So, here’s the story of how I started to do the Sacred Order of the Laidofferati videos.
Spoiler alert. This story touches upon the fact that I was recently laid off from Lerma/.
No reason to really get into the nitty gritty of why I was laid off, but it was done very respectfully and with a lot of class. I can’t say that I wasn’t worried about it a little bit for quite some time, as we’d never really been able to replace a few of my clients that had left over the previous year and a half.
When I first started taking night school courses on advertising copywriting, I had a teacher who told the class. You will all get laid off 4-6 times in your career. I had never forgotten that, and had felt very fortunate that through 33+ years I was consecutively employed. And loved practically every minute of it.
I’ve felt very fortunate to work in a career that allows me to be weird and creative.
In the previous 9 months at Lerma/ I had really leaned into learning to use AI tools effectively. And frankly, I love it. It lets me bring ideas to life in ways that I never could have over all those previous 33 years. In fact, my last client at Lerma/ was a pharmaceutical company that let us create bizarre short videos (in Polish, no less). Getting the language right in a language you don’t speak took a little doing, but nonetheless the end product was super fun. The client had a very lean budget, and this allowed us to do thumb stopping work without breaking the bank. The last I heard the campaign was going gangbusters for them.
But then, alas, I got laid off. And frankly, I felt embarrassed. I felt lousy. I told the people I worked with, but I kind of found out that I really struggled in letting the greater sphere of people I knew know.
So, I started reaching out to people individually, and I kind of randomly landed on a quirky way to tell people. I would say that I have recently been inducted into the Sacred order of the Laidofferati. People got it. And always with a smile on their face.
But then, as I got in to the laid off world of trying to find new work (freelance or otherwise), it is made quite clear to you by recruiters and other people in a similar position, that you MUST be on Linkedin. So, I started by liking posts. I wrote a few posts. But everything on there started to feel the same to me.
Then, it dawned on me – what if I really created this world of the Sacred Order of the Laidofferati.
I really didn’t know what it was. But I knew it should be weird. So, I kind of created the first video on the fly, figuring out some of the lore as I was prompting and creating. I knew pretty early on that I wanted them to have a sacred shape. My great friend Chris Smith (over at Plot Twist) we had often joked about how everyone has a “shape”. So, pretty sure over beers at some point we hatched the idea of a “Hexagon of Truth”. But as I was prompting, I thought it would be funny (maybe just to me), if they thought they were worshipping a Hexagon of truth but that it was actually a heptagon. Like I said, I wanted these to be weird.
So, I kind of laid the seed for that joke in the first video. I knew that I should base the main character on me. He is…and depending on what day it is he looks more or less like me. I know I would go completely insane if I worried about every aspect of continuity, so I kind of give myself a pass on that. I’m sure some film purists would be troubled by it. But you kind of know who the main guy is. Then I knew we needed a Leader, so I figured he should look like he came from Eyes Wide Shut. Then, I sort of stumbled on the Carl character. I wanted someone to speak up, so wrote a prompt about one of the cult members in the background having been laid off (or fired more likely) because he photocopied his butt. I figured it would just be another anonymous masked man. But one of the prompts had him come out as this nerd guy. So I totally leaned into it. Loved him. I then let Carl have the next line about some of the tenets of the Laidofferati. It needed some serious stuff, and then, of course, something weird, which is where the muffins came from. I’m just trying to make myself laugh – and that seems funny to me. The part about them being in praise of the algorithm, is, of course, a truth of the LinkedIn world.
So, that kind of had me plotting out episode one and two. And frankly I knew I had to keep going.
I had had a lot of conversations with other laid off people about “do you or don’t you” wear the green ring in your profile. Like I said, I was/am still carrying some guilt shame about being laid off, so I really didn’t want to wear the Ring of “Desperate Hope” as I called it. That video came together in a really fun way. I was trying to show the Ring in reel life and one of the iterations came out looking kind of like a life saver, so again, I leaned into it. And then Carl introduces the alternate “GetMeOutofHere” lifesaver which is what I actually have in my Linkedin profile now.
For the next video, I wanted to explore other hallways and areas of the Laidofferati world. As I was putting it together, it’s like a felt a little tug on my purple robe saying, “Hey Bill, you’re screwing up. You have 2 main characters who are white males. And one other main character who is in a mask.” So, I knew I would introduce more different characters. But as I went to create that one, I didn’t initially mean for diversity to be the joke. But then it naturally happened. I was a little worried about ruffling some people’s feather with this episode, but I felt like adding the “bad stero types” joke after the “checked all the boxes joke would help diffuse the issue.
I did share that spot with several people that I trusted to make sure it wasn’t offensive. I hope people don’t see it that way. But mostly it feels like I was turning a mirror back onto agency life, and how sometimes you have an incredible cast, and someone says we need to mix it up a little and it just changes that dynamic.
At that point, I knew I was going out of the country on a long-planned trip, so I knew I wanted to be able to post one video while I was away. I always loved how Pixar occasionally had outtakes from their shoots, so I thought that would be a good break in the cadence. That one came together insanely quickly. All I had to do was go back to one of my successful prompts and change the prompt to something like Carl has too much muffin in his mouth and begins to almost choke on it. Cracked me up.
And this last one, I wanted to bring back the idea of the guys baking the muffins. I had been joking in several of my emails about how I was hoping to find some freelance work and I would say something like, “ I would love to find some freelance work…or some paidjustalittlebitlance” Again, those things were making people laugh, so I figured I could lean into it. I decided Carl would’ve taken on some freelance gigs that were making him super tired. And ultimately discover that he was also doing them for free. The long yawn joke just sort of came to me as I was putting it together.
I have several ideas ahead. So, I am just starting to work on next weeks. I have done so many now that I feel like I have to keep going!
Not sure when we’ll see it, but I really want to do a Hannah-Barbera animated episode, in the vein of Scooby Doo. So that’s something I’ll probably try to do down the road.
Of course, my greatest wish is that I am unable to continue to do any of these because I am either too busy with freelance work or a ft job. But – also – I certainly hope I can bring AI filmmaking silliness with me on my next job.
And if you’ve made it this far, we should probably know each other.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn, learn a little more about me and my work at BillCochran.me, or head over to the Laidofferati YouTube channel to see all the episodes, outtakes and whatever other weirdness the Sacred Order gets up to next.
Praise the algorithm.
