A new website aimed at matching a wide pool of creative, digital and marketing talent with clients and agencies has officially been launched today, Friday June 19th.
Called The Indie List (www.indielist.ie), the new website is the brainchild of Una Herlihy, the well-known client/agency intermediary and founder of BKC. Since she began curating the list over a month ago, she has been joined by media expert and former CEO of TodayFM, Peter McPartlin.
Back in early May, Herlihy set out to create a database of professionals who had been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic and who were actively seeking work. To date the response has been significant and over 1,500 people have signed up to the database, promting Herlihy to launch it online.
According to Herlihy the database includes existing freelancers, industry professionals who have been recently let go as well as small indie shops and agencies looking for work. The database, which she calls The List, includes people with experience across a wide range of disciplines including account management, planning, art and creative directors, SEO experts, digital specialists, photographers, brand strategists, videographers, content creators, UX/UI specialists, web developers and media consultants.
“It’s clear that there is a market for this and so I am really keen to develop the initiative but it is much more labour-intensive then I had envisaged. I was over the moon then when I persuaded fellow independent traveller, Peter McPartlin to come on board to help me develop it. Peter is a former colleague of mine from my Irish International days and will be known to many of your readers from his time in the agency world and from his involvement in stations like TodayFM and the current PlayIrish radio initiative. For the last few weeks we have both been working together on shaping up the list – now called The Indie List – to properly service the pool of independent talent as well as agency & client communities,” says Herlihy.
“It’s early days obviously at this point, but over the last number of weeks we have been able to successfully place a number of people with a wide variety of experience and specialisms into roles in both client and agency businesses. Every day, we are getting more and more freelancers signing up and everyday clients are contacting us looking for people. So we’re really confident that this is an idea whose time has come and it serves a real need in the local market. We are anticipating a lot more disruption in our industry over the next couple of months and this is going to have huge implications for the sector’s talent and craft base. We have created the The Indie List to be ready for this and to hopefully act as way to keep as many people as possible actively engaged and paid fairly for their skills,” she adds.
For more information go to www.indielist.ie
