Pick Me: Breaking Into Advertising and Staying There

By Nancy Vonk and Janet Kestin

Advertising is a fantastic industry, but actually getting a job (or even your foot in the door) can seem next to impossible. Whether you're a student or a young professional loaded with questions, this one-of-a-kind guide shows you how to land a job and how to thrive once you're in and the pressure is on.

Authors Nancy Vonk and Janet Kestin are seasoned creative directors and longtime creative partners. In Pick Me, these industry leaders answer your toughest ad career questions, like:

• Is advertising right for me?
• How do I build a killer portfolio?
• How do I get an interview with the elusive creative director?
• Should I accept an unpaid internship?
• How do I find the right partner?
• How do I beat creative block?
• How do I avoid burnout?

Plus, fourteen industry superstars share their insights and explain how they broke into the business. You'll hear from Bob Barrie, Rick Boyko, David Droga, Mark Fenske, Neil French, Sally Hogshead, Mike Hughes, Shane Hutton, Brian Millar, Tom Monahan, Chuck Porter, Bob Scarpelli, Chris Staples, and Lorraine Tao.

Forget the clichés this is advertising as it really is. If you're hell-bent on making it, this informative guide will put you on track for a career in one of the most exciting businesses on the planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Dec 14, 2010
• ISBN: 9781118040416

Nancy Vonk

JANET KESTIN and NANCY VONK spent thirteen years as co-chief creative officers of Ogilvy & Mather Toronto. They delivered world-beating results for global brands like Unilever and Kraft, including Cannes Grand Prix-winning work for Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty and a Grand Clio for "Diamond Shreddies." They are the authors of Pick Me, the ad industry advice column "Ask Jancy" and frequent contributors to several publications, including Fast Company. In 2012, they were named among Ad Age's 100 Most Influential Women in Advertising. Now with Swim, their new creative leadership lab, they approach leadership training a little differently. Well, a lot differently. Visit them online at http://swimprogram.ca/.

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Introduction

Ignacio Oreamuno: The View from Down Here

Junior.

Could there be a more inferior title? I’ve personally never seen a Junior Fire Swallower or heard tales of ladies going to their Junior Plastic Surgeon for a facelift.

That’s what I was wondering as a I stared at my shiny brand-new red Ogilvy business cards during my first day as an official Junior. I’m not quite sure why they even bothered printing them. It’s not like I would have given out my Ignacio Oreamuno, Substandard & Powerless (Wannabe) Art Director credentials to my mom, let alone to the clients.

The junior’s perspective is not a pretty one. Everyone around you seems large and powerful. Your paychecks will buy tons of absolutely nothing and your powerful new position will give you control only over the adjacent perimeter of your desk, if you happen to get one. But for the optimists, like you and me, being a junior means you made it. And that, my friend, is the career equivalent of becoming an astronaut (only with much more stress and casual clothing).

In my first week on the job, I got to clearly understand why the stupid junior title exists. Even though I was confident I was prepared to take on the role of creative director emeritus of WPP on my second day, I actually knew birdpoop about advertising. My years of arduous scholarly research and preparation vaporized. I wondered if I had taken the wrong college degree by accident. Doing color corrects, timing voice-overs, managing client politics, learning to talk to print production people, and even trying to understand the moods of my creative directors were classes I had never taken.

The pre-junior gap between school life and ad life is a deep, dark, scary abyss. I know. I crossed it. I saw many of my friends turn back, others fall, and some are still trying to get in. Pick Me was written so you could have some sort of bridge to cross into the ad world.

You might have realized by now that there’s a big hush-hush about this stage. Why? Well, perhaps because you wouldn’t have made it this far into your future ad career had you known how hard it was to get in, or perhaps because nobody in advertising wants to chatter about the most daunting stage of their careers, or perhaps because it’s simply a taboo question, like why doesn’t Donald Duck wear any pants?

If I’d been as lucky as you are to have a book like Pick Me, I might not have gone to my first job interview wearing a full beige suit, white shirt, shiny shoes, and black The Thinker tie or answered creative director when I was asked on my second interview if I wanted to be an art director or a copywriter.

Read every word in this book. Then pursue your new career with every inch of energy in your body until you sweat every drop and shed every tear. Believe me, there is no better job on Planet Earth.¹

PART I

Breaking into Advertising

1

Was I Really Put on This Earth to Do Ads?

We’ve been asked this question dozens, if not hundreds of times. If you’re reading this you’ve asked it yourself. The question can come up at any time, when you’re a student, a junior, an intermediate, a senior, or a creative director. At all these points in time you will have ample occasion to wonder, Am I nuts to have chosen this profession?

It’s an amazing business. Glamorized in the media on everything from Bewitched to Thirtysomething, and most laughably on Melrose Place, many of the clichés are true. It is a ton of fun to create little movies and posters called ads. It’s never boring. It often involves travel; and you may even meet some stars along the way. Feel like an Oscar winner picking up your fancy awards and life is good. The great free lunches, a trip to Cannes, the industry parties: What’s not to like?

If you’re not cut out for it, plenty. You will need to develop a skin like elephant hide to withstand the rejection that every new day brings. You’ll be told by your partner, your creative director, your clients, or research that your idea sucks. You’ll need to remain positive after the campaign you slaved over for months gets killed because budgets just got cut. You’ll need to act cool and professional when you want to cry. You’ll need to forgo killing people when you really, really want to kill people. And you will likely want to kill your partner, boss, client, and especially the dolts behind the focus group glass many times over.

The people who make it in advertising absolutely love it. There’s often an early interest in ads; in Nancy’s case, she was in front of the bathroom mirror pretending to sell dish liquid before she could talk. It’s a strange calling—shouldn’t we be trying to cure cancer? But somebody’s got to do it—and have an amazing time in the process.

Advertising is for you if you can be calm in a crisis, optimistic to the point of looking the fool, if you’re a team player, a hard worker, and deeply curious. It also helps to have God-given talent, although talent without drive is useless.

It’s not for you if you can’t take constructive criticism, aren’t passionate about it, aren’t willing to go to the wall to do great work, or have an ego problem (many highly successful egomaniacs walk the earth—we’ll just say most CDs don’t want to deal with them).

You’ll know advertising is your destiny if you can’t imagine anything you’d rather leap out of bed every morning to plunge into. Short of having that feeling, consider your other options long and hard.

Dear Jancy: How do you know that advertising is the right career for you? If you can’t get an internship until you’ve completed an ad degree, how can you truly know if advertising is the true career path?

I love advertising, am quite creative, and think that I would like to be a CD, but there is always that little guy in the back of my mind saying something different.

Just like studying to become anything—a lawyer, a psychologist, whatever—you can’t really know until you’re in the real world if you’ll truly love it. The closest you can come to knowing is to feel a passion for the idea of it. That’s a pretty good sign you’ll put all you’ve got into this career when you graduate, and people who do that tend to do well. It’s normal to have doubts and even be torn between multiple interests. But we’d have to say that if you’re still feeling squarely on the fence by your last year of school, that’s a bad sign. If you’re not highly motivated and really focused on a goal of being great in this field, you probably won’t get the job in the first place to discover just how much you love or hate advertising. Creative directors hire only juniors who are clearly driven. Any hint of uncertainty means that potential hires may not put heart and soul into doing their best, and the effort of training them could well be energy misspent. On that CD goal, a suggestion: Visualize a new, really important short-term goal instead—being the best damn underpaid, overworked junior you can be.

You’ve probably heard the question What would you be doing if you weren’t in advertising? many times in your lives. But now it’s a question that I’ve asked myself and am unsure of the answer. I’m thinking of getting out of advertising and moving in a yet undecided direction. What arguments could you make to convince someone to stay in the biz?

Anyone who’s been in the business for a while and hasn’t asked that question is possibly dead. At least you know you’re breathing. So how can we persuade you to stay when we don’t know why you want to leave? We could remind you about all the early mornings, late nights, and crumpled paper you’d be giving up, but we won’t. Seriously, though, Janet has come up against this question a couple of times and left the business twice. But like a boomerang she keeps coming back. How come? It’s a psychological game. No two days are the same. No two problems are the same. No two teams would crack them in the same way. Most of the people are clever, decent, and talented. Even the crappiest days come with a laugh. And coming up with ideas is fun and exciting. Not every business can say that. Rethinking yet?

I am currently a student in an advertising design program. I don’t know if it’s me or advertising, but I don’t feel the love for it. My dilemma is sometimes I really enjoy it and sometimes I want to shoot myself in the big toe. What should I do?

This is a big moment in your life. You’re staring at a fork in the road. We wish we knew whether you’re near graduation or just starting the program: It makes a difference. If you’re early into it, know that it’s normal to question if this is the right path, and every student struggles with how tough the learning experience is. It is a taste of the real world—the long hours, the anxieties that come with trying to find a big idea, over and over again. It will never be one long happy experience—it’s really tough. For many, the payoff moments (an idea cracked, praise from the professor, the rush of getting the idea in the first place, etc.) are worth the natural struggle. But if you are well into your program and having serious doubts, listen to your inner voice and explore other career choices. If you don’t have a burning passion for this business, in spite of the difficulties, you won’t find much success at it and certainly won’t enjoy it. It would be the intelligent choice to go down another road and chalk up your school experience to date as a valuable chance to learn that advertising may have looked interesting, but it’s not for you.

I’m an aspiring copywriter who hopes to create award-winning ads one day. I’m presently still in school and I often fall into a creative depression about whether I’m talented enough for the industry.

I saw a CD of one of the hottest shops in Singapore for the first time in my life last month for her to take a look at my book. She went nah, nah, nah . . . won’t work, won’t work . . . and she picked out one spot, not a campaign but one spot out of 12 campaigns and went not bad . . . but could be better. You could say my first experience with a CD was terrifying.

Still, I think I’m hungry to make it in advertising, but the little rational guy on my shoulder says, Get a real job, dude, you will have bills to pay soon.

If I were your son, ha ha-ha, would you recommend that I continue to push for my aspiration to be a copywriter? I don’t want to be a hack.

Here’s a good news, bad news answer. If you’re still a student and have a year or more to go, you’ve been out there too soon to show your book to a CD. Of course you suck right now. We wouldn’t take time to see students who aren’t near graduation: They need every moment of education to get their portfolios to the point of being good enough to get themselves a job and show their true potential. If you’re at a bad school, that’s another story. We’ve written quite a bit about this lately. If your school doesn’t have great student work on display and successful graduates to point to, you’re probably wasting your time and money. It’s not too hard to check out these basic criteria.

Let’s assume you’re in a decent school. To worry that you’re an untalented hack is normal and, sad to say, probably means you’re good. This is the burden of creative people: We all think we’re hacks. The really cocky, confident people are either pretending really well that they have no fear, or they really are hacks, blissfully unaware. Strange but true. It took us years to figure this out.

Your harsh view of your own work also bodes well for you. The drive to push yourself hard and never feel satisfied describes all the great ad creatives. No great advertising person is complacent. The person who leaves at 5:00 entirely satisfied that he or she has nailed it is probably deluded. (That said, not many places expect you to spend the night twice a week. Long hours can kick in for periods, sometimes lasting far too long, but you don’t have to choose an agency that calls for sweatshop hours.)

How do you know at this point whether you’re talented enough? You’re at the mercy of your teachers. Ask them to be brutally honest with you. Some schools have a portfolio review every year or six months and take that occasion to tell students if they should change their majors. This is a kindness, and it’s too bad it isn’t common practice. Generally, it’s too soon to go to CDs unless you’re talking to CDs who teach and who are used to evaluating student books. However, talking to people in the business is always a good idea. If you can identify a mentor at an agency, this would be great (some schools have mentor programs that pair people with creatives willing to give regular feedback and advice). Ask the head of your department about how you might identify such a person. If your school is any good, it must have some kind of dialogue with agencies.

So, we hope you’ve got it; you’ve got some of it for sure (the attitude, the drive). One last point to ponder: A young writer took first place at a big student competition, and her professor said afterward, You may not be the most talented, but you’ve got the most drive, and that will get you to the top. Sounded like a backhanded compliment at the time, but there’s truth to that, too.

2

School Daze

Does school matter? This isn’t as dumb a question as it seems. We hear it regularly. And frankly, lots of successful creative people have made it without an advertising degree, most of them copywriters.

Art direction is so detailed and labor-intensive, with so much to learn, that it’s pretty much impossible to get a job without an advertising program. We’ve known only one successful art director who didn’t learn it in school. All we can say about him is that he was born with a silver design spoon in his mouth and turned that into a variety of art-related careers, such as clothing and house design, before becoming an art director. He was good at those and he’s good at this.

Art directors had schools to go to before copywriters did. This meant that copywriting used to be a more forgiving, learn-as-you-go sort of gig. That’s why copywriters used to come from lots of different types of education and shockingly unrelated jobs, like bartending and home renovation. But that’s changed, which is sort of sad; carpenters brought a lot to the party.

Now, you’re expected to be able to perform as soon as you walk in the door. This makes school way more important, and also puts pressure on you to go to a high-quality