Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Dear anjingnakal,

Catch 22: you can't get a job without experience, you can't get experience without a job. Or is that really the case? No. It's not.

From your question it's a little unclear what you want to do: work in accounts/strategy, or work as a creative.

You APPEAR to be leaning toward the latter—which is also my background, and has been for almost 25 years.

So. Here's what I think.

Were you in my position, and were I to come to YOUR office expecting to get a job as a creative—with: no portfolio, no ideas, no evidence, no apparent skills, and nothing to back up my position, what would YOU think?

Would you give me a chance?

You asked "So, how does one enter the 'creative realm' of agencies that are in branding and digital media for instance?"

That's easy.

One shows one's worth, one shows how one adds VALUE, one works one's ass off to prove one's self, one does whatever—WHATEVER—it takes to show the person sticking their neck out for you that YOU have got what it takes, that YOU are prepared to work 60, 70 or 80 hour weeks if necessary to MAKE YOUR MARK.

If this means making the tea and coffee, that's what it'll take. If this means doing odds and ends, do it. Several of the greatest creatives ever started in the mail room or pushing a broom.

Your creative ideas?

They can be as rough as a bear's arse PROVIDED THEY COMMUNICATE!

Your portfolio can be an old cigar box and your ideas can be written with a blackened stick from an old camp fire on deer pelts or papyrus PROVIDED THE CONCEPTS COMMUNICATE!

But the thing about ideas is this: you've got to have some.

You've got to show proof of the way your mind works; you've got to provide some evidence from the scene of the crime. It's simply not possible to solve a creative problem—to produce creative work without expressing some form of an idea.

But here's the REALLY big thing.

The idea HAS to rock.

The ideas, plural, have GOT to be fresh, new, different, thought-provoking, comment worthy—REMARKABLE.

Because if they're NOT, then the product or service they're supposed to be promoting or positioning falls flat.

And when a product or service falls flat—when sales don't increase, or when awareness of the product or service and its many benefits and values isn't made apparent in the marketplace, when the product or service does not generate share of mind in the noggin of the average buyer, for the clients (remember them?) it raises the following question "If my sales haven't gone up, what the bloody hell am I spending all this money for?"

Any creative work that CANNOT help answer this question isn't creative. Now, I'll admit that the fault isn't ALWAYS that of the creative work: market, message, media ALL triangulate to support this. But if the ideas BEHIND all this are not fresh, people's minds tend to ignore them because they don't say or give anything new.

And the reason human being have been around for hundreds of thousands of years is because their search for newness keeps them on their toes.

With me?

You also asked "Would you recommend me to learn graphic design anyway, just for the sake of having a portfolio?"

Read read everything above and THEN ask the same question. That's your answer. But all this "just for the sake of having a portfolio" thinking?

It's got to stop.

This isn't a bag of potatoes we're talking about here, just for the sake of making French fries. This isn't a roll of toilet paper, just for the sake of—well, you know.

Here, we're talking about a little book of PASSION. And specifically your passion and your exhibition and love of that passion.

Your portfolio, however rough it may be, your portfolio has got to—bloody well GOT TO—show you're passionate about producing great creative work.

Think passion isn't important? Consider this:

If Beethoven had lacked passion his Fifth Symphony might have sounded like "Dah! Dah! Like, whatever dude" rather than "Dah! Dah Dhuuummm!"

If Tchaikovsky had lacked passion, his 1812 Overture would have had farts in it instead of real cannon.

Do you see the difference? Passion is VITAL. And sadly, as attention spans decrease and communication speeds increase there's less and less passion evident in a lot of marketing and advertising which is a great shame. But never the less, great creative work has passion and always will have. The difference between OK work and great work is HUGE.

So, regroup, rethink your position, and if it's REALLY your dream to become a creative, study great ads, pull them apart, and figure out what it is that makes them great. You must become a student of advertising.

There are two great books you might want to read, both of which I've reviewed on Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com.

The first is Jim Aitchison's "Cutting Edge Advertising", (the first edition if you can get it). This book is all about print advertising and, as I said in my Amazon review way back in 2000 and whatever it was (look it up), the personalities simply LEAP off the page. Its foreword is also written by Neil French, a British writer
(and former Worldwide Creative Director for Ogilvy), who now divides his time between Singapore and Spain.

I've had the pleasure of corresponding with Neil and he's a sound bloke who speaks his mind. "Cutting Edge Advertising" is probably one of the best books on print advertising ever written, second only to anything you can get your hands on from David Ogilvy—gone now these last ten years, poor old bugger.

The second book you'd do well to devour is Luke Sullivan's "Hey Whipple, Squeeze This". Don't let the title fool you. Again, this is a gem of a book. My copies of both these books are tattered,
dog-eared, scuffed, and heavily annotated. But every time I go through them, as I do every now and then, i find and learn something new.

Once you've read those—three or four times, and no, I'm not kidding—read them both at least three or four times, then read Paul Arden's "It's Not How Good You Are, Its How Good You Want to Be: The World's Best Selling Book".

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA
Follow me on www.twitter.com @GaryBloomer

Dear anjingnakal,

OK. So you want to be an account handler ... or something.

Splendid.

But first, grab a chair, sit down, pin back your ears, keep your mouth closed and your fingers off the keyboard and listen—JUST for a moment.

Why?

Because I think we need to have a little chat.

There's on teesy-weensy detail that bothers me, and, as you'll find out if you belabour it as a point, it may also bother your new boss, whoever that person may be.

Before I get into that, as Neil French said to me several years ago:
"It's only bloody advertising. nobody dies."

However, the point that bothers me is the issue you raised about passion: "As far as your other answer about passion, you obviously understand that it only applies when I actually get hired."

Ex-squeeze me. Stop. Breath. THINK!

Take a moment to truly, and I mean REALLY consider the gravity of that statement. then answer me this:

Have you ever been in love? And I don't just mean vaguely having the hots for someone or fancying someone just a bit, but really, madly, and deeply been head over heels, mad crazy, howl at the Moon in love?

If you have, that's passion.

Passion for the CRAFT (and note there, please, the use of capital letters) of advertising and marketing isn't a light switch that you can flip on and off. It isn't a toilet flusher—whoosh, one crank gone, and "Next!".

It's a way of life.

Or at least, it ought to be if you want to get hired. If you walk into an interview and your potential boss gets one whiff of that, you're in trouble. And believe me, senior agency people talk to other senior agency people in other agencies.

Jay's bang on.

If you lack creative work you've got to produce the stuff. Or you find an art director and copywriter and you ask them if you can work with them on the side. Or you take some part-time or part-time courses in graphic design, page layout, art direction, copywriting, photography, and drawing.

With some clip art, some stock images, or images pulled from magazines you can, if you've got your wits about you, pull together a pretty solid looking series of campaigns and one offs.

But your ideas must be sound.

Forget all the fancy, whizz-bang, whistles and bells execution of the thing, the art directing it to death and the skills of using a Mac, because as great as the Mac is, it's only ever going to be a tool.
A highly sophisticated tool, yes, but a tool all the same.

And forget the fictional ads. Do REAL ads for REAL products and REAL services. But, to echo Luke Sullivan, don't do condom ads. they've been done to death and their presence in the portfolio of any student or junior agency hopeful ought to be illegal.

I've been a graphic designer for almost 25 years and as odd as this might sound, the only MAJOR difference between a creative with a Mac and a chimpanzee with a stick is a two percent slice of DNA.

Without a great, solid, unquestionably BRILLIANT idea to support
it and push it through, and up, and out, and away above the mediocre offerings that are so often the ads and examples of marketing we see around us on a daily basis, so that the ad or piece of marketing in question makes a real difference to someone's life, and to the client's bottom line—the execution of the ad is pretty much meaningless.

I don't doubt there are thousands of creative directors who'd take issue with this, but it's true.

When it comes to you creating strategy, you've got to figure out what's going on in the the niche that the product or service you're working for. And you'll have to do this for every campaign-sometimes, for every AD.

The role of strategy is to prop up and reinforce every action, notion, call to action, and function of the overall plan to put the goods, services, and products in question in front of the people that need those specific things in order to meet a specific need
or solve a particular problem.

Strategy that does this CANNOT BE FAULTED. It can be questioned,
yes, but it cannot be faulted. And ads that adhere to the strategy, that embody the strategy and the personify the heart and soul of the product all help to reinforce the power of the brand.

And speaking of brands. Something else in your response to jay stands out: "brands are interested in crowd-sourcing".

Brands don't crowd source, people do.

Brands happen, blossom, and take shape as a set of perceptions, suppositions, real and imagined memories, and associations inside people's heads. Brands don't actually exist in the real world, labels do, but not brands.

Think of everything that IS the brand as an indelible stamp, as some kind of mental tattoo etched onto and into the brain that connects to deeply enmeshed feelings, wants, needs, desires, imagined outcomes, and promises—either to what is, or to what could be.

So, become a student of advertising. Take some classes. Partner with a creative team. Immerse yourself in the craft as you would a hot bath and let its soothing warmth soak into your brain.

Then, get out there and strut your stuff.

Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA
Follow me on www.twitter.com @GaryBloomer