📘 The year of Scary Mommy vemes

Jill Smokler changed my life

On The Dad we had a range of voice. A ton of comedy, sure. But then we’d punctuate that with emotion. So it’d be: comedy, comedy, comedy, BAM! feelings. Having range makes all the content work better. If you only do comedy, it comes across as forced (and less funny). If you only do sentimental stuff, it’s cheesy. Following a serious essay with an absurd meme works better than you think.

In last week’s The Dad Story entry, my dad died. I’ll try to make this one lighter.

Jill Smokler created an absolute parenting brand behemoth with Scary Mommy.

It worked so well because it was real. And Jill tapped into the talent, emotion, and writing skills of the Scary Mommy community. She gave people a stage, a microphone, and a huge opportunity to reach so many people with their stories.

I am forever grateful that she gave me a chance too.

I started submitting to Jill in April 2016. For the next year, I never missed a week of submissions (other than Lawyergate 2016, see below).

I did a few video style memes (vemes) per week. I was paid $50 per accepted veme. (I don’t know the current industry rates, but I feel this was and still is very good.) I didn’t care about the money. I was progressing my 5 year corporate escape plan, QUICKLY. Plus it was hella fun.

A recurring theme in The Dad story is that I was in the right place at the right time, I got lucky, and I am grateful. That is especially true of the Scary Mommy vemes. In 2016 Facebook was HEAVILY emphasizing short video. It was the perfect storm for making me look like I knew what I was doing.

(Part of recent PR woes are that FB was caught inflating video metrics, exactly during the period when I was first getting paid to create video content. Yay me! Thanks Zuck. Although if you’re a social biz guru and you read closely, it’s more about “time spent watching” metrics than view counts, necessarily. But whatevs.)

Also vemes were less prevalent at that time, especially in the parenting meme creation community, and there weren’t as many tools to easily create them. (I used Windows Movie Maker at first 😬) All this combined meant that I could crank out mediocre content and it would blow the heck up.

Here are a couple from the first month:

49 million views.

35 million views.

Not exactly comedy gold… but those numbers! As someone who just spent 3 years getting 10k followers, seeing a thing that I made go up, and then watching the engagement and views climb by the 10s of thousands with every refresh? Holy shit, this was the greatest thing. This was like grinding open mic nights in a church basement for 3 years and suddenly performing sold out theater shows.

I loved it so much.

Jill even gave me an unsolicited $250 bonus for the “END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR” one because of performance.

Even just looking at those fonts and designs overwhelms me with nostalgia.

You’ll notice too that at first they were co-branded, with Scary Mommy and The Glad Stork in the footer. I was being paid to make these things and I was getting public credit? Freakin ideal.

Behind the scenes lawyery stuff

A little inside baseball: there was a portion of my contract that I was not a fan of. I won’t go into details other than to say there was a clause that, in my opinion, wasn’t very creator friendly. Some Spider, the parent company of Scary Mommy, was doing their best. The contract was pretty general and covered all the bases. It just wasn’t overly optimized for this type of work.

In June, just a few months after starting, I told them that because of that clause, I had to quit.

There was over a month of back and forth with the lawyer, who was almost certainly annoyed by the whole thing. (I would later interview with him, for the job at The Dad, hahaha. Hey buddy!) Eventually, we worked together on the new language for the clause I was concerned about, and THEY CHANGED IT! It would have been way easier to cast me aside.

“Who the hell is this freelancer complaining about Clause VI of the contract that everyone else has had no problem signing???”

I actually didn’t expect them to even consider changing it and was so happy to get back to work.

(Later, at The Dad, I saw our freelancers had been given the old contract. We went back and pulled the creator-optimized version and used that one instead.)

Jill and I had very similar comedic sensibilities. We worked well together.

Early on I admitted to her my plans to do creative work full-time some day and she said: “That's awesome; I love hearing that! You definitely have a future in entertainment!!“

Oh my goodness. Motivation fuel for years right there.

It was rare that I’d submit something that she would reject. But it happened. So here, for the first time, I give you memes made for Scary Mommy THAT WERE REJECTED.

Lol, I get it. This is… a bit much.

This was 2016, an election year. And for these, we wanted to avoid anything that could be misconstrued as political.

I always wanted to do more original photography memes. But Some Spider leadership really wanted video stuff from me. But these are my son’s feet. I still love this one. And he still pulls this crap.

“Quickies”

After the legal battle of 2016, I got a new contract and got back to work. This was a great opportunity for a rebrand though, and I was told they’d just be branded Scary Mommy going forward. No more TheGladStork. I get it. It’s a little weird to pay for content and then have two brand names on it.

But we also got a new name for vemes. I was now spending my weekends working on… Scary Mommy Quickies! 😂

Practical takeaways

Want a gig like this? All’s you gotta do is be in the perfect place at the perfect time and the ideal opportunity can happen for you too. (Only mostly kidding.)

In all seriousness, if you find yourself with an opportunity like I had that has huge potential upside and you love it, don’t hesitate to put in WORK. Be grateful, be thankful, be positive and easy to work with, and consistently deliver. Day after day, week after week, month after month if that’s what it takes. Don’t complain about pay (within reason), and enjoy the ride.

Jill Smokler changed my life, just as she has with many writers and creators.

I reached out to her last week to tell her this and thank her once again, as I have many times.

I think the best way to thank her is to try to create opportunities for other deserving hardworking, creative people out there. That was always on my mind as we created The Dad.

Instagram Takeovers

Back in these days, Scary Mommy was just getting started on Instagram.

Jill did the coolest thing. She let parenting creators take over the @scarymommy page. She gave the keys (username/password), let them introduce themselves, and post 5-6 times throughout a day. I really can’t overemphasize how huge this was for aspiring creators.

I did several takeovers. Every time, I carefully selected my lineup of memes to post that day, making sure to strike the right range of tone, while also using only greatest hits, stuff that would get 10k + engagements.

I distinctly remember sitting at a friend’s house after a post went up, watching the notifications roll in. Refresh, 100 notifications, refresh, 100 notifications. UNREAL.

This was the pinnacle of meme creative fulfillment!

I didn’t think it could ever get any better, until April 2017, when I was asked to run the Scary Mommy Instagram indefinitely…