My First Year in Advertising: An Account Executive Speaks Out

By Rod Sims

Ever wonder what life was like inside an advertising agency? In this motivational and informative book, you will have a front-row seat to the inner workings of an advertising agency. No other book chronicles the day-to-day work of an advertising Account Executive during their first year on the job. This book is equal parts of education, inspiration, entertainment, and exposé. When you add them all together, it's 100 percent truth. The struggle and triumph is chronicled in this kiss-and-tell book about agency life and following your dream.

You will have the opportunity to learn from an advertising Account Executive who worked with blue-chip clients like: Circus Circus Hotels and Casino, Coldwell Banker, Mazda Motors, Eli Lilly, Firestone, United Airlines, Lufthansa Technic, and Air Canada. His clients in government included: the California Department of Rehabilitation, the Food and Drug Administration, the Los Angeles MTA, and a community initiative to reduce crime and repeat offenders. He worked on political campaigns for the California State Senate, The United States House of Representatives, the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and a host of California propositions. His educational clients included marketing TV programming that aired on PBS-affiliated stations nationwide.

His essays were published in Education Week and a host of publications in higher education. He conducted research and wrote articles for the music industry. He continued to write and have his ideas featured in the Wall Street Journal, Marketing News, Advertising Age, The Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of Marketing Research.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 1900
• ISBN: 9781098335014

Book preview

Heroes

Introduction

Hello and welcome to, My First Year in Advertising. I’m Rod Sims, the author and narrator of the audiobook version. I’ll be sharing how I got my first job in advertising, what life was like within the agency, the different jobs people do, and some client stories along the way. Most of the book is about my experiences, but I also added in a few stories from the past to give a wider perspective than just my own. I recognize that my path to entering the industry was unique, and that’s pretty typical of the bohemians who work at agencies. I also share some common threads that you can use. When I first started, I thought it would be fun to take notes about what was happening to me as it occurred during my first year in the agency business. That’s how this book was born. Keep in mind that advertising is just one part of what is known as marketing communications. But advertising is what most people know, and like to hang their hat on when we mention marketing. It’s the most visible and memorable part of branding a product or service. So sit back, lie back, or just kick back, while I share the sometimes-crazy business of life in an advertising agency.

CHAPTER 1

The Power of Advertising

Despite ongoing criticism of the advertising industry, it maintains its allure. It is the intersection of art and commerce. It is from these two avenues that we get the high-gloss photography, which makes the bubbles in a glass of beer a mouth-watering work of art. Add the headlines and jingles that fill our minds and dot the consumer landscape, and the result is nothing short of powerful. The role it plays in popular culture both fascinate and threaten us as consumers. We thrive on the change advertising messages deliver, and with each new product offering we are promised nothing short of a better life.

On a purely intellectual level, we are the first to admit that advertising is not to be believed. We denounce its influence over our buying decisions and refuse to admit that it directs our behavior. But it does. Advertising awakens emotions that lurk beyond our conscious mind. And before we know it, we are singing the jingle and buying the product. The effect of advertising not only drives our economy, but also promotes the pop culture.

Many don’t like what they see in advertising, and point the critical finger of blame at the industry for promoting self-indulgence. In fact, the hunger is within us. Some may cast blame upon the industry for dangling the wants and needs in front of consumers. We recognize that our claims merely satisfy a craving already present. A print ad for Porsche automobiles expresses this philosophy well. The magazine ad featured a beautiful, red Porsche shown against a black background. The headline, You may not have one in your garage, but you probably have one parked in your mind.

We all want things. We all consume. In spite of this, consumers are not helpless victims who have no defense against the onslaught of advertising messages. We reject ad claims that are overly zealous in their promises. We compare price, consider location, company reputation, and our prior experience. Consumers have high-tech tools that insulate them from exposure. Tools like mute buttons that zap the television’s audio portion, and commercial skip flies by entirely. On a personal level, friends and experts are consulted. When the economy goes stale, people pull back from buying non-essentials. Winning business is fiercely competitive. Keeping the business is even more difficult. Competition is no longer across the street. It’s overseas.

For a select few, advertising is what they do for a living, or what they want to do. But like high-fashion modeling, it is a tough business to break into. You won’t find any ads with good jobs that say, Want a career in advertising? Call 1-800 CAREERS. And while recruiting on campus is common to corporations, rarely do you find ad agencies soliciting graduates. People who want to be in advertising find a way to get there. The obstacles are many, and overcoming them is your first test.

This book is about my first year in advertising. I can’t claim the idea for the book, since it was an Art Director who admired my work and suggested I write about my experiences on the job. This book has gone through many revisions over the years and tempered by subsequent experience. Your life in advertising will no doubt vary from mine.

One thing I can promise you is that everything I say in this book happened to me, and you are going to get it straight. No one has ever written a book like this one. You will have a front-row seat to the inner workings of an advertising agency. There is no other book that chronicles the day-to-day work of an advertising Account Executive during their first year on the job. You will see the unseen and experience the unknown.

I like to think of this book as equal parts of education, inspiration, entertainment, and exposé. When you add them all together, it’s 100 percent truth. I wish I had a book like this one to help me when I was trying to break into the ad biz. The goal is to show how business merges with art. Each without the other doesn’t reflect the true nature of an advertising agency. While variation is considerable from one agency to another, you will likely find many of the same basic elements no matter where you finally land your first job. In the end, you will have to decide whether or not advertising is the right place for you.

CHAPTER 2

A Long and Winding Road

The first rule of marketing is know your customer. Not just where you can find them, but who they are as consumers. The more you know, the greater your likelihood of positioning products toward them. This book begins with some biographical background about me. Not that my life is especially fascinating, but it does help you understand the book, and how it unfolds into my first year in advertising.

You will find that advertising professionals are the mavericks who often worked as ski bums, fry cooks, and rodeo clowns before settling into a real job. Those who earned degrees were often from a multitude of college majors. Throughout history, the truly great advertising people studied everything but marketing and advertising. Legendary advertiser, David Ogilvy, was trained as a chef, and tried his hand at being a gentleman farmer before turning to advertising. Ray Rubicam dropped out of school at 15 and spent the next several years traversing the country, working as a shipping clerk, bellhop, chaperone of cattle, movie projectionist, door-to-door salesman, and newspaper reporter. Leo Burnett sold cars.

Here is how David Ogilvy described himself in an open letter:

Will any agency hire this man? He is 38 and unemployed. He dropped out of college. He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist, and a farmer. He knows nothing about marketing and had never written any copy. He professes to be interested in advertising as a career, at the age of 38! And is ready to go to work for $5,000 dollars a year. I doubt that any American agency will hire him. However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later, he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the 10th biggest agency in the world. The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in their hiring.

—David Ogilvy

Another copywriter of repute, Peter Mayle, who had worked in the Creative department of BBDO London office, described agency personnel this way:

Most advertising agencies recruit staff on the basis of suspected merit, rather than formal qualifications or impressive social backgrounds. And it is a selection process that throws up a rich and varied cast of characters. University graduates, school dropouts, ex-actors, aspiring politicians, assorted corporate misfits, would-be novelists, and lay psychologists. There is room for them all.

As for me, I’ll skip birth and the numerous beautiful baby awards I received, and move ahead to the teenage years. Like most people in advertising, I did several things before advertising. This was a source of great turmoil for me, since many of my friends took a very linear path to their present career. They went to college, majored in business, did an internship with some company, found a job, and started building that coveted three-to-five years of experience every company wants to hire.

For me, it was a different story. Since the age of 10, I was an avid musician. More than anything else, I found notoriety, success, and joy behind my drums. Just another long-haired drummer who hung out in a garage band? Hardly. I had been a member of an honor orchestra playing classical percussion, backed choral groups, stage shows, and performed with my own jazz combo. I wore my first tuxedo when I was 13 years old. I received my first standing ovation at 16. By the time I was 23, I had articles published in every major music magazine and journal. I wrote three music method books on jazz and rock drumming. While my friends were all slaving at minimum-wage jobs, I was giving private music lessons. It was heady stuff to set appointments and have people show up with money to hear what I had to say. I was an entrepreneur before it was fashionable. I performed with my own group on the weekends doing casual work for private parties, which customarily paid each musician very well for a few hours of work. While I pursued music, I soon found that playing for money was quickly deflating the joy I once had when I played for my own self-satisfaction. Soon I was taking work that paid well, but left me empty artistically. When I took a vow to play only jazz (my greatest love) I was artistically enriched, but practically broke. There is no better pursuit than music to fulfill oneself, but it is a difficult way to make a living. Mobile DJs and CD technology began to take more work away from live bands. And let’s face it, CDs are never late or hung-over, and they never try to make a move on someone’s daughter during a wedding reception.

I’d always been a very good student in school, so I never doubted my plans to attend college. I found that psychology held the most interest for me. When the psychology professors would often lead discussions with the phrase, Now remember folks, there are no right or wrong answers, I knew I had found my major. I had long since given up the idea of majoring in music, since the best musicians in jazz didn’t have degrees. Instead, I always preferred to study privately with people I respected as players. Quite surprisingly, it was during a music lesson that I also received my first lesson in marketing. Strange, I know, but here’s how it happened.

I was taking a music lesson from one of the most famous drummers in the world. He asked me to play a drum solo for him. When I finished playing he said, Very good. What’s your musical goal? I said, Jazz drummer. He dropped his head and let out a sigh. I looked up at him from my drummer’s throne and said, Not good enough? He said, Being good enough has nothing to do with it. I replied, Well, it has a little something to do with it.

This particular musician also developed a successful manufacturing business making percussion equipment. So he said, Let me give you an example from business. Let’s say you are the world’s greatest mousetrap maker. Every time someone sets one of your traps, it catches a mouse. Are you with me? I said, Sure. Then he said, Now, let’s say tomorrow you wake up and there aren’t any mice. How long are you going to be in business? I said, I’d be out of business. He then said, That’s your problem. There aren’t enough opportunities to make a living playing jazz, exclusively. You can survive as a musician, but you’re going to have to buy a tuxedo and take gigs playing all kinds of music. Some of these will be playing music you hate with horrible musicians.

My first lesson on marketing was one of supply and demand. Even a very good product won’t sell if people don’t want it, or need it. This is sometimes called the buggy whip problem in business. There are no horse and buggies to support manufacturing operations that make even the best buggy whips. People drive cars and trucks, not horse-drawn carriages. Yes, there are still a few opportunities out there to sell buggy whips, but not enough to support a thriving industry. In all likelihood, there is probably room for only one manufacturer a buggy whips, not several.

That not only ended the music lesson, but was also my first lesson on marketing. You see, jazz only represents 2 percent of the recorded music market. Classical music, 2 percent. You get the picture?

I finished my bachelor’s degree and began to look for work. Much to my surprise, few who were in a position to hire me regarded my bachelor’s degree in psychology with the same enthusiasm as the man who gave my commencement address. I had a degree in psychology, not business. I had virtually no work experience outside of music and freelance writing, which can really scare people who do the hiring in a company.

Most found my strong interest in jazz to be a detriment, and one placement officer told me, When I see jazz musician, I think you’ve been part of a shiftless, drug-ridden world. I said, What’s your point? No, I didn’t say that, but I did think it. She advised me to remove any reference to jazz (and my music in general) from my résumé. Never mind the years of dedication studying piano and percussion, the endless hours of practice, and my contribution to the arts.

I decided that business wasn’t for me, at least for the moment. I took a long, hard look at myself, and what I was going to do with my life. I decided that teaching was a reasonable option. I had come to enjoy the years I spent teaching drum lessons at the music store, and found it very gratifying to offer my skills to help others. So it was back to school to earn a teaching credential. Since I had majored in psychology, though, I had a problem. I couldn’t teach psychology in the public schools. As far as the educational system was concerned, my degree in psychology lumped me with social sciences. This meant that I would be expected to teach high school courses in American history, western civilization, or government. These subjects were by no means my strength. I had taken several math and science courses as I pursued my degree in psychology, and a few more courses would entitle me to teach in both these areas with state certification.

My career was stranger by the day. Now I was a musician, who wrote freelance articles for magazines, had a degree in psychology, and was pursuing a teaching credential in math and science. I didn’t need a guidance counselor to get me out of this mess, I needed a fairy godmother! When the local music store went out of business, I had to start doing grunt work to make ends meet financially until I finished my teaching credential. Live music was becoming almost non-existent as more jazz clubs were mysteriously burning down for the insurance money.

I worked in a men’s clothing store, a tuxedo shop renting formalwear, delivered flowers, and a few other odd jobs I just as soon forget. However, with each of these jobs, I always learned about these industries. It was an excellent training ground for what would follow in advertising. For in advertising you often get new accounts that you know nothing about, and you have to be a quick study when it comes to that industry. I finished my teaching credential, and once again I found the job search process one laden with frustration and despair. The problem was that my degree in psychology wasn’t representing me too well for a job teaching math and science. People don’t like to think you can do more than one thing well. I had become a renaissance man to a fault.

I had to substitute teach for six months before a job opened up. I got the job, only because I was given the opportunity to teach a sample lesson that clearly demonstrated my skills as a teacher. I survived my first year of teaching and spent the summer self-reflecting about my career. Soon the school year was revving up again, and I had a job teaching yet another year. I found the second year far easier, but I still lacked the fulfilled life I was seeking. My students (and in many cases their parents) were uninterested in learning. I found the number of students who didn’t do their work absolutely appalling.

I survived my second year and spent the summer taking a battery of vocational exams. My career was sick, and I needed professional advice. Rightly or wrongly, I questioned my abilities in the classroom. Perhaps, I was the reason the students weren’t performing well. By this time I had considered everything from pastry chef to demolition derby as a career.

Then the watershed event occurred. My vocational test results came back indicating a very strong interest in marketing executive and advertising executive. What? I figured if my psychology degree was worth anything, I should listen to the people who do this kind of work. So I enrolled in a course called, Introduction to Marketing Communications.

Now the real story begins. Marketing, it turned out, was the psychology of selling.  Shazam! They need people to do that? The instructor was formerly with Procter and Gamble, where he worked as a product manager for the TreeSweet Juice division. We went around the room and introduced ourselves like it was an AA meeting. When they got to me, I was certain they would shake their heads in pity and say, Poor bastard. Instead, I was surprised to find just how many people in the room that night were seeking something new in their careers. The something was different for each person, but we were all there together, and I didn’t feel like an outcast. I was told that in the future, the average person will change careers five times. So at least in one sense, I was way ahead of my time.

Suddenly, things were beginning to take shape. Now the psychology degree didn’t seem so irrelevant. The need to present information in a compelling manner was something I face daily with students. Things were starting to make sense to me. The first assignment was to market something you are currently involved with at work. Well, I said, I don’t have anything to sell. I’m a teacher. The instructor