You want to work in the glamorous ad biz?

Yeah, it’s just like on TV. Full of glamorous people. All working in hip and glamorous offices and every day, doing ground breaking, cutting edge, chasm crossing, really, really glamorous work for clients that are dazzled by their vision.

Really. That’s just what its like.

So who could blame all the people who want to get into the biz. Of the industries most people want to break into, it’s got to be in the top five. Entertainment (movies, music and such), then sports then advertising. Sure, there are a lot of brainy types that want to be scientists or jet pilots or polititians or great financial leaders. Stuff the world doesn’t really need. But advertising is probably their real goal.

I used to work with a great guy named Bruce Campbell. His favorite saying was “We’re only in advertising to pay the bills… We really want to sell insurance.”

Everyone would always laugh.
But really, just walk through a crowd of college students and ask ten of them what they’re majoring in. At least half will say “marketing”.

Where will all these people work? If half the population wants to sell stuff to the other half, who’s going to make the stuff?

That’s why I get so many resumes and email from recent grads wanting to work in the glamorous field of advertising.

They grew up watching too much TV and they’re in for a shock.

They want to come work at an ad agency but don’t know WHAT they’ll do there. I’ve talked to some of these kids, who have already GRADUATED and they don’t know if they want to do creative or agency management.

These days, if you don’t know the answer to that, you’ll never do either.

An agency is broken down into “Creatives” and “Suits”. Basically, the guys coming up with the crazy ideas (the Creatives) and the guys making sure the electricity stays on (the Suits). You cant run an agency without your fair share of both. And rarely do you find anyone that can do both very well.

And to waltz into an agency thinking you get to choose which you want to do because you spent the last four years drinking at football games or acting artsy at Starbucks is a big fantasy.

Say, for instance, you want to be a graphic designer or art director in an agency. Having a degree really means nothing. You can graduate from any school in the country with any GPA and it’s not going to matter.

It’s your portfolio.

That’s it. It’s your work. You need to walk into the agency with a fantastic book, willing to work like a slave for very little money for a long time. It’s tough to get a job in the creative department. The competition is heavy. For every good job, there may be a hundred people with great books fighting tooth and nail for the position.

So don’t go to school as an “advertising” major and expect to end up in the creative department. Not going to happen. You could end up as an account exec, or doing research or buying media, but you’re not going be a creative.

But not to worry. There are a lot of great jobs in ad agencies. Every shop needs AE’s, research, media etc. You can have a great career there and have a lot of fun.

Of course, probably not as much fun as the guys in the creative department.

But if you want to get into creative, you need to figure out which schools produce the best books. I’m trying to find that out now. My daughter is 17 and hunting design schools. We’ve looked at private schools like SCAD and Rhode Island School of Design. Great schools that will really prepare you for work the day you graduate.

But in reality, you could just take a lot of design classes and learn all the software you need at a city college to get an entry level job. This is especially true of Web development. There are a million web jobs out there and not enough good people to fill them.

I’ve been hiring Web designers since around 1995, when the Web was first coming to life. Back then, all I could find were these hot young wunderkinds who knew the latest technology, but were, generally, a mess. They were too young to have any real work ethic and were terrible at basic things like showing up and making clients happy.

That crowd has grown up a bit, but it’s still very hard to find Web designers that you’d let live if you had a choice.

But still, I love this biz. It’s a blast and great for anyone with a good imagination and short attention span. Guilty on both accounts.

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I love advertising.

I’ve loved it as far back as I can remember. I even think I’ve got a genetic link to the ad biz.

My grandmother found herself a single mother in the 1930’s in Central California. There weren’t a lot of options for her, but she walked into a Bakersfield newspaper and demanded a job. Before long, she found herself selling ads to a big variety of local businesses and she found herself creating those ads. She wrote hundreds of ads. No formal training. No college degree. Just the need to feed her children and a gut feeling about what would motivate someone to care about which market they shopped at or who cleaned their laundry. I’ve got a big scrapbook of her ads and I treasure them.

Looking at them now, they seem pretty cornball, but they were brilliant in their own way. She wrote poems in praise of cornstarch and quaint missives to green grocers. The ads weren’t slick or sophisticated, but they WERE effective. She knew her audience and she knew her products. She sold a lot of goods and services, brought in a lot of shoppers and fed her son and daughter without anyone’s help through some very tough times.

As it was, her daughter went on to be my mother. And her son went on to be an ad guy. Uncle George was an art director, illustrator and creative director for many years in New York. I’ve got some sales sheets of his “Whimsy Art.” His own brand of clip art that he drew and sold in the fifties.

So this ad biz was already in my genes as I sat in front of my black and white Zenith TV, growing up in LA in the sixties.

And right there, in beautiful grainy greyscale was Bewitched.

I realized right then that Darren Stevens had the job I wanted. He met with clients, came up with great ideas and created campaigns, even though Larry Tate, his boss and head of McMan & Tate, was a bumbling idiot.

I grew up with that goal in mind. I was going to be an Ad Guy. I went to college majoring in art and for a brief, shining moment I saw myself as a painter. Living the painterly life, being very artsy fartsy and living in a loft somewhere. Hanging out with people in funny hats and accents and selling my paintings for tens of thousands of dollars.

Then I looked around the art department and saw a lot of genuinely talented painters that I knew would never make a dime.

Besides, my talent’s weren’t in color or shape or form. I learned the tools in school, but my talents were the same as my grandmother. I could see the magic in something and see what might motivate an audience to buy it. There is a lot of art involved, but good design is only part of the problem. Understand your audience and visualizing the whole idea in your head is the key. Then you need the tools and skills to turn those concepts into something the world can see.

And to do that in a way that nobody else can.

That’s what makes good advertising. Not just beautiful art or snappy copy or good media buys. It’s that deep-down gut feeling about what motivates and inspires people. You have to have that before you can be effective in this business. Sure, there will always be research, studies, market analysis and more. But without starting with the right concept, you’ll spend all eternity in analysis and no time selling.

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