Why Do You Want To Work In Advertising?
When giving a book crit I would often finish with the above question.
I wasn’t trying to catch anyone out or check the extent of their sad devotion to this ancient religion. I was genuinely interested, and I still am.
I sometimes try to remember why I wanted to work in this industry and how the coupling eventually came about.
Well, like someone who has blacked out the initial moments of a car crash, I really don’t know how this came about, but one day I found myself in the office of John Banks, the Banks of now-defunct Banks Hoggins O’Shea, ex-MD of Y&R. His offices were on Brook Street, almost opposite the old Commes Des Garcons shop and I was duly impressed by this Mayfair address.
Like I said, I have no idea how I got there, but I do remember Mr. Banks asking me which job in advertising I was seeking. I aslo remember having little idea of what he was talking about. He gently explained the basics of the account management and creative departments and suggested I head off to the IPA to find out more. I went there immediately and found out that I did not want to work in account management.
Around Christmas I sent out a spoof Absolut ad (Absolut Despair. It had a picture of me drowning my sorrows above a series of dismal puns about being ‘neat’ and ‘a good mixer’) that asked for work experience the following Easter. The agency that took me on was the now-defunct Reay Keating Hamer, who got me to catalogue Yellow Fats in their account management, where I found out that I did not want to work in account management.
While I was there I hung around in the creative department as much as possible. There a nice chap called Mark pointed me in the direction of Watford and the rest was a very minor footnote in advertising history.
So, although I’m not clear about what set me off in the direction of advertising, even when I learned about the industry from the inside it still took me quite a while to work out what a creative was and indeed that I wanted to be one.
If any of you can be bothered to explain it, I’d love to hear how and why you got into advertising.
I came to it late. I was working in recruitment at the time, which is like having a red hot poker inserted in your arse every 5 mins for 8 hours a day. I got into recruitment advertising as a copywriter by answering a job ad, then into normal advertising a few years after that. I suppose the moral of the story is that it was more to do with what I didn't want to do than what I wanted to do. That's why I never moan about working in this industry – well, I try not to.
It was the final term of my final year at uni, studying a non-advertising-related degree, and I was getting a little bit panicky.
What the buggering hell was I going to do with my life?
The one thing I knew I was good at, that I'd always been good at, was writing. A career in journalism had been somewhere in the back of my brain for as long as I could remember, but I'd never quite got around to becoming Editor of the uni paper or landing myself a placement at the Daily Tits. So I was a bit out of luck there.
One day, a glamorous-sounding, intriguing word landed in my head. Advertising. Like everyone else, I had no clue that there were other jobs than just being the person who makes the ads, so that's what I set my heart on.
Luckily for me, the IPA had advertised their brand new Direct Marketing Summer School with my uni's jobs department. I sent in the required 250-word creative writing piece, and before long I had a place. That place led to an AE job, which led to a Copywriting job.
For something I chose almost by accident, it's turned out surprisingly well. I love my job.
I was at art college doing graphic design. We would do projects from other courses higher up the scale and we did an advertising one.
There seemed more fun to be had with the advertising lot (quite a few guys who you lot know well were on that course) than the graphic designer who were wanking away with a 3A brush hand lettering in 6pt.
Just use a fucking N60, who cares?
Anyway, I applied for that course when mine finished and then spent what seemed like 10 years on the tube seeing folk with the book and doing unpaid placements.
We really should change that. I don't agree with these twats that say "well I had to do it" etc etc.
Anyone doing it better?
At my school we had a BBC Micro (that's a computer for all you young bastards) with an awesome piece of software where a pupil could type in their interests and it gave them a list of jobs they might enjoy.
I can't remember what I put in exactly (probably art and design technology) but the top result was "copywriter". That's when I first considered that there are people whose job it is to think up the ads I watch on TV. That seemed like an cool job so that's what I did.
I didn't know about foreign shoots or free booze, I just liked the idea of thinking up funny ideas and putting them on the telly.
Those were the days.
I was doing the Graphics degree at Central St. Martins, the first year of which we got to try a bit of everything (photography, illustration, typography, film-making etc etc). I was unsure what to specialise in for the 2nd and 3rd years, when a young Peter Souter (an ex-CSM student) came in to put his case forward for the rather unpopular (and looked-down-upon) 'advertising' option. The way he sold it was that becoming an advertising creative meant you'd still get to work in all the other craft fields, but that you'd be doing the controlling and commissioning etc. Being a slightly indecisive control freak, it seemed like the perfect option…
I was one of the first people to be hired by Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe. I was their first gofer and primed to be a suit. The first thing I learnt was how to pronounce their name correctly (and quickly) when responding to a telephone call. I doubt anyone can do it quicker than me to this day.
The highlight of my day was pointlessly asking 'Who's calling?' when Mariella Frostrup rang (daily) for Robert Campbell. Who could mistake that 440 a day rasp?
Anyway, I seem to remember them being all pretty good people although I decided the life of a suit wasn't for me so I quit.
My neighbour was fairly senior at BMP DDB Needham (as it was then) and he agreed to give me a week's work experience when I was 15. I sat in with the Traffic department for a week and also got dragged along to various meetings/presentations. I didn't have a clue what was going on but Wimbledon was on the telly in the corner of the office, there was free beer and coke (a-cola) in the meetings and loads of fit birds wondering around the offices. And I was given some free 6-sheet posters for my bedroom wall that kicked the arse of anything my friends had on their walls. That week I was sold on a career in advertising.
Did I never tell you about my time at Watford….?
I was all set to be a lawyer. a year out of university, I had a cushy nepotistic internship at some nuclear bastard barristers' chambers.
then I met someone at a party who filled my head with intoxicating tales of a place where you could put fun on a job number and write glorious nonsense in the company of glamorous and exciting people for a salary which looked like an overseas phone number. this lotus-eating half-truth had me at hello.
so one awkward conversation with my parents later (which went a bit like the scene in footloose where herself talks to john lithgow about dancing), I packed in johnny law and skipped off to watford.
fin.
the fanny
Sorry for this Ben
The court has just ruled that the peace protesters in Parliament Square can be evicted.
"… The Mayor does not seek to minimise the vital importance of the right to free speech and assembly and protest….what he seeks to achieve is to safeguard the rights of the majority to use and enjoy Parliament Square Gardens and bid to prevent the abrogation to themselves of such a place by a small minority, however well-intentioned."
At least someone is well intentioned.
I don't want to live in this country any more.
Anyone have a job going?
Boot1947:
I think so. I'm not sure if I can trace it back to one precise moment, though. Maybe it was an accumulation of small nudges…
I sucked off my boss and got a job starting on £12k a year. I've never looked back since, but that's because I didn't want to see his face while he was buggering me at every payrise.
Levis "Launderette".
oh, vinny thank you for a comment that i have the attention span to read. witty, too. you should be in adverti – oh don't worry about it.
It went something like this.
Advertising people always seemed to talk about their jobs in such a way that they actually enjoyed them. Granted, that was 10 years ago, but that was enough for me.
i did four years of law, then i got tired of it without really knowing why i was…then i realised there wasn't one picture in all my law books.
then a 'friend of a friend knew a friend' in ad agency. i went for a chat, told to read a few books. Gerry Della Femina then convinced me that copywriting was the best job [with your clothes on].
kind stereotypical:
advertiser by default.
t h e g a p s b e t w e e n y o u r n e w f o n t h u r t m y b r a i n.
15:59 Quite right too. They're a fucking eyesore.
Make your point and then piss off, as I once told the countryside march. They haven't back you'll notice.
I did some sort of hideously expensive career test at school that took hours and hours and involved things like drawing as many circles as possible in 3 minutes.
I wanted to be a doctor at that stage and filled the whole thing out with that in mind.
The results came back and it said I should be a Copywriter.
I was gutted. I assumed it was something to with copyright.
I failed Chemistry A-Level, couldn't become a doctor so spent years traveling and getting stoned. I then met a creative in a bar in Australia who told me about his job.
I stopped getting stoned and I am now a copywriter.
You might say I should have listened at school, but then I would have missed out on all those nights giggling in front of my Nintendo 64 and eating toast or lying on beach at night next some twat with beads in his hair talking about how every star in the sky is the ghost of a dead person.
I'd always paid close attention to advertising after seeing this for the first time when I was about 13 (even though I had no idea where advertising actually came from): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlU6crWC_3Q
I found myself doing an art A-Level but was crap at it because I'm colour blind. So I switched to Graphic Design because the colour names were written on the markers, but I was pretty shite at that, too.
My tutor at the time used to work at JWT Manchester (writing scripts for Bandit biscuits in the mid-80s) and said if I stayed at college for another year he'd set me some spec ad briefs. That got me onto a proper advertising course (HND at Stockport) where I teamed up with a guy who couldn't spell.
That fact, coupled with my colour blindness, was how I became a copywriter.
15:59
really bad. it is everyone's right to protest non-violently. what else can you do? voting is not helping anything. it's all going down the shitter and people ignore it. as ben said the other day: it's never too late to kill yourself. or just take a cruise in the mediterranean. someone else might do it for you. i heard there are pirates.
15:59 I agree. And we think we have a right to export "democracy" to countries like Iraq and Afghanistan? Evicting the protesters and suppressing public displays of dissent is nothing short of fascism.
I wanted to make cool shit with other people's money and get paid for it.
Er… 15:59 They're free to protest, they're just not free to set up a permanent camp in the heart of London. This has fuck all to do with what they're protesting about. I'd be against it even if they were protesting against drowning little kittens. 23:33 Don't pretend we're living in a fascist state. You're fucking kidding yourself. Voting does count. Unfortunately your vote only counts as much as anyone else's.
09:49. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the definitions of a fascist government is that it displays "intolerant views or practices". Sound familiar?
09:49
they are not free to protest if they cannot protest here or there. and all because the dear visitors cannot enjoy the park? what a pile of shit.
and dont forget that the 'camp' attracted homeless people. alright. why don't they get sent to some camps where they can work, get a haircut and have a nice shower.
and because voting does count (people voted for obama who promised to end war), the war in iraq is over. politicians lie. most of them are idiots on top of that. voting is the biggest scam ever. and yes, silencing (peaceful, non-violent, humanitarian) dissent is fascist behaviour.
9:49 You comments are completely incoherent. I don't even uderstand the ramblings of your second post.
A government that displays "intolerant views or practices" is one that enforces laws. Some of those laws my not be to your taste but tough shit. I don't like the fact that I can't keep my neighbours up all night and I have to deal ith it. Personally I am happy for people to protest as much as they want so long as they don't set up a shanti town in the middle of our wonderful city. Ask yourself this, would you be so tolerant if the square was covered in top end tents belonging to people protesting against the 50% tax rate? Somehow I doubt it.
12:01
i think you messed the identities up. there wont be people setting up shanty towns to protest the 50% tax because they are too busy spending their massive amounts of cash and have lobbyists who deal with the unpleasant stuff for the rich.
not 09:49
12:01
You say: 'A government that displays "intolerant views or practices" is one that enforces laws.'
I say: you're a fascist too, mate.
15:47 That's because you're intolerant of my views.
16:04
nope, that's because you are a fascist.
not 15:47
i failed my first Career Test but then i tried again the second time and got it`;.
I somehow fell into it through a design course, made some cool adverts, developed a slight anxiety problem and now want to be a roofer, where no-one can find me or talk to me, all after 10 months.