Yesterday, I found out that I officially sold my first campaign.

I’ve been working in advertising in different capacities for the past 9 months, and while I’ve had work published before, pitching and selling a campaign is something completely different.

It’s cool to see a print ad that you made turn up in a magazine you’re flipping though, but it’s about a million times cooler when you were the one that came up with the complete concept behind the campaign. It’s your baby. And to have a client say that they like it? Well that means a lot.

Let me back up. The campaign I’m working on is for a big brand. While it’s a national campaign, it’s not going to be the first thing you think of when you hear the brand’s name. It’s a campaign for a sales event (cue sad trombone) — something that can easily be overlooked in terms of creativity. In fact, the client has basically been using the same campaign for the past 5 or 6 years in different capacities.

When my partner and I were put on this, we were told that they would probably choose the old one again, but it would be good to pitch new work as well.

It helps that we’re new. It helps that we’re still excited about some of these projects.

But really, I’m just so completely jazzed that even though the odds were stacked against us, we sold a campaign. And I can’t wait to see the end result.

A huge pet peeve of mine is people who are self-centered, in any walk of life. It’s especially true in advertising, though. Everyone knows how writers and art directors started working together in teams (if you don’t, read Idea Industry), but what people don’t fully comprehend is how INTENSELY those (good) teams work together.

I remember an interview with Craig + Eric of Oldspice fame (sorry to beat a dead horse here, but this happened when I was really just getting into advertising and hearing this had a huge impact on me). They were asked who was the writer and who was the art director, and they didn’t have a straight answer. They said that they both worked together on everything, but they guessed when it came down to it, Craig was the AD and Eric the writer. 

That’s how all teams should (ideally) work together. The two members should be working together so closely that you really don’t know who was responsible for which idea or where one person’s thought ends and the other’s begins. That might be a lot to ask for someone just out of school who might be working with someone they’ve never met before. But it’s something to aim for one day. 

I hear a lot of people try to make it seem like they’re like this. A writer will tell someone they’re a visual thinker and an art director will talk about how they like to write as well. That’s great, but that’s not what this is about. This is about really willing to work with someone and really have a relationship. In all honesty, you’re probably going to be spending about as much time with your creative partner as you do with your spose, so to be successful you need to have a similar relationship. That might mean making sacrifices for the good of a campaign, even if it’s almost completely text-based or visually heavy.

You’re not a lesser writer because you helped make a campaign that was focused more on visuals. Same for art directors. Too many people focus on the final execution of an ad and who “won” — writer or art director. This toxic behavior wouldn’t work in a romantic one and sure as hell won’t work for a professional one.

At the end of the day, you shouldn’t be able to tell who came up with whose idea. And even though you might have to sit down and prepare three print ads for a meeting with a client, that’s not the cool part of your job. The cool part is the ideas.

It’s so hard for me to believe that people who are a year younger than me are now half-way done with their senior year of college. It’s scary to think that a year ago, I was one of them, trying feverishly to finish college, have fun, prepare my book, and get a job… it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago but at the same time, I feel like I have grown so much since then. That’s why this year, I’ve really tried to dedicate this blog (though I don’t update it as often as I’d like) to offer the advice to graduating seniors that I wish I would have had.

If you want to be a creative (art director or copywriter), your entire career is based on your book, a compilation of all of the best work that you have done in your career field. Everything else (including your resume), is good, but isn’t going to be the reason you’re hired. Think of it this way: companies are making an investment when they’re hiring you… they want to make sure that you, in turn, will help to earn money for them. So before they hire you, they will want evidence that you’re good at your job. That’s where you book comes in. 

To quote the great Deb Morrison, “Your book is never done.” To add to that, “and you will never be happy with it.” This is a good thing. If you’re completely satisfied with your work, you will not push yourself to make better work. The drive and motivation to make better work is what separates good creatives from great ones. My portfolio is nowhere near where I want it to be, but I’m constantly working to add projects to it that would make it better. 

Building your book from nothing is hard. Doing it while you’re trying to attend a liberal arts college is even harder, that’s why so many ad creatives attend portfolio school after a general university — it gives them a chance to take two years to just concentrate on their portfolios. If you don’t have the luxury of a spare $40K to spend on portfolio school, you can still make a good book, you just need to work harder at it.

Here are three reasons why your book might not be as good as you want:

1. You don’t have enough time to concentrate on it. Trust me, I was in this boat. In college, you’re rushing around and doing about 50 things other than the campaign that you’re working on. In the real world, that campaign is your top priority and you will sit in a room/cubicle all day with your partner just thinking about that one campaign. It’s a lot easier to get into the deeper meaning behind a brand’s message when you’re doing it for hours on end. It’s almost impossible to do when you also have a history paper due tomorrow and a group meeting tonight.
2. You don’t have a Creative Director to keep pushing you. Juniors rely heavily on their experienced bosses (CDs) to give them feedback and nudge them in the right direction. If you don’t have someone constantly giving you pointers and helpful hints, it’s hard to strike gold with an ad. Teachers are great at helping to fill this void, but many are already being pulled in a million different directions — it can be hard for them to help you better your book when they already have 50 other students asking the same thing, papers to grade, evaluations to fill out, etc. etc.
3. You don’t have a complete team. At a real agency, the creatives work with strategists, producers, project managers, media buyers, and the account team on the same project. Having a big team like that can make it hard to make sure everyone’s on the same page, but it also helps you to be a lot more thorough in things like research and strategy as well as making sure it’s fulfilling the client’s needs. You hear a lot of bad things about clients, but in reality, they know their business better than you do and they really just want to do what they can to make it better. Without having this whole team in place to help you on a project, you might not fully understand what the client would want/need, even if it’s just for spec work. Plus, there’s a reason people go into other jobs in advertising: they’re good at them and (usually) they like them. So while I might not find it that interesting to do market research into direct and indirect competitors, luckily I work with someone who does (and does it better than I ever could). That gives me more time to do what I do best: art direction.

Don’t let this discourage you from going out as a creative, but be warned of these problems that you might have. Push your ideas further. Ask each other for help (believe it or not, there are people in those “other” advertising jobs that go to school with you), and more than anything, use your book as an opportunity to show how you think.

Good luck!

Today was my last day working at Goodness Manufacturing. It was an amazing job to have, especially straight out of college, but a very hard and sad fact about advertising is that most of the time, you need to move around to different agencies to advance your career. This isn’t 100 percent true at all, I can name about 12 notable exceptions of the top of my head — but it does work for many people.

On Monday, I’ll start work as a junior art director at Team One in El Segundo where I’ll be working on all the accounts except for Lexus.  This includes American Express, FlexJet, Haagen-Dazs, Icelandic Glacial Water, JW Marriott, and the Ritz-Carlton. Team One is owned by Saatchi, who use them to specialize in their “luxury brands.” I am so so so SO excited to start this job. At Goodness, I was functioning mostly in a designer capacity, so this is definitely a good career move for me. It’ll be good to stretch my concepting muscles again (although I am nervous!).

I’m going to miss Goodness a lot, though. The people who work there are easily the greatest group of people I’ve ever met. They are all crazy talented and have some truly amazing leadership… I am so happy with all of the connections that I made there and will be watching their agency news with excitement to see what big thing happens next. You watch, they’ll be blowing up soon (in a good way). I’m not going to miss the commute or the craziness that is downtown Hollywood (where movie premieres really just mean more traffic), but I am going to miss all of my friends.

Thank you so much, Goodness for all that you gave me. And thanks to Team One for giving me a chance to be a real art director.

So, I’ve been hinting at exciting news for a while now and haven’t said anything, but here it is:

I got a new job.

As of January 20th, 2012, I will no longer be a manufacturer of Goodness. Instead, I will be working as a junior art director at a wonderful placed called Team One in El Segundo. I’m really sad to be leaving my co-workers at Goodness, but I think that it will be an amazing opportunity to get to be a real art director and get paid like a real person as well.

This has been an amazing place to work/intern, but I’ve been doing a lot more design/production artist work than I had thought, so it’ll be goo to go to Team One.

And the drive is a LOT better.

So there you go. It’s out. Starting Team One on the 23rd. Until then, I’ll be working late Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, AND Wednesday.

I never wanted to be a teacher growing up. I was always a terrible baby sitter and don’t really have the patience to deal with trying to teach kids who don’t want to be there. Teaching, was never EVER a goal of mine… until now. 

I would love love LOVE to some day, teach a class in advertising one or two nights a week. I know that there’s no way that I’m qualified to do that now, but in a decade or so, I might be. I’m really jealous of what Dave Allen does — work at North all week and drive down to Eugene to teach a class for three hours, one night per week. That’s my goal.

As a student, I always respected teachers more who had real world experience and who were still relevant in a real world setting. It’s really easy to just sit back and watch technology and modern methods/trends pass you by while you grade papers. I never want to be one of those teachers. I want to be able to sit down and honestly advise students on what they need to do to start a career in advertising.

I got a little taste of it these past few weeks…. some former classmates (who are still in school) contacted me to help them out with their projects for a class that I remember taking last year (Deb Morrison’s Creative Strategist class). I tried really hard to help them out and to answer their questions the way I would want them to be answered if I were doing the project. From the different requests I got, here’s some advice I can give students on reaching out to people in the industry for an interview/advice:

1. Subject lines. It sounds silly, but the subject lines of your emails are going to make or break whether or not the emails are read. Be honest, engaging and memorable.
2. Time of day. If you send it too late at night, the person probable won’t read it until the morning… which means it will get stuck with the rest of their mail in the person’s mental “I’ll reply to that later” folder (hint: these hardly ever get replied to, but that’s not your fault). A lot of it is luck, depending on how busy that person is during the day, but late afternoon/early evening is usually good for people who check their email again after dinner. If you’re completely unsure about the time the person might read it, try to first reach out with an email that allows for a simple one line answer like, “sure, I’d love to help out. What did you have in mind?”
3. Don’t take up too much of their time. No matter what answer they give, you can’t ask them to change it. It’s YOUR project, so it’s your job to make their quote/advice, etc. fit into the project, not the other way around. Also, don’t ask them for information that is readily accessible elsewhere on the internet (such as their website for job history, grad year, etc.)
4. Be polite and gracious, and always remember to show them the project after it’s done. 

Sometimes, I feel like I get a lot of crap when people hear I work in advertising. Lots of people tell me that I’m evil, contributing to the downfall of society, making people have body image issues, making people fat, making people crazy, etc. etc. In short, I’ve been accused of a lot of things for my career choices. It was even worse when I was in school… At the University of Oregon, the advertising program is embedded within the School of Journalism and Communication and lots of “true journalists” felt like advertising and PR students were contaminating the college. Luckily, I am a Duck (#4 in the nation, baby!) and those comments just roll off of me like… well, like water off a duck’s back. But to defend advertising once and for all….

90 percent of all ads are crap. I think this is why people hate them so much. Because advertisements are the things that split up chunks of your favorite show, that unnecessarily fill your mailbox, and that ruin perfectly good blank sides of buildings. I mean, TiVo was basically invented to allow people to SKIP advertisements. Well, I hate them too. I hate seeing bad local used car ads, and poorly photoshopped print ads. Honestly, it gives everyone else in advertising a bad name. However, I got into advertising to be the other 10 percent. I want to make amazing, beautiful, and hilarious ads that people want to share with their friends and stop the TiVo to watch.

Treat every ad like it’s going to run in the Super Bowl. Normal network TV commercials are expensive. Super Bowl commercials are CRAZY expensive — so that’s when every agency puts their best foot forward, and why people actually LIKE to watch those ads. The Super Bowl turned out such amazing advertisements like the Old Spice Guy (sorry to beat a dead horse here), and definitely represents some amazing work. If every agency would put as much effort into normal ads as Super Bowl ads… let’s just say we’d have a lot fewer GoDaddy ads.

Awesome clients = awesome work. I was lucky enough to be able to attend the One Show this spring and see a lot of different amazing advertisements win some awards. No surprises, the biggest winners were Nike and Old Spice (both Wieden + Kennedy Portland, my hometown). One of the things that I noted was that when the creatives were accepting their award at the end of the night, they thanked the client. If you’re not in advertising, this sounds normal, but if you are, it’s the weirdest thing ever. See, clients and advertisers have always had a rocky relationship (just check out clientsfromhell if you don’t believe me)… they just have different motives for advertisements. Advertisers want to make cool and creative work that they can use in their portfolios. Clients want to sell more of their product and make more money. A lot of times, this can be disastrous (hence a lot of bad local ads… where clients attempt to be creative directors). But the most amazing work comes from when clients and advertisers work together and trust one another… just like any other relationship.

Advertising creatives are artists…. they just get paid more. This is why a lot of people accuse us of selling out. It’s a steady income, you get to work in a cool office and bring your dog to work, and you still get to just dink around and (hopefully) make pretty things all day. Yes, you have to answer to a boss and meet with clients from time to time, but because you have that steady paycheck, it allows you to sometimes take risks that not a lot of advertisers can afford to take (literally). And if you don’t think creatives are artists still, take a look at Nike’s My Butt is Big campaign from 2005 and tell me that’s not poetry. Not to mention all the cool old french ads people put on their walls as art now.

So yes, I work in advertising. And I know I’m not changing lives or saving people, but I am proud of my career choices.