We hold our hands up, we have an obsession with Nando's and it was only a matter of time before we uploaded a Nando's related post. But we'll keep it short, otherwise we'll be here all day. Not only do Nando's make food that dances on your tongue (we're druelling at the thought of it now) but now they do pretty funky menu's, here's just the three we've seen in the last week. Well done Nando's.
Basically we had to advertise this magazine to women of all ages. So far so good. The proposition was that Bella was about “Real life stories, rather than aspirational, celebrity news”. Still good. Bearing in mind we only had an hour, in-depth research wasn’t an option so we were given a short paragraph describing the product:
“Women’s magazine, combining practical issues and real life. Bella combines stylish practicals with fascinating, insightful real life stories to deliver one of the best quality women’s weekly magazines available. Its contemporary design and content reflect its true understanding of women today.”
Now if we’re totally honest we’ve never heard of this magazine let alone read it so that paragraph is all we had to go on. We liked the idea that this magazine didn’t focus on “Brangelina” “Cheryl” and “Jordan” week in week out. We were pleasantly surprised that a magazine existed for women that talked about real life issues. Our idea was (and we’re very aware that it’s not the next Cadbury’s Gorilla, but cut us some slack, we did it in about 5 mins) was to say that Bella Magazine represents real life issues so well that it’s what the celebrities use to connect with the real world (as they don’t live in it).
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Here’s my problem (sorry it’s taken so long), this magazine isn’t about real life at all! Some of the stories in this magazine are titled “He was 16 but I couldn’t help myself…” “Mum watched TV while I gave birth in secret” and my all time favourite “I like to pleasure myself with my vacuum cleaner”, ok I made that last one up but that’s the sort of BOLLOCKS this magazine prints…every week! There was somewhat of an uproar when the tutors said that the magazine isn’t really about real life stories, it’s more reading about other people’s rubbish lives to make you feel better about your own. 1) That doesn’t say much about women’s self esteem these days and 2) how the bleep are we supposed to know that going by what the paragraph says.
You may think I’m having a go at the tutors but I’m not, I’m having a go at Bella Magazine who apparently pride themselves on talking about real issues yet actually talk about utter crap. To bring this all back to advertising, the question you should ask yourself is that if Bella came to you and asked you to advertise their magazine, would you carry on falsely claiming the “real stories” thing knowing is was a rubbish idea or would you tell the truth? I know which one I’d prefer to do.
I don’t know about you guys but my parents have no idea about the advertising industry, especially the creative department, and can’t quite get their head around a few things. That’s why I’ve created The Parents Guide to Advertising. (Please feel free to copy, paste and then print this off and give to your parents).
1) The Creative Team – Advertising creatives work in teams of two, a Copywriter and an Art Director. Your son/daughter will be working with someone else for most of his or her career. They need this person to get a job. They work together, they interview together (more later) and they sleep together…ok they don’t but may as well do. Creative teams traditionally spend more time with each other than they do with their respective partners. And at the beginning of their careers they’re going to be working a lot. In fact at the end of their careers they’ll probably be working a lot too.
2) University – Were you, or are you, worried your son/daughter isn’t doing a real degree? Well you shouldn’t be worried, you’re right; it’s not a real degree. There aren’t any exams and hardly any essays. Essentially they’re on a course where the more interesting ideas they have, the better. The work is totally subjective and to be honest the grade your son/daughter receives means absolutely nothing in the advertising world. The reason they’re doing it is to produce their portfolio. This is their key to getting a job; this is what you should nag them to do. Gone are the days of revision, it’s all about re-working your book! (Note – if you have to nag them to do it, then they probably won’t get a job).
3) Interviews – These are known as “book crits” although a book crit isn’t really an interview. Let me explain. For a normal company, a position will become available and people will apply for that position. The company will select people to interview and someone will be hired. Simple. Advertising is a little more complex. There is never a vacancy in the creative department; this business is far too competitive for jobs to be going around. Normally a team will choose an agency/agencies they admire and want to work for and will approach them with their portfolio of work. The people they see will advise them on what they like and don’t like and will arrange for another “interview” some time in the future to see improvements. The team will see many agencies and will start to know which ones feel best for them. Once they’ve been to a few “interviews” they should be offered a placement (only if the work is good enough), which leads me onto point 4.
4) Placements – These are similar to placements in other industries. The difference comes in the time frame and the salary. Placements start around 2 weeks and can go as long as 8 months. Your son/daughter will be paid virtually nothing, relatively speaking. If they’re lucky they’ll get around £250 per week max! They’ll more than likely, however, be paid just for expenses. So they’re going to be working day and night for months for in effect no money (so you’ll have to look after them just that bit longer). How do they go from placement to full-time? Hard work and impressive work. They’ll probably have a few placements before being offered a job. The main objective on placement is to work so hard that they have no choice but to offer you an extension. On average it takes 18 months for a graduate to get a job as a junior creative at an ad agency.
5) Future – Now all this may seem quite negative, so I think I should end on all the positives. When they finally get a job, they’ll be paid handsomely to make adverts that will actually be on TV, and on bus stops etc so you can be a proud parent almost every day. They’ll work in cool offices, surrounded by intelligent and funny people and will be able to get you discount on some products they advertise. They can change the way people think about pretty much anything and they won’t be anywhere near as boring as the accountant you once wanted them to become.
I hope this clarifies a few things for your parents. I’ve yet to show mine. In reality this probably won’t help whatsoever but even if it helps one person explain the struggle of getting a job in advertising to their parents then it was worth it.
Any advertising student will relate to feeling slightly intimidated by going to big agencies and having a book crit. But after our first round of crits (with our new book - below) I can safely say, there’s nothing to worry about. The amount you learn in that short space of time far outweighs any sort of anxiousness you may have had. Besides most teams will do all they can to help you, after all, they were once in our shoes.
We started the day with Andy and Christian at DDB. We thought we’d jump in at the deep end and test our book at, let’s face it, one of the best agencies in the World. We got to Paddington station an hour early, spent 20 minutes finding the offices, then had 40 minutes to spare. We didn’t want to be too early so we basically sat on a bench by a bus stop for half an hour absolutely freezing. After nearly catching hypothermia we finally went in and met Andy and Christian. Nerves were gone and our learning caps were on. That’s the one thing I’d say about crits, learn as much as you can, write it all down and most of all – listen. Andy was dealing with some sort of disagreement in the creative department so we listened to Christian. He was brilliant. Honest, constructive, everything you want from a crit. There were some things he liked and others he didn’t, the most important thing was he asked us to come back after we’ve made some changes (another thing to add to the ever growing to-do list).
After DDB, it was a short trip over to see Steve and Matt at AIS. We won an hour with the 2 creative directors on twitter (we were their 1000th follower). Now to be perfectly honest we were shitting ourselves. It’s not often you meet 1 of the owners of an agency AND it’s creative director. They took us for coffee round the corner from the agency and we proceeded to have the most surreal 60 minutes of our professional lives (so far). Ollie and I felt like we were chatting them up – Ollie was speaking to Matt about rugby and I was chatting to Steve about Coventry City FC where my friend played just months ago. After chatting about all sorts of things we got down to business and presented them with our book. Things got even better and we felt liked they took a shining to us, we were getting great feedback on our work and Ollie kicked me under the table as if to say, “can you believe this”. Truth was, I couldn’t. Everything seemed to be like some sort of dream, with everything going our way. Steve and Matt were impressed by us and have invited us back again, so we’ll be working hard to get our book in shape for another round of crits in the next few weeks.
Next we were onto Ogilvy, and their rather plush offices, to see Steve and Serge with some other students from Lincoln. They’d set us the challenge of advertising Toyota (Yeh, they've got a strange sense of humor). Ollie and I thought we’d take a risk and do something we knew nobody else would do. I’d say the risk paid off, we got good feedback but for me it was important that nobody else had the same idea as us. That’s another thing we’ve learnt recently. You’ve got to produce unexpected stuff; the aim is to make people say, “I’d never thought of it like that before.”
So all in all, it was a really successful trip. We’ll be cracking on with D&AD this week then re-doing more work for our book and hopefully back to London for more feedback, it’s quite addictive actually, I'd never thought of it like that before.
