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.

Star Stories: Luke White

Next up on the Star Stories carousel is Luke White, founder and creative partner at My Agency. We're in the process of developing even more material for young creatives so stay tuned.

My story is I hope an encouragement to all those of you who don’t get your first job in London’s sexiest agency and end up doing things the hard way. I have to say I have had a lot of luck, but I’ve also worked very hard and made some bold decisions which have all worked out well for me.

From the age of about 14 or 15 I wanted to be a creative director in an advertising agency, make TV ads, travel the world and make a shed load of cash. As it turned out it would take me over ten years in all kinds of agencies to achieve it.

I left school at 16 and went to Croydon Art School where I did a two-year foundation course and my A levels. Having failed to get into Manchester uni to do their advertising course (due to my lack of a portfolio with any ads in it!) I then went to Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham where I did a three-year degree in Information Graphics. Before I left college I was offered a job in house in a Swedish designer furniture company called Intercraft. I’ve always believed it is better to look for your perfect job from a job and although this was far short of working at Saatchi of CDP, the job appealed to me because I would work alongside an expat Australian designer called Jim Cook, creating all the company’s communications across a wide spectrum of media. We wrote and art directed the ads, designed and illustrated the brochures and leaflets, designed exhibition stands and presentations and even shot and edited promotional videos. It was to be the perfect introduction to integrated thinking in the days before integration even existed. I worked long hours and spent my spare time working on my portfolio to get myself into an ad agency. To be honest it was no easier then than it is now and to some extent it think big agencies were far more up themselves in those days than they are now.

My next job was designing brochures for a very small agency that specialised in the travel industry, followed by another job designing theatre posters for Mentor advertising, an agency that specialised in the entertainment industry. In both of these agencies the ability to turn your hand to pretty much anything was a bonus and good fun. This ability to switch from one discipline to another has definitely been the theme of my career and informed my thinking when I set up My Agency in 2004.

I’d now been working in design and advertising for small agencies for nearly 4 years and was going to have to take a big drop in salary to start again as a junior art director in a purely above the line agency. I am lucky that I was born in Australia and have dual nationality, so in 1987 I decided to go travelling and see if my London experience would be an advantage in making the jump into above the line advertising in Australia. It was without a doubt the best decision I ever made.

Within a few weeks of doing the rounds I landed a job at Sudler and Hennessey in Sydney working as the Art director to the agency’s American creative director, Bob Lallamant. S&H were at that time the world’s most awarded healthcare agency and did a mix of above and below the line work. In my first year there I made 18 TV ads and won my first national and international awards, I was off to the races in a way I could only imagine stuck in London. After 3 years at S&H, I joined FCB in Sydney where I spent a year purely doing pitches and winning the agency $90 million in new business. Although this was a huge achievement it was not a great year for me, as I didn’t get much actual finished work for my own portfolio. I think most good creative people work for themselves and use the agency as a tool to getting a better portfolio and thus a better job. Having done the pitches did mean I had a good relationship with the agencies top management and I managed to get transferred back to FCB in London where I spent the next 3 years until I got fired by Alan Midgely, (I think for always having an opinion that never matched his).

I freelanced for a couple of months and then got two weeks freelance at McCann Erickson. It turned into a ten year stint where in the space of five years I went from middleweight art director to executive creative director. I had a ball, creating some great advertising for Bacardi, Nescafe, Motorola, Coke and MasterCard. But it was on the ‘Tomcat’ campaign for Bacardi Breezer, that all my past integrated experience came together to point the way to the next leg of my career. It was a brilliant experience where all the pieces in the marketing mix worked together seamlessly and the buzz aspects of the campaign, PR, experiential and sponsorship became more interesting to me than just creating the ads.

In 2004 I left McCann’s to set up My Agency and fulfil a long held ambition to be my own boss and to create an integrated communications and brand creation agency, but that’s another story.

I think today that young creatives trying to break into the industry do so at both a frustrating, but also very exciting time. It’s tough out there, but it has been as long as I’ve been working. I think most of the young teams I see are smart and switched on in a way their predecessors aren’t. Those in the industry still earning large creative salaries with skills that are primarily creating above the line ad campaigns are under threat like never before. The new blood with talent, ambition, open mindedness and a real understanding of ‘new media’ will eventually find themselves a job and get their first foot on the ladder, not just because they are cheaper, but also because they get it. Agencies like mine are ready to give them a go for a start.

Don't be put off if you don't land your dream job straight off. Just get in, get going and start showing the world what you can do.

Star Stories: Tony Malcolm

The next in our line of Star Stories features Tony Malcolm, a CD at Leo Burnett in the UK.

I’d like to give some sort of philosophical answer like Leo Burnett himself saying ‘I didn’t get into the business, the business got into me’. But I’m sure nobody will quote me on saying it was by accident.

I was thrown out of the Hounslow Manor School after only excelling at English, Art, Sport and smoking. My mum encouraged me to do a Graphic Arts course at the local college, which at the time was Hounslow Borough College. I took a portfolio of the still life drawings I’d done to pass my O level and they saw enough potential to give me the last remaining place on the course. On the three year course, I managed to scrape through with a diploma thanks mainly to an inspired alphabet I designed made of illustrated hands. I did however manage a more respectable higher diploma for my advertising work. Thankfully, in the second year of the course, advertising was added to the curriculum.

It introduced us to the D&AD Students Course where we would go out on a Thursday evening and meet some of the top creatives in advertising, setting us briefs, reviewing our work and showing us their swanky offices. They’d even give us free beer and crisps and that for me was the clincher. Back in the eighties Collett, Dickenson Pearce was at the height of its powers, producing stunning campaigns for Hamlet, Fiat, Parker Pens, Heineken, Clark’s Shoes, Barclaycard, Cinzano, Stella Artois, B&H, Hovis and Wall’s.

I admired the wit and the cleverness of what they were doing.

I started putting effort into what I was doing, studying D&AD Annuals, listening to the wisdom of those who were Copywriters and Art Directors for a living. I teamed up with my first art director. We’d been to one D&AD Students evening at a new agency called Gold Greenlees Trott. Dave Trott was a legend amongst the student fraternity for his no nonsense approach to advertising. We plucked up the courage to ring him and take our work in to show him.

He took our call, but said ‘if you want to come and see me, do thirty campaigns in two weeks’. He encouraged us to look for bad ads for good products in press publications and said we would find the brief buried in the copy points. So we scanned dozens of magazines, tearing out ad after ad. We did the required amount of ads in the specified time and were duly granted an audience with the great man. Trotty looked through all 90 ads pulling out the ones he liked and throwing out the ones he didn’t and at the end of the process, told us to photocopy all those that had made the grade, put them In a pack and mail them to the following people at the following agencies saying he recommended us. We wrote a letter saying what we had done and stapled it to the little booklet of A4 ads.

It certainly worked for us. We got very excited when we received a call from Saatchi and Saatchi.We went in the following day to see John Bacon and after verifying our story with Trotty he offered us a job. Just like that. I phoned my mum and dad. They had heard of Saatchi and Saatchi from the famous Conservative campaign and like me, were delighted. Especially my dad who thought the word ‘Labour’ could have been permanently replaced with ‘Tony’ in the ‘Labour isn’t Working’ poster.

Since those days I have worked at many of the best advertising agencies in London, including being Creative Director of CDP, Simons Palmer Denton Clemmow and Johnson, TBWA, and running my own agency Malcolm Moore Deakin Blazye.

Nearing my third decade in the business, I’m still working as hard as I did in those early days to ensure the quality of work at Leo Burnett lives up to the high standards engrained in me back then. As with Leo himself, the business got into me, and what started as an accident turned out to be a very happy one.

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: Charles Frith

After a long break, we return with a star story from one of my best friends - Charles Frith, rather than tell you all about him, I'll let him do that. Charlie's blog is Punk Planning, check it out here.

I donʼt think that this should be a guide towards getting into advertising - if anything it should serve as a how-not-to-do-it with a few nuggets picked up along the way.

As a friend of mine put it some years back when I declared my occupation, ʻoh thatʼs so 80ʼs” and she was right. We were among a handful of people dancing on a catwalk after a fashion show was over (while the music still was kicking off) and so I guess the glamour remains in pockets if you keep your eyes peeled. Burmese royalty links or so she claimed.
Nevertheless Iʼve always loved advertising and when a vacancy arose in a small below the line agency called Counter Attack in London on the Albert Embankment, South London at the end of the eighties. I not only applied for the administrative role in advertising but was elated to be given a position that exceeded my experience based I was told on how I conducted myself at interview stage.

I loved all the people there and it was my first full on taste of people who work within the creative industries. Iʼve been hooked ever since. When the ad business produces superstars they shine greater than any other business Iʼve ever know. Truly inspirational and clever people to work with.

I was however young enough to subsequently chop around and try a few different opportunities including a spell with a direct marketing printing outfit in Nottingham where I was a useless sales person in their London office. However no incentive could have been greater than to strike out abroad on account of falling in love with a young East German au pair from Leisnig in Germany not that long after the Berlin wall had come down.

I had a fascination with politics and particularly Communism, that in part explains why Iʼm currently inhaling deep lungfuls of power and bureaucracy here in Beijing with a view to getting a grip on global politics for the next twenty or so years. They will be important decades.

My German experience proved to be a pure blend of Victor Hugoʼs Les Miserables (something positive only occurs about 200 pages in and nothing happy happens until the end) and Franz Kafkaʼs The Transformation. Itʼs a book in itself, that part of my life and I shall enjoy sharing it as I kept a detailed and extensive journal of that period which never happened again till I took up blogging.

On my return to the UK I had no intention of working, given the weight of events I had experienced during this period which even took me out to the Far East for six months where I learnt Thai and worked for a Direct Marketing company. So back in England I felt pretty numb about life with no inclination to work for some time, and so I enrolled for a marketing degree at the age of 23. They let me in on account of my advertising and marketing experience (and secondary school qualifications) and I had three wonderful years of doing what came naturally to me. Studying marketing and design.

My only regret was I probably could have scored a first class degree if I put my mind to it. I was however diligent with the lectures and tutorials which compensated for my refusal to do exam revision, except for one memorable all nighter where an accountancy student took me through profit and loss, cash flow, and financial statements. Amazingly 3 months of lecturing on a subject that bores me to tears was condensed into a night of rough scribbles on paper and I passed with flying colours. Or at least just flying.

As ever with these things some serendipity is needed. Just before I graduated I went to a party and spent a whole night talking to a young woman who later revealed that she was a copywriter from the ad superstars of the day called HHCL and partners - I think she found me interesting as she ignored her partner for the night. I was in awe of a living breathing creative from the agency I most wanted to work at. Yes folks I slept my way to the middle.

Thatʼs categorically not true, but meeting people and being interested in them is a sure fire way of being seen as interesting. So is encouraging gossip like the anecdote above, and so when the opportunity arose to interview with HHCL. I grabbed it and was fortunate enough to have been mentored by one of the intellectually toughest planners I have ever encountered to this day.

It was Mark Piper who memorably gave me his copy of the Koran before it really mattered because he was that kind of guy. A voracious reader and a heavyweight intellect. If you donʼt know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims youʼre probably best off working in a bank or something. Planners are information whores. They suck it in any way they can get it and the best of them know how to process that information into something that matters. Youʼre either into it or not. The rest is down to accumulating experience.

A year later almost to the day I joined Howell Henry, I resigned. I remember it well because I could have stayed on a couple more weeks and secured my annual bonus but I wanted to get as far away from someone as possible. So I jumped on a plane did some interviews, secured a position, and moved back to Thailand, with its welcome tropical heat, the most awesome food, amazing culture not to mention Thailandʼs unique place in the DNA strands of the planet and undeniably the hottest women in the world outside of The Emirates and maybe Estonia.

I decided to accept DDB in Thailandʼs offer, and due to my London experience became one of the few Planning Directors in that part of the world. I had an incredible time sharing what I knew with people who had never even heard of planning. We won business, banged out some ads and life was good. I was 29 years old, earned a comparative fortune and lived like a king. There are few finer buttoned down yet buttoned up feelings in life than waking up knowing that your maid has crisply ironed to perfection every shirt in your wardrobe.

Moving on, about a year and a half after joining, our agency was mandated by New York to merge with a HUGE local agency that I knew I could never join on account of the Managing Director wearing a polyester tie. He wasnʼt trying to be ironic either so I took my severance and had the brilliant good grace to have a couple of clients that wanted to continue working with me. AXA insurance and my best ever client and later close friend VW.

This launched what Iʼve retrospectively called my ʻexecutive freelance careerʼ (thanks Rob) which took me round the world from Europe to Asia. The freedom of working for oneself is great as it allowed me to take some self indulgent yet also enormously rewarding lifestyle decisions like pile the rum and books in equal measure either side of me; shoulder high, and plough through the stuff that I believe has contributed to my intellectual calibre with more validity than any degree ever could. I cherish that more than any 73% increase in year on year sales ad that I was ever involved with. I probably thought I was Hemingway or something.

Iʼm thinking the likelihood of anyone having read this far is very low and highly likely that those same people if they exist are asking, ʻyeah but whatʼs this got to do with me?ʼ is high.

Bear with me.

Towards the end of 1996 I decided to relocate to London and get to know all these amazing people who were sharing their ideas and thinking through blogging. Those people were single handedly responsible for me falling back in love with communication theory, business and creativity all over again. I had been getting more and more stale with the more interesting work projects coming from things like market entry reports for multinationals into India, than cracking out another ad with superlative families, beaming superlative white shiny teeth and all the other things that I have talked about which are directly related to media literacy and is the most important subject to learn about if considering a career outside of the M25. Or rather how to challenge it.

I learnt something else while I was in London and that is the interaction of online and offline which is I believe not only the most critical relationship to be managed outside of the monologue to dialogue shift. Its the reason Iʼve set forth once again to take the next stage of my life here in China. Iʼm not sure if I can handle another winter here but whatever happens Iʼve learnt something important and met the people who matter because despite thinking this would be home for a while I now know I need to tick off a few more boxes before the energy begins to ebb.

Many young people have asked me how I could have led such a wild and exciting life. The truth is that I had the energy to do it when I was younger and was frightened of it all at the time. Now that Iʼm older there is little that fazes me but the energy to relocate once more diminishes with each passing year.

So what are the most important lessons I can share? Well read the 48 laws of power and there you have a comprehensive list of 48 immutable laws I have broken. Donʼt do that please. There is one maxim that is important and will help you in a planning/advertising career more than any abundance of intellect, more than any charisma or creative surplus or rock and roll lifestyle:
Itʼs nice to be important, but itʼs important to be nice.

Lastly if youʼre considering a move into the marketing communications business and you have no regard for the great challenges we face as a planet you will always be restricted by the limitations you have set yourself. Selling stuff is easy. Selling the right stuff the right way takes courage, vision and patience.

I know because Iʼm still waiting.....

Star Stories: Marcus Brown

Photo courtesy of Matt Baker

One of the best things about blogging is that you get to meet amazing people. Marcus Brown is one of these amazing people. He does a lot of stuff, but as a start you should check out his blog: The Kaiser Edition. He ain't German, but he lives there. And his story of how he got into advertising is pretty damn awesome.

Now then, I have to admit that I have no idea about graduate programs and the likes. Never heard of them, let alone been on one so if you wanted to find out how to 'best get through one and then get a job in the advertising world' this isn't the article for you. Sorry. In fact I was a little surprised that Sam asked me at all, but ask me he did.

So here we go.

One day, back when the Internet was black and white and I was standing in front of an industrial photocopying machine I got a call from a man who spoke German badly. He wanted to know if I had ever thought about working in advertising. I asked him if there was any money in it and he said yes and I then informed him that I had just, that very minute, been thinking about a career in advertising and isn't life funny like that. He agreed and invited me in for a chat about the internet and commercials and things.

I had no idea who this man was, I had never heard of Ammirati Puris Lintas and I had always thought that people who do advertising must be complete and utter tossers with the attention span of goldfish. That was 10 years ago and I can confirm that nearly all people in advertising are complete and utter tossers with the attention span of goldfish.

I was actually determined to turn down any job offer and go back to being a freelance artist/ graphic designer/ web developer who just happened to also work in a photocopy shop. I did, after all have my principles.

I arrived at the agency and was guided by the man who had invited me (one of the partners) into a little room where he asked me if I wouldn't mind helping building the internet department for APL and if I could do stuff in Macromedia Flash. I informed him I'd never used Flash before. This unsettled him a little and he left the room only to return with a PowerBook and went on to inform me that in around an hour we had a presentation to give and he had informed his partners that I was the famous 'Mr.Brown' (I was an artist back then and was enjoying a little coverage in Frankfurt) and that there would be moving pictures and things would happen when we rolled over things with the cursor (can you make something go 'beep'?)

So I had less than an hour to learn how to use Macromedia Flash and design a presentation with moving pictures and rollovers but completely void of any content. “Just make sure it looks really sexy; that was my brief. The fate of an entire department depended on it; depended on Macromedia Flash.

Later I was asked if I would like to take the job. Remember those principles? "fuck'em" I said yes.

It's a true story. That's how I got into advertising.

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.

Star Stories: Simon Veksner

Our fifth star story comes courtesy of Simon Veksner, a creative at BBH. Simon's been involved in a lot of high profile campaigns, most notably this for Vodafone. His blog, Scamp, is one of the most widely read creative blog on the internet, and can be found here.

HOW I GOT INTO THE BUSINESS

by Simon Veksner

I’m one of those sad people that just always really liked advertising. I even sang jingles in my primary school playground. (Hey, whatever happened to jingles? Surely it’s time they came back…)

My dad used to work at the Sunday Times and I would beg him to bring me home copies of their poster ads. They had a very cool campaign back then, with the endline “Haven’t you ever wished you were better informed?” It ran on images like Anne Boleyn about to get married to Henry VIII.

I was quite academic so I ended up going to Oxford University, and then I applied to ad agencies in the milk round. I got offered a job at BMP, as an Account Handler. I think one of the reasons they wanted to hire me was because I was so enthusiastic about advertising.

However, I was also very naïve. I hadn’t done any research – literally jack-all - and I actually didn’t know that there was such a thing as Creatives, who wrote the ads. When I found this out, I decided not to take the job.

I think that was the right decision, as it’s not really possible to transfer to the Creative Department once you get into the industry. It’s a separate skill-set, and requires specific training. Not to mention completely different outfits.

In fact, to get a job as a Creative, you really have to do a specialist course in that. There are several out there, the best-known ones being at Watford College, St Martin’s in London, and Bucks college.

So that’s what I did. I went to Watford, to do their one-year course in Copywriting.

These courses are an excellent foundation, and a great place to meet a partner (Creatives always work in teams of two – an Art Director and a Copywriter).

However, it’s very rare to get a job straight after leaving college. You have to spend time building up a portfolio, a collection of ‘spec’ ads that demonstrate how good you’d be on a real brief. Once your portfolio is up to scratch, you start to get offered placements at agencies, and the most common way to get a job is by doing well on a placement.

It’s competitive, and a lot don’t make it. Even the good people can take a year or more before they get a real job, so you have to be prepared to sponge off your parents or sleep on the streets for a little bit longer than most graduates. But people in the industry are very helpful, and normally very willing to see young teams and give them advice on their portfolios.

My first job was at Saatchi & Saatchi, where I worked for 2 years, and since then I’ve worked at Ogilvy (for one year) and DDB (which used to be BMP - ironically, the place I’d originally applied to be an account handler) for 7 years. I’m now at BBH.

The life of a creative is not all TV shoots in Miami and recording voiceovers with Judi Dench. But some of it is. Then again, some of it is writing a 99p deal ad for hamburgers.

If you think you might be interested, then the best place to start is probably to contact the colleges. They will tell you more.

Star Stories: Jonathan Rigby

Our fourth star story comes courtesy of Jonathan Rigby, a Founding Partner at LOVE Creative. Within the industry, Jonathan has had a wide range of experiences at London agencies, before moving northwards to Manchester and setting up LOVE. Their agency blog can be found here.

SOMETIMES BRIBERY PAYS OFF

by Jonathan Rigby

I joined the industry as an Account Executive. I’ve been a Board Director at WCRS, a New Business Director at Lowe and a Managing Director at FCB London. I’m now a partner in a fast expanding “new model agency” called LOVE in Manchester.

To get into advertising, I sent £5 notes as bribes to 10 London agencies figuring they’d feel humbled into replying to my letter in order to return the cash of an impoverished student. It worked. I got 10 replies and 9 fivers back (the cheeky gits at an agency called Arc kept my fiver!) and a work placement at WCRS. I spent the summer there doing anything I could volunteer for.

I wasn’t over-bearing and annoyingly over-enthusiastic (as far as I remember), just polite, quite quiet and keen and I made sure I did everything as thoroughly and professionally as I could. I spent days and nights writing, typing and binding a report for a pitch and Robin Wight (founder and chairman) liked it. Robin remembered me a year later when I applied for a full time job and my advertising career started. Four grads were recruited that year. Giles was sharp and very funny. Lorella was loud and great fun. Alison was really professional and intelligent. And they hired me too.

The point is, not all agencies hire a “type” of person. Like putting a boy/girl band together, they’re looking for a mix of people, so be yourself and don’t take it personally if you get a rejection from one agency. You might be the perfect fit for the next. The first year or so was about learning, listening and doing as much as I possibly could. As a grad in 1991, you certainly knew your place and ruthless, blind ambition was frowned upon. Have things changed? Is it the done thing to be in a rush to be a Board Director nowadays? Do grads tolerate the requests to make the tea, write the contact report, keep a wallet full of twenties and run across busy roads for the cab?

I learnt to become an indispensable member of my team. I asked questions. I tried not to be annoying and arrogant. I wasn’t in too much of a rush to get ahead. I was in London and I was 21 – concentrating too much on work would have wasted the most hedonistic years of my life. When you start in an agency, you might think that no-one ever notices you or is too busy to be thinking about or discussing how you’re progressing. Wrong!

You’ll be talked about by everyone because you’re new and you’ll be being judged for your contribution to the culture of the agency. Positively or negatively. Oh and make sure you make genuine friends with the most important people to you in the agency – the person who orders couriers, the post room, the edit suite, the person in charge of petty cash, the finance department, junior creatives, traffic and production, the security guards, secretaries (do agencies still have secretaries?), the cleaners.

This will quadruple your ability to get things done against all the odds in your formative years. You need these people. But it will also teach you the importance of being civil, polite, nice and never to burn bridges in such a small industry where everyone knows everyone, reputations are quickly made and memories are long.

Star Stories: Gareth Kay

Our third star story comes from Gareth Kay, an expat Yorkshireman. He's currently head of planning at Modernista!, an agency in Boston that not so long ago won Cadillac's US business. He also writes a blog called Brand New, which is a great read.

PERSEVERANCE PAYS OFF.

by Gareth Kay

I fell into advertising by chance rather than design. I had my heart set on working in the music industry so when my band failed, I looked to be an A&R man. But after some work experience at a major record label, I realized it was more about business than the music, and the politics and backstabbing were truly amazing.

So I began in my second year at University to think about what I could do. I was studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford Uni and didn't want to fall into the trap of satisfying one side of my brain by going to a bank or a management consultant (which I think about 80% of my year did).

So in thinking about a career that might exercise all my mind and frankly be fun I thought about all the ads I had grown up enjoying. Didn't really have a clue about any of the agencies or disciplines, so I just wrote for placements at the dozen agencies that had that year won prizes in the Daily Telegraph Press Awards.

Eleven agencies said thanks but no thanks, but there was one moment of serendipity. I met with a small agency (no longer around) called Harari Page (probably best known for their work on Harvey Nichols) who were willing to take on a placement. Spent 3 fun months being thrown in at the deep end, predominantly as an account man but helping out in TV production, print production and planning (which was more of a research thing there). At the end of the summer they offered me a job which I took as an account exec.

So, my first year was spent being an account exec. And there was real benefit to that. You learn about how stuff is made, timelines, budgets. And the benefit of a small agency is you end up being exposed to every discipline and working out what you like doing. So, I decided planning was my thing - I enjoyed working with creatives to develop work, was curious about people, culture, brands and enjoyed the strategy part. The next challenge was finding somewhere to be a planner.

After 18 months or so I began to get the usual call from headhunters and every time I told them I wanted to be a planner they said "good luck finding a place". Eventually, I began to interview at agencies with more established planning departments in the hope to get a job as an account person and quickly transfer.

I interviewed at a place called BST.BDDP (now part of TBWA) and I was offered a job as an account manager. That was the point I decided to get serious and I turned down the offer and explained that I wanted to be a planner. The MD there, Nick Kerr who I owe a huge amount of gratitude, decided he liked me enough to arrange a lunch with their head of planning Chris Baker. Chris is a pretty legendary figure, especially in terms of ad effectiveness, and he decided he'd take a chance on two account managers who wanted to be planners and hired myself and Rob Alexander who is now a planning director at JWT.

So it was about perseverance and serendipity. Being really passionate in the end about planning. And being lucky. After Chris I was lucky enough to continue working with the who's who of planners - Simon Clemmow, Gary Duckworth, John Lowery and many other people I learned and stole from. And it's down to them and the trust they placed in me that I really owe any success I have.

I know it's hard to get in to planning, and hard to establish yourself, but stick to it. I think perseverance works, and I think it brings you some serendipity down the road. It's a great job. And probably the most exciting time to be in advertsing, especially as a planner, since the 1950s as it's all up for grabs.

Star Stories: Giles Rhys Jones

Our 2nd star story is upon us courtesy of Giles Rhys Jones who is the Director of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy UK. Giles' blog - Interactive Marketing Trends is here as well as in our links section. We also recommend you have a look at Ogilvy's graduate recruitment site.

HOW I GOT TO WHERE I AM NOW.

By Giles Rhys Jones

Nearing the end of my degree in Industrial Design and having missed the grad recruitment rounds, I watched all my friends picking up design or city jobs and had abit of a panic.

Not realising that this was a situation that I would replicate often in later life, this pressure seemed to bring out, if not the best, then a slightly above average performance in me. Being of a creative persuasion I produced a 6 page cv booklet to send to prospective employers with each of the pages focussing on a particular skill with a relevant photo of me, a description and examples. I bought a business directory and sent out 74 of these to the top advertising and design companies in the UK and US. This led to a number of interviews and some very interesting conversations.

At the same time the older brother of a friend of mine was as a grad at Saatchi & Saatchi and offered to take my letter to his boss. I got a call and was asked to come in to meet them. After a couple of interviews I was offered a 2 week summer job starting the day after my last final. A couple of weeks later I started work on the pan euro HP business as a ae.

A couple of weeks later I got an extension to stay longer and 2 months later they even started paying me £50 quid a week. After a few more interviews, quite alot of beer and some half decent work they invited me to join full time and be part of the coming years grad trainees.

After 2 years of spreading press, poster, wobblers, gondola ends and DM across 17 countries for HP, I shed the shackles of traditional channel thinking by moving into their emerging media group: Saatchi Vision. Amazingly lighting a 747 up with a laser, causing outcry with a graffiti campaign for Random House and plastering a talking 3D supermodel on bus stops for Playtex produced results as well as being great fun.

Three years helping to run the Digital Marketing Group at AGENCY.COM working on BA, Oneworld & Heineken gave me the ability to 'top-trump' interstitials, virals, CPCs and eCRM with the best of them and, more often than not, win.

Not able to find an agency I liked, I helped to create Agency Republic delivering campaigns that crossed wireless, traditional and digital channels, generated results and appalled other roster agencies on clients like O2 and Boots.

A year at The Brand Company in Asia followed, travelling, buying cheap gadgets and helping Vodafone/Smartone to work out that branding is not just what they say but actually what they do.

The opportunity to gain more line management experience running the global integrated HSBC account at DRAFT tempted me back to the Uk and into advertising.

As Interactive Strategy Director, I am responsible for digital marketing strategy across clients including IBM, Ford, Cisco and BT.

The only traditional title I have had was that of Account Executive at Saatchi, since then I have made pretty much made up job titles. Where once, not fitting into an advertising job box was a hinderance and headhunters struggled to come to terms with what I could offer. Now as advertising needs to become smarter in how it works rather than just bigger, there is positive descrimination for people who have a broad range of T-shaped skills.

Looking at how my career has moved across disciplines and companies I guess you could say I have ants in my pants but I am just passionate about how to better connect businesses and their audience.

There is always a better way.

Star Stories: Jon Steel

Here is our first 'Star Story', by Jon Steel, Director of the WPP Fellowship. This will be posted on the Wiki shortly, along with other people's personal experiences of getting into the industry.

THE JOB I ALWAYS WANTED, BUT NEVER KNEW EXISTED.

by Jon Steel


I am writing this by accident.

You see, I was never supposed to work in advertising. I should have been teaching geography and coaching the 1st XI cricket team at some leafy English private school. If I ever really had a plan, that was it.

But twenty-five years after leaving university, I have spent my entire working life in the advertising business. I was a director of a London agency after five years; within ten I was a partner at another agency in San Francisco. Since 2002 I have worked for Sir Martin Sorrell at WPP, one of the world’s largest marketing communications groups.

So where did it all go wrong?

It all started when a friend suggested that I should apply for jobs in the advertising business. He told me that all the good jobs – and therefore the interviews – would be in London. And in London, he said, he knew a number of fun-loving nurses.

That seemed quite appealing. As I started to research the business and its requirements for graduates, it also seemed that advertising might be a good fit for me. In a year spent working for my university’s students’ union I had run advertising for the newspaper and radio station and managed a number of full-time staff. I had been told I could write reasonably well. I had a good degree. Even without the nurses I would have felt compelled to apply.

I applied to about fifteen agencies for a position in account management (the account manager is the person who represents the client’s business interests inside the agency). Within a few weeks I had been rejected by fourteen of them, including all the major agencies owned today by WPP. At the fifteenth, BMP, I was asked whether I might prefer to be an account planner. When I admitted that I had never heard of such a role, my interviewer explained that planners used consumer research to help craft advertising strategy. I told him that it didn’t really appeal to me.

BMP subsequently hired me as an account manager, but only when their first-choice candidate turned them down for a higher paid job in the City. Within six months I had transferred from account management to account planning. (Once inside the agency I had seen the job in a new light and had discovered that it was more interesting than I had initially thought.) Five years later I was surprised to find myself running a planning department in an agency in San Francisco, a job I held for a decade. On my return to the UK – again unexpected – I now find myself working on a daily basis with the management of agencies like Ogilvy & Mather, Grey, Young & Rubicam and J. Walter Thompson, all of whom had rejected me when I first applied a quarter of a century ago.

My career has been full of accidents, and it has also been enriched by others who stumbled into jobs they probably always wanted but never knew existed. At BMP I was trained in the ways of advertising by a man whose degree was in aeronautical engineering, and by another who was a classics scholar; in the ensuing years I have hired lawyers, doctors, and engineers and even a killer whale trainer, all of whom realized along the way that they didn’t really want to be lawyers, doctors, engineers or (surprisingly) killer whale trainers.

I tell you all of this for three main reasons:

First, being focused and having a plan is not all it’s cracked up to be. Over the years I have met a lot of unhappy people who were doing the jobs that their parents and teachers always wanted them to do. I’m sure there are lots of people out there heading for careers in teaching, management consultancy, law, or indeed anything and everything else, who would actually have a lot more fun in the marketing communications business if they knew what it had to offer.

Second, being rejected is not the end of the world. In my case, it was probably a good thing that all those other agencies rejected me when I was twenty-one, because I later realized that I wouldn’t have been happy at most of them. At my first agency I found the perfect job, in an environment that suited my personality. At other places I would have been a fish out of water. With every rejection I also learned some important lessons, and in the end, albeit with a generous dose of luck, I was able to put them to good use.

My final point relates to my experience of rejection. Each year as the director of WPP’s Marketing Fellowship programme I have to say ‘no’ to almost 1,500 applicants, but when I do so I always try to remember how it felt when I was the recipient of such bad news. In those days the news came in a letter. Sometimes they started with “Dear Mr. Steel.” Others addressed me with “Dear Candidate.” One started, surprisingly, with “Dear Shirley.” But one recruitment director took the time to write me a personal letter, and I have never forgotten that. BMP’s chief executive actually took the time to call me after my first interview and explain what was going on. Now I can’t make 1,500 phone calls, but I do always call the one hundred or so interviewees and give them feedback on our meeting. If they haven’t made it I tell them why.

It’s impossible to make anyone feel happy when telling them they haven’t made it, that the answer is ‘no.’ But you should never forget that when you hear that dreaded word, it may well signify the beginning of something much better.

Jon Steel is the Director of WPP’s Marketing Fellowship Programme, and author of “Truth, Lies & Advertising” and “Perfect Pitch” (John Wiley & Sons, NY). He still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up.