Behind the scenes at SCA2....

The class of 2010/11.

Hello gang. Apologies for the radio silence in the last few weeks; I've been on hols and busy with a spot of work.

Anyway, this post is a guest one from Samantha Jenkins, a recently graduated student from the School of Communication Arts 2.0.

I will let her explain more, but suffice to say, the School is after a 2011 intake. If you like the sound of a creative career, you should definitely read on.

Anyway. Here's Sam:

"Some people believe in luck, fate, a big-break, chance, destiny and fortune.

It’s where you’ve come from, who you know, your lot in life.

Others trust in sheer determined hard work and tireless perseverance.

Ball-breaking, back-aching commitment.

Some people regard phenomenal genius, which needs neither rabbit’s feet nor elbow grease, enough to propel one’s vision into a world of desperate anticipation and quivering awe.

One thing’s for certain. All people have hope.

Hope that one day lady luck will whisper sweet nothings, promising everything.

Hope that sweat and tears will turn to rain, drenching the drought of dreams fulfilled.

Hope that raw talent will be plucked whilst ripe and bursting with vitality.

Hope that after studying for years to earn the perceived right into the Promised Land of employment, one does not end up circling in and out of the spiraling, rotary doors of the dole office.

After quitting my A-Levels in the hope that I did not need them, I discovered I was right after securing a place at university.

After quitting degree course, after degree course in the hope that I did not need them, I discovered I was right after securing a place in the dole queue, even after eventually obtaining the highly desired graduation photo.

Something had gone pretty wrong – or had it?

Degree in hand, I was meant to get a job; and I did.

Bartender. Quit. Retail Assistant. Quit. Telesales Operative. Quit. Receptionist. Quit. Tour Guide. Quit. Bungy-jump Coordinator. Quit. Gallery Assistant. Quit. Online Marketing Assistant. Quit.

All of the above merely a small handful of the job opportunities given to me as an Applied Arts graduate, hopping from country to country trying to discover who on earth I was; what, for heaven’s sake, I wanted to do with myself; but more importantly, how the hell was I to get there.

The church was my saviour.

The house of worshipping creative freedom that is The School of Communication Arts 2.0 happens to exist within a Methodist church in Vauxhall, South London.

Having now completed study at SCA 2.0, I now realise that the Job Centre was the best possible place for me as I walked through its doors little over a year ago. It was here, at what should have been the lowest point of my career’s journey - signing on to my weekly giro - when I signed out of my old way of thinking.

A state of mind that had crippled me by a rigid set of rules which led me nowhere; the same brain washed mind-set that leaves young creative people unemployed or in jobs that they despise all over the country - the belief that spending 3 years within the UK creative education system will result in a career.

A-Levels and degrees are not needed to become a creative.

Once realising my degree meant jack shit, I just started to do stuff I wanted to do.

It was this stuff that got me noticed and this stuff that started my journey of luck, fate, hard graft, perseverance and self-belief that has, in just a year, earned me a work placement in the Amsterdam based creative agency, Strawberry Frog.

Stuff. Looking at stuff. Being interested in stuff. Caring about stuff. Finding stuff. Sharing stuff. Creating stuff. Being stuff.

HAVING IDEAS AND DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THEM.

How can these ideas bring value to a brand and therefore bring value to an agency?

The SCA accepts students because they are creative and then shows them how to translate their ideas into a format that agencies will want to hire. Have a look at some of the work here.

The people that work within these agencies have written the entire curriculum that is available for anyone to view. Here, take a look.

This curriculum is taught to students by the very minds that wrote it – the industry itself.

The school only has a handful of employed staff. Creative professionals visit the school everyday, delivering the curriculum, giving talks and workshops, imparting tips and advice, helping develop ideas, critiquing work, offering mentorship and friendship.

Additionally, the networking opportunities offered at SCA are unrivaled. With over 400 mentors and only 30 students, there is plenty of time and attention spent on the needs of every individual.

Students get to work on live briefs for real clients, getting to see their work become a reality before even stepping foot inside an agency.

And step foot they shall as the course offers every student guaranteed 6 month work placements in some of the top advertising agencies.

The SCA 2.0 changed my life.

To all of you who’ve just received your A-Level results…

Pass or fail – YOU DON”T NEED THEM!"

I hope that was helpful to anyone considering a creative career. Good luck with your applications, guys.

Wannabe Planner? Account Handler? Creative?

I reckon planning's the one on the left...

Here at AdGrads towers, we've been told a little about two new opportunities, both of which you should consider applying for if you're trying to get into the business:

1) IPA Summer School

The IPA (in conjunction with many agencies) run a Summer School, aimed at getting talented graduates into the business. The main link is here. There are two streams you can apply for, account management/planning and creative.

Both streams close on the 15th of April. Get applying.

2) Ogilvy Planning Fellowship

This is that rarest of rare beasts, a Planning specific introduction to the business. Details are here. It closes on the 14th of March at midnight. If you have any other queries, get on twitter and talk to the Ogilvy Fellows.

Best of luck with both of them.

Star Stories: Ben Kay

He doesn't look like Father Christmas. At all.

Ben Kay is the blogger behind ifthisisablogthenwhatschristmas, an irreverent commentary on ads and the people behind them. He's also a damned fine copywriter, twitterer, and has ten points to bear in mind when getting into the business.

Anyway, I'll leave the rest to the man himself:

"I got my first job as an advertising copywriter in 1996, spending years at Y&R then AMV BBDO. In 2005 I became creative director of Lunar BBDO, leaving in 2008 to freelance. My experience in the industry has manifested itself in a blog, ifthisisablogthenwhatschristmas, Since 2002 I have also tried to write the kind of books I would love to read. Instinct, to be published by Penguin on the 2nd of September, is the first of these.

1. Planners are currently in the ascendancy. For various reasons, the creative product isn’t nearly as important as the work that goes on behind the scenes. Sometimes this work is specifically aimed at improving the creative product but more often than not it is arse-covering, unnecessary bullshit. But these days people are very fond of arse-covering unnecessary bullshit because...

2. People make most decisions out of fear. People want to remain in their jobs so that they can feed their kids and pay their mortgages and that means they do not necessarily want to do things that might lose them their jobs. Unfortunately this means that decisions tend towards the middle ground where perceived safety is at its strongest. Marketing managers approve ads that won’t get them fired; account handlers sell ads that are less likely to require expensive, time-consuming persuasion; planners will create strategies with the scared marketing managers that will sound like every other strategy going around town; creatives might write exciting ads but they won’t argue that hard for them. Result: vanilla flavoured blancmange with a glass of skimmed milk on the side.

3. Martin Sorrell is as good at predicting the future as Stephen Hawing is at the flying trapeze. However, when he speaks, most of the business world listens and the newspapers report what he says as if it’s a pronouncement of the truth. It’s laughable. And pathetic.

4. You might well meet your other half in the industry. Advertising is full of bright, ambitious, somewhat appealing people, and people who like the company of bright, ambitious, somewhat appealing people. If this looks likely, go with it. Forget all that stuff about not shitting on your own doorstep or whatever the proverb is. Get in there.

5. There’s a famous film saying from William Goldman (if you don’t know who he is, be ashamed and look him up): nobody knows anything. The same applies to advertising. When you join the industry people will talk as if they are very certain that their opinion is 100% correct. When you leave the industry you will do so stunned at the number of times those people (almost certainly yourself included) were wrong. There is nothing you can do about this except weep.

6. It’s going to take a metaphorical earthquake for the British public to like the people who work in advertising. The perception of slick chancers corralling people into buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have is one that is here to stay. If you want to be loved, become a nurse.

7. Advertising has very little absolute effect. By this I mean that it has been proven that advertising will not make you buy something you would never otherwise buy. Instead it makes you switch brands. This means your job will effectively be as cheerleader for the brand you are advertising. You should either try not to care about this or make sure you want the companies whose products you advertise to succeed.

8. People in advertising take cocaine. People in all sorts of businesses take cocaine but the fear of point 2 can be tempered (some believe) by sniffing white powder up their noses. Unfortunately it’s just papering over the cracks in their empty lives (just kidding!).

9. You might well travel the world, meet famous people, see things for which you are somewhat responsible on billboards and TVs (and computers – whoopee fucking doo!). This will give you a fizzy little thrill in your tummy and make mummy and daddy very proud. Whether or not they work out what the fuck it is you actually do all day is another matter (they never will).

10. Do things for love before you do them for money. This is a truth about life that’s easy to forget. If you forget it you will end up having a miserable ten hours a day that you hate, then you think that the fun you have with the money you earn will make up for it. You will be wrong."

I hope that's helpful. Ta for that, Ben.

Creatives In The City Pt 1...

(In best Attenborough voice) These...are...some...young...creatives...

Hello all.

One of the things AdGrads hasn't done, historically, is focus too much on the creative side of things (barring the odd Star Story by a CD or two). As we're a bunch of planners, it's perhaps not surprising.

So, with that in mind, we've put our heads together, and two of our creative mates have volunteered to write a series of posts on how to get a job within the big smoke, and what problems and opportunities they encounter along the way.

Without further ado, here's Luke & Wilf:

"Hello, welcome to our first post. We’re Luke and Wilf, two lads working as a creative team.

Hopefully we can use our personal experiences in future posts to serve as useful advice to anyone considering a job in advertising. For now we thought we’d give you an insight into what brought us together.

We met at UCA Farnham on the advertising and brand communications course where we learnt a bit about strategic thinking and idea generation, before we decided to specialise in art direction and copywriting. It’s at that point that we looked across the room and decided that we both loved football, films, dreaming up cunning plans/ ideas, and thus decided to pair up (There are lots of other courses, but there will be a post on that at a later date).

Wilf wanted to be a creative because he liked the idea that the job as a whole would not be confined to any one medium. Secondly, he loved the idea that he’d be able to collaborate with loads of interesting people.

I wanted to be a creative to appease my ego as I liked the idea of having my work seen by the public, and to be paid to solve problems. What’s more, I thought I might be able to learn a little bit about writing screenplays by writing adverts.

After a while you realise that being a creative is many of the above but the main reason for wanting to be in a job like this is that you crave the feeling of solving briefs of any nature.

Now that the ice is broken, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments section and we’ll try our best to answer them or dedicate future posts to explore the issue.

Luke & Wilf blog at http://smallbears.blogspot.com and tweet as @lukeandwilf"

For Creative Types...

Nice. Damn nice.

One more thing to tell you about; it concerns the creative fraternity.

YouthNet is a youth charity and online community set up to provide 16 to 24-year-olds with support and trusted guidance through award-winning website www.TheSite.org. They are running an open brief to improve their presence on and offline.

And this is where you come in, creative types. You get a few hours with the brief on Friday 25th (from 3pm-6pm). It takes place in Shoreditch Town Hall. Agencies can enter, I think, as there may be real life spangly work at the end of it.

More details here. Best of luck..

Dialogue Show: You Should Go..

Pretty much what you need to know.

Hello there. Been holding off posting this, to ensure it got a little closer to the deadline.

Anyway, some lovely 3rd year students from Farnham, on the BA Advertising and Brand Communication class, are holding a show at the Truman Brewery, running from the 28th to the 1st of June.

More details about it are here - along with an interesting blog. You can follow their efforts on twitter here.

Best of luck chaps.

Grads Down The Track: Sam Haynes & Lee Trott

A hobbit and a wise man. Truth.

Here's another story from some intrepid grads learning the ropes. Only this time, they aren't planners or account handlers - these chaps are junior creatives at Lowe London, where they have the pleasure/misfortune (delete as appropriate) of working with me.

FEAR AND LEARNING IN LOWE LONDON.

“Welcome to advertising,” said Ed Morris.

This was the moment when half a years’ worth of sweat and blood finally paid off. The placement at Lowe had been a rollercoaster for us. Not least of all because we were still in our final year at Saint Martins and trying desperately to juggle this fantastic opportunity along with a degree that we were so close to finishing.

It was an intense baptism of fire for us noobies, who had only ever been on one placement: 2 weeks with no work at AMV. If truth be told, thinking back to some of the layouts we were presenting in our first few weeks on placement is not a pleasant experience. But what we lacked in discipline and experience we made up for in energy.

If you throw enough darts eventually you’ll hit the bulls-eye. This was our rather haphazard way of learning what a good idea looks like. Incidentally, it’s also how we got the placement in the first place. In our second year of university, we sent out 600 emails and got only 5 placement offers. That’s less than 1% return! That’s a lot of darts, and a lot of injured bartenders.

And that’s after painstakingly trawling through D&AD annuals in an effort to piece together the email addresses of different companies. But then, rejection is an enormous part of this job. Get used to it. But that process is forgotten in an instant when you’re walking the green mile to Ed Morris’ office on Judgement Day. It was terrifying. We wanted to believe that we’d done enough to secure a job, but we couldn’t quite let ourselves hope. But get it, we did.

Go to up to roof and scream like girls, we did. But the fear doesn’t really leave you. At least it hasn’t for us. Even now we spend most of our time terribly insecure, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. It makes you try harder. We both hold true to the idea that energy wins over talent, and although we’re still honing the talent part, at least we’ve got the first one down!

But this year something seems to have clicked. What that something is we’re not entirely sure. The random dart-throwing that got us the job seems to have focussed itself a little. But then, practise makes something a little closer to perfect.

We’re not there yet by any stretch of the imagination, but at least now it feels like there’s some method to the madness. It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be, which is quite a reassuring thought when you’re just starting out in this dog-eat-dog business. So what humble advice can we offer those who are only just starting out, based on almost 2 years of trial and error?

1. DON’T WAIT FOR WORK TO COME TO YOU.

Find it. Whether you’re at an agency or still at college, there’s always something you could be doing. OpenAd, for example, is a great way to test yourself amongst other working creatives, and earn some pocket money on the side.

2. ENERGY WINS OVER TALENT.

We cannot stress this enough. Even if you haven’t quite cracked strategic thinking, if you can come up with 70 storyboards in a day, a Creative Director is going to notice. That’s how we got our first TV ad through. Nail this, and with the right guidance talent will come. We hope.

3. THINK BIG.

Don’t just stick to the usual advertising formats. The possibilities are infinite. Whether it’s a sponsorship event, an idea for a new product, a mobile phone applications, or even a silly loading bar design you came up with on the bus, get it down. You can reign-in the ideas later. Go nuts. That’s the fun part.

Star Stories: Rory Sutherland

Our next Star Story comes courtesy of Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy One London's Executive Creative Director and Vice Chairman, and the Ogilvy Group UK's vice chairman and the forthcoming IPA President for 2009/10. Oh, and he also writes an excellent blog on Brand Republic.

HOW I GOT INTO THE BUSINESS

by Rory Sutherland

My story? A little similar to Jon Steel's, in that I thought I was going to become a teacher. A plan that was rapidly abandoned once I spent some time actually in a school. This experience terrified me. Not in the way you might think, though: it was rather a good school, and the pupils were well mannered and amusing - no, what frightened me wasn't the classroom but the staffroom.

Imagine your entire life since the age of five spent either learning or teaching in educational establishments. It's not a good idea. Remember, too, that this was the late 80s, a time when the lack of entrepreneurial spirit and ambition in much of the staffroom seemed completely at odds with the times. I remember one female teacher was married to a partner at a law firm in London. She drove to school in quite a nice car. Not a Bentley or anything, you understand, but something that wasn't an Austin Maestro. I think it may have been a Fiat X-19, if you remember the thing. Anyhow, once her back was turned she was routinely villified for having the temerity to drive this car. Sod this, I thought.

I applied to 19 agencies half way through the year, and had about six interviews and two second interviews. At JWT (which involved two days away at a place called Minster Lovell to check you held your fork correctly and owned the right part of Derbyshire and so on) and at Ogilvy & Mather Direct, the latter making me my sole job offer. From September 1988, and for about a year thereafter , I was the world's worst account man, then became a copywriter in 1990, a rare move (rarer still now, I suspect) which required great support from a number of people to whom I owe thanks to this day - Drayton Bird, Steve Harrison, Dan Gipple, David Watson, Andy Firth and David Nobay being many but not all of them. I also owe my job to an anonymous advertising copywriter who was the other candidate for the one available copywriting job in the department at that time, but who took one look at a long copy ad and a mailpack on the walls, loudly declared "I'm not writing all those words - I just do concepts" and promptly flounced off.

Two lessons, here. First, get a job at a good agency doing anything. After a while, if you're good you can probably choose to do something else and if you're bad (and I was a very bad account man, once even failing to turn up at a time management course because I'd got the date wrong) there's a small chance they may give you a chance elsewhere to see the back of you. It's only a small chance, but the odds are probably better from the inside than from outside.

The second thing? I can't help here much, but be lucky in the place where you start. We probably did not realise it at the time, but O&M Direct (now OgilvyOne) in 20 Soho Square was one of those supernode wellspring places you get in advertising and direct marketing (quite possibly it still is, but we won't know for another ten years). The assemblage of talent was tremendous: in addition to the above named were Rod Wright, Mike Simm, Randy Haunfelder, Derek Robson (now at Goodby), Miles Young, Paul O'Donnell (still here) and many more great people. Plus Drayton Bird had a Bentley Turbo even though he couldn't drive, which rather confirmed my suspicion that the automotive prospects were at least better there than in teaching.

Sometimes I feel a little like the Peter Sellers' "Chauncey Gardner"character in Being There. I had lucked into an interesting place with great people at exactly the right time. We were lucky in other ways, too. in the 90s we picked up an obscure Seattle company called Microsoft. I can still remember meetings where anyone new to the account had have explained to them what the company did - "You know when you turn on your PC is says MS-DOS for about a second? Well the MS stands for Microsoft." Looking back, this was rather a stroke of luck. Having software clients (and later we had Compaq, too, to be followed by IBM) meant we took IT quite seriously. And when the Internet became big, there were some of us who already knew what it was.

Advice on first becoming a copywriter? Advice which, now I think of it, holds good for any creative person anywhere, and at any time, for that matter. Work very hard and look for opportunity everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Not only in the briefs you are given. And not only in the fashionable briefs. A few early breaks I had were a tactical ad for BT which ran on the evening Mrs Thatcher resigned and a wonderfully cute piece of work to small tradesmen for American Express. Mailpacks to small businesses - not promising. As Drayton Bird was fond of quoting (from Bacon) "A wise man makes more opportunities than he finds."

But a more important question than "how did you get started?" is "how do you stay interested?" What keeps you enthusiastic?

In the early days, I feel I must record my debt (a debt shared every one of us in direct marketing from those days) to Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury.

For the hottest agency in London in those days to do promotions and direct marketing because they wanted to not because they had to was an inspiration to all of us. Its approach to innovation was truly a revelation. I think, deep down, most British people in the business are either temperamentally BBH-ites or HHCL-ite - the school of "sexy" versus the school of "new".
Even though it lived less long, I think I am temperamentally a HHCL-ite. It's one of those Beatles or Stones things - everyone goes one way or the other - all, that is, except me.... I'm for Jim Reeves.

A little later (and what a shame it is HHCL never fully lived to see the digital age) , new media have added a new dimension to what we do, which has made possible innovation of a kind that seemed years off when we first started.

Subsequently? Well, I have been enthused by one simple fact, of which I remind myself every time I get a little low. This is one of very few jobs where doing almost anything of interest can make you better at your job.

Actuaries, bankers, acountants - their jobs aren't improved by watching people in a cafe, listening to conversations from bus passengers or taxi drivers, reading a book about history or economics or watching a film. We can become better copywriters in our spare time. Never forget what a rare and wonderful thing that is.

Star Stories: Dave Birss

Taking a break from the frantic pace of application/wait until the date agencies said they'd get back to you/wait some more/post on Facebook asking if anyone else has heard/wait some more and so on, we've got a really inspiring star story from Dave Birss.

Dave will take up the role of creative director at Poke London in December and has won a London International gold, a D&AD silver nomination and a bunch of other awards for Fingerskilz. He's worked ATL, BTL and on the line (or online) in equal measure and has been a copywriter and an art director. He also tells us that he can't dance.

Dave's blog is here.

HISTORY OF DAVE

By Dave Birss

I guess I should start at the beginning before advertising entered my life. And before male pattern baldness finally got the better of my mullet. I went through a few jobs. So many I can’t actually remember them all. A brief summary would include: farm labourer, veterinary assistant, dishwasher, busker, university lecturer, radio traffic bulletin broadcaster, guitar teacher, session musician, recording engineer, stand-up comedian, nude model, marketing manager and complaints line operator. None of them stuck. I augmented these with a degree in computer programming and advanced mathematics, a postgraduate in marketing, a certificate in lawnmower maintenance and a diploma in typography. And then I was kind of awestruck when someone told me that people got paid to write ads for a living. I was dumbfounded. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. And I wanted to do it.

But I didn’t have a portfolio. I didn’t know you needed one. And I hadn’t a clue how to get into the industry. Then one day my mother saw an advertisement in a Glasgow newspaper with the headline “Advertising Creatives Wanted”. I’ve never seen such a thing since. I applied by sending them a congratulations card, a cassette of my application song, an introductory letter etched on a wooden spoon and some biscuits by way of bribery. They thought this was just so ridiculous that they had to see who had sent it. They liked me and - even although I didn’t have a portfolio of concepts – they set me a test brief and ended up giving me the job. I liked to think it was because I dazzled them - but I look back now and realise that it’s because I was young, cheap and willing to write crappy recruitment ads in their basement. I had made it onto the first rung of the advertising ladder. Woohoo!

Nine months later I fell off.

Redundancy is cruel. But – as I’ve found a couple of times since - it was the best thing. To be honest with you, even although I’d moved upstairs to the ‘proper’ ‘advertising’ ‘department’, I still didn’t have the remotest idea about the job. But I had a few bits of work and I knew that I wanted to stay in this industry.

I hawked my portfolio around the other agencies in Glasgow. Creative Directors took the time to see me, looked through my portfolio, smiled politely and said they’d call if anything came up. Then I went to see a Creative Director who told me the truth.

“It’s crap. There’s nothing decent in there. You need a whole new portfolio that actually has concepts in it. Come back to me when you’ve got one.”

So I swatted up on every award annual that I’d stolen out of the agency to try to work out what a concept was. Nobody had told me. I started building my portfolio, painstakingly drawing every visual and hand-rendering every headline. Then, with my head held high, I made a return visit to the Creative Director.

“It’s still crap. You’ve got it all wrong. You need to find a proposition and make sure you communicate it clearly in your ad. That’s the whole point of doing an ad, after all.” He took the time to go through every piece of work and tell me very specifically why it didn’t work and how I could have done it better. I thanked him and returned home.

I immediately took his advice, ripped everything out of my portfolio and started again. I refused to give up and returned again and again and again. To cut a long story short, he eventually gave me a placement. That meant that I worked for absolutely nothing except travel expenses.

After my first month, he called me into his office and told me that I’d have to go. He had mistakenly thought that I’d had potential but I’d failed to show it. I told him that I didn’t want to leave. I had it in me. Just give me another month. He reluctantly agreed.

After the second month, he called me into his office, told me that he was still disappointed and asked me to go. This time I begged him to let me stay for another month and even more reluctantly he caved in.

I was determined to show him how wrong he was. I worked until after midnight every night. I worked weekends. And at the end of the third month, I went into his office and told him that I’d found a job that was willing to pay me more than travel expenses. And this time he asked me not to go. I’d proved myself and had come up with my first batch of decent ads. So I left and went where the money was.

After 3 weeks in my new paid job, I got an even better offer. Not financially better, creatively better. I was now doing several radio ads a week, a couple of TV ads a month and a load of press and poster ads. This is what I wanted.

I was an Art Director at this time and my Copywriter left. I then decided that I’d give Copywriting a bash and recruited a supposedly hotshot Art Director to work with me. He was a wanker. He said “no” to everything I suggested until I couldn’t suggest anything any more. I started to hate my job. Then something wonderful happened: I was fired.

I was thrown out of the office in the morning and was touting my portfolio about in the afternoon. That’s when I picked up my first proper freelance gig. I found out that I could still come up with ideas and started to build a decent freelance business.

I then threw this in and came to work in London. Since then I’ve worked for countless ad agencies, DM agencies and a handful of digital places. Now, fifteen years after I started, I’m about to start at one of the most exciting and creative agencies in London as a Creative Director.

And I still can’t believe that people get paid to do this stuff!

Star Stories: Eaon Pritchard

Our sixth star story comes courtesy of Eaon Pritchard, a creative at Weapon7, an interactive ad agency, which has done some very interesting work for Xbox and Smirnoff (the 'Triple Distilled' spot in particular) amongst others. Eaon's blog can be found here.

FLASH BANG WALLOP

by Eaon Pritchard

FLASH!

It's 1992 and I'm in the back office of the record shop in Aberdeen that I manage.

I'm clutching a brown cardboard envelope containing an Italian white label 12" record that's been mailed to me by one of the specialist importer/distributers I buy from. The note attached tells me they are hopeful of doing some business with this record and what did i think? It will be available as an import in about 3 weeks.

On the blank white label the words Glam Hell's Party are scribbled in black marker.

I dump the record onto the turntable and drop the needle on. Its a full on Euro house/disco stomper that samples Curtis Mayfield from 'If theres a Hell Below..'

On first listen, I'm thinking that I could probably shift about 20-25 of these on import before any UK release and decide to give it a whirl at one of my dj engagements at the weekend.

Over the next few weeks I play it at every gig and everywhere it drops the roof goes off. It's a monster tune. When the labelled copies are finally available I end up selling over 250 12" on import over the following couple of months before it's picked up by Sony in the UK, remixed and released for a stab at the charts.

The Sony rep calls me to sell in his new releases and offers it as a 1 in 3 deal (ie buy 3 get one free) expecting a big order. I buy 6. Ive already sold 250 on import so I'm done with it, now it's time for HMV or whatever to takeover.

The Long Tail and the Tipping Point in action before anyone had properly coined those phrases.

Recap...

The distributer gave me one of the few white labels know in my history of being able to sell decent numbers of Italian imports. I'm also a reasonably well-known dj in Scotland. An influencer in my niche.

I play the record at the clubs I'm booked at (the small ones that are full of the clued-up kids - the influencers in their towns) - the cool kids love it and want it. When it's available they are the first to have it and play it at there own parties. The idea spreads. The specialist shops sell shed loads on import.

Sony cool detectors pick up the record for mass market - its in all the chains and hits the top 40.

It's hit the early and late majority.

It was round about this time I realised that I was destined for marketing because, without any formal training or anything, I just understood this stuff.

FLASH!

It's now 2007.

I'm working as a creative technical strategist with Weapon7, a specialist digital advertising agency in London, using basically the same principles to develop digital marketing campaigns for global brands. It's come full circle again as traditional mass interruption advertising is no longer as effective as it was in the pre-digital age, with word of mouth - this time accelerated by networked connectivity on an unprecedented scale. An evolved (fuzzy) role (geek marketer? T-shaped creative? Job 2.0? – delete as appropriate) with an evolved agency.

I quit the music industry around ’96 after helping launch a group of indie labels. We released about 15 records a month for 3 or 4 years. No big hits but the Long Tail kept us ticking over – we could sell about 2,000 of any release so it made sense to release loads rather than look for one big hit.

I then picked up my crayons again (I had hardly drawn anything since leaving Art School in 89 with a fine art degree) and spent a year or so learning how to work a mac on the job at the local newspaper setting ads.

Next stop was a small design and comms agency based in Aberdeen where we worked with the oil companies on everything from brochures, intranets and safety videos. The big lesson there was – never say no to a job. If we didn’t know how to do it we’d just go and figure it out. Try, fail and learn.

Decamping to London in 2000 I had the idea that interactive tv was going to be the next big thing, post dot com crash. After about 18 months at Sky I realised that probably wasn’t my smartest move (fail and learn, again) and then became Creative Director with Littlewoods Gaming, an old fashioned company looking to launch its gambling products into the 21^st century and a market dominated by young pretenders like 888.com.

Around this time, I had my next epiphany when I was given a copy of Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. It seemed like everything I had been thinking but unable to articulate properly was encapsulated in those pages.

‘Pouring off every page like it was written in my soul’ as Bobby D would say – that’s maybe a bit dramatic but you get where I’m coming from.

My advice for grads making their first tentative steps into industry?

Well, if you are clever enough to be reading this blog and participating in these conversations you don’t need much from me. You already realise the power of community and dialogue in modern marketing. You are smarter than the average bear already.

Your potential employers and clients are desperate for new thinking, fresh approaches and innovation that’s going to keep their products/services and marketing relevant – beyond 30 second spots, no matter how smarty pants (I’m thinking drumming gorillas here…)

Be fuzzy, poke your nose in where its not wanted, challenge the status quo, don’t ask permission for anything and be prepared to fail and learn.

That’s about it.