BoSacks Speaks Out: Confessions of a stressed media buyer

By BoSacks

Tue, Aug 25, 2020

BoSacks Speaks Out: Confessions of a stressed media buyer

I have had the luck to play many roles, and I've had multiple job titles in our media industry. I think the one I enjoyed the most, other than being the publisher of this newsletter, was as a Director of Manufacturing and Distribution. I thrived on the chaos that the job entailed. Each day had dozens of moving pieces tossed into the air, and if you were good at it, none of the magazine pieces hit the floor, and all titles shipped out on time and on schedule and reproduced with exceptional, consistent quality.

I've seen the production process crush those without the ability to adapt to the non-monotony of perse and complex situations on the fly. But I found it exciting to be in the center of the magazine manufacturing storm jumping from one solvable problem to the other. I believed then, and I think now, that there is always a solution. It is seeing the simple solution rather than the complex one that is at the heart of manufacturing alchemy.

My enjoyment of the pressure of making magazine magic under stress brings me to the interview, “Confessions of a Media Buyer under Pressure”. I feel for the person here and the mental toll he or she is dealing with. The 24/7 cycle and the intense pressures of clients and supervisors not respecting that the media buyer is a person, a human with the need to decompress and step back from time to time and get refreshed. Clearly not all employees are built for the constant, ever developing 21st century stress and chaos.

Perhaps it is the new normal where we don't have the structure of the commute to an office, the somewhat orderliness of 9 to 5 (or so) out of the home, and the return commute to our families. If you take that organized part of our routines away, I can see the new expectation that we are always on call.

This always on call, always available, has been growing with each advancement of the digital process for the last two decades. It’s not that it is new – it isn't – but with the advent of the COVID Time Machine, we are where we would have been anyway, but years before it might have happened. And that presents a Human Resources situation where a person's personality traits that might have been acceptable for methodologies and work patterns of the past are no longer suitable for the compression of the new normal workload.

It’s a topic worth having a conversation about. If there are any HR professionals on this list or if you non-HR professionals would like to offer your thoughts to our group, I’d love to hear from you. - bo@bosacks.com

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