantities of ready-made digital design workers. Sigh! I guess we'll just have to lengthen the school day by one more hour so our children will learn yet another skill in order to become competitive in the global economy.

This guy wasn't as nice as Emily Steel in talking about American workers: "

There are a lot of talented people in this country, but there is just a different work ethic that comes with working with people from another country," said Dan LaCivita, senior VP-executive director of Firstborn, a 40-person digital agency headquartered in New York. Referring to a one-to-ten scale system, he said that in the U.S. you can hire "100 'sevens' or 'eights', but you can't hire 100 '11s'. And I want there to be 40 '11s' here."

LaCivita's quote was taken from AdAge.com (login ID required, but the article was copied into one of Rob Sanchez' Job Destruction Newsletters).

I decided to visit the Firstborn Multimedia website. Was it designed by one of their "seven's" or one of their "11's"? Is it my eyesight? Do I not have some sort of essential flash media installed on my PC? Or is it most of it almost (besides the pretty pictures) totally unreadable? I immediately found out why they can't find qualified American workers. It must be some sort of "If you can't read this, you're not good enough to work for us."

I was curious how a foreign-born "11" working in the United States is paid compared to a Costa Rican working in his or her own country. I have no way of knowing how much Costa Ricans earned, but I could find out a little bit about the H-1B's working for Firstborn through the Department of Labor's Foreign Labor Certification Data Center website. According to the Labor Condition Applications (LCA's) filed for fiscal years 2006 and 2007, a Senior Designer makes $65,000 per year, Flash Developers make between $50,000 and $70,000 per year, and a Senior Producer makes $80,000 per year. I doubt if the Costa Ricans are making that much money.

I also can't help but notice that Emily Steel doesn't seems to think the necessary talent exists in the U.S., while LaCivita says, yes, we have the talent, we're just not very good.

Food for thought. If we start producing a bunch of American-born "11's", would the ad agencies start bringing the outsourced jobs back into the U.S., or start replacing the H-1B's with Americans? Shouldn't we start demanding that our nation's executives and politicians also be "11's"?

(Note: John McCain, in a recent Silicon Valley fundraiser, was very sympathetic to donors complaining about the low H-1B limits, and the fact that foreign students "must return" back to their own countries after graduation rather than seek employment in the United States. Do you think McCain is an "11"?)

Cross-posted at Carrie's Nation.