Maybe The Most Important Thing You'll EVER Read While Putting Your Portfolio Together.

A View From An AdGuy Number 300: Maybe The Most Important Thing You'll EVER Read While Putting Your Portfolio Together.


Originally posted this February 19th, 2011 (and was my 300th Blog Posting) to assist advertising students to better understand what they need to consider to 'build' a better portfolio. To date this post has had over 8,336 visits.  Enjoy!

What better way to celebrate my 300th Blog Posting then to feature a piece from someone I highly respect and admire. Suzanne Pope. Her blog Ad Teachings" is a must follow and can be found on Twitter ad @SuzannePope.

Have you ever read something or come across an article and said to yourself, "damn it, I wish I had written that".

Well here is one of those pieces and it's a story I have told (literally this exact story) a hundred times over the years during both my advertising and teaching careers. But after reading the thoughts and the version that Suzanne Pope a Creative Director at john st. Toronto published on her blog "Ad Teachings", I felt it was something very important to also share here for the future AdLanders putting their portfolios together and to the industry at-large.

Throughout her career she has been dedicate to creating brilliant and innovative communication messages for clients but in recent years she has taught copywriting at Humber College and has been a regular at the various Portfolio Review Nights. Suzanne has also contributed articles to ihaveanidea.org to help in the development of better "creative" idea building.  From those writings she recently launched her blog where she proudly boasts:  

"I STARTED THIS BLOG TO PROVIDE FREE ADVICE AND INSTRUCTION TO YOUNG PEOPLE IN ADVERTISING. I HOPE IT HELPS"

Trust me Suzanne, thus far, mission accomplished and the added bonus... It’s just like school, minus the tuition and text book costs.

I have had the privilege and honor of meeting Suzanne a number of years ago at various industry events and quickly we developed a mutual respect for the development of future "Ad Landers". I have described Suzanne as inspirational, dedicated but most important passionate to the craft of copywriting. Hardly enough to describe what Suzanne brings to her engagement with young aspiring creative thinkers.

There isn't a time that Suzanne wont find time to help a young AdLander with a review of a portfolio or provide information on career direction. Her honesty is not lost, most leave after meeting Suzanne more inspired not only to do better, but are inspired to improve their craft. Her passion is infectious.
As an educator I am proud to have developed a professional and personal relationship with her, and I am honored to call Suzanne an colleague in the development of young talent.

Thank you Suzanne for this great piece, but also for your commitment to future AdLanders by posting inspiring content on your Blog.

Originally published on Suzanne Pope's blog "Ad Teachings"

ON THE SINGLE GREATEST THREAT FACING THE ADVERTISING STUDENT

A number of years ago, I had an advertising student whose thirst for success far outstripped the quality of her work.  I think her work would have improved if she had been willing to listen to me or her other instructors, but that never happened. If I gave her 70% on an ad, she would become annoyed and say that it deserved 80%. I started giving her 72% or something just to avoid the arguments, but my explicit message to her never changed: Unless the quality of your ads improves, you will have a very hard time getting hired.
I don’t know what became of this woman, because I’ve never heard from her since. But I did hear through the grapevine that she ended up being vocally bitter about the instruction she had received from me and my colleagues. Her complaint, surprisingly, was that we ought to have graded her more harshly.  The complaint developed when this woman started taking her portfolio around to interviews.  She heard none of the effusive praise she had expected. Instead, creative directors ripped her book to shreds. Thus, she decided, her instructors were to blame for having failed to prepare her for the tough standards that awaited her in the real world.

If this story has you shaking your head in disbelief, you’re probably okay. You’re probably a very good student, at least in terms of reacting to bad news about your ads. You are open to the possibility that your instructors are right, and that you need to go back and work a little harder. But I have observed that there’s a significant minority of students who cannot tolerate the suggestion that their talent is anything less than exceptional. When their work is criticized, they scarcely seem to hear. It is as if they are listening instead to the fanfare they imagine will play when the team of unicorns pulls their chariot through the front door of Wieden+Kennedy.

If you’re not sure whether you’re vulnerable to this attitudinal threat, there’s one simple question that will reveal all: Have you ever responded to a disappointing mark by questioning the credentials of your instructors? A disgruntled student might say that one professor hasn’t worked in an agency for years, or that another never won any important awards. These comments might be true, but it doesn’t matter, because they actually have nothing to do with the instructors at all. They are actually an expression of the student’s desperate hope that creative directors will judge his work more favourably than his instructors did. But I can tell you that this never happens. I have never seen student work get praised by a creative director after being panned by an instructor. If you are holding on to this faint hope, the time has come to unhitch your unicorns, smack them on the hindquarters and dry your tears as they gallop off into the hills.

Most instructors will be kind in their criticisms. This is because applying professional standards to students isn’t helpful, any more than it would be helpful for a piano teacher to apply professional standards of musicianship to a twelve-year-old. Your instructors are focusing on developing your discernment as an advertising person, to help you build your potential through an understanding of what is or isn’t a good advertising idea. And, actually, that is all that most creative directors are looking for. There’s a famous ad person I know who got his first job on the strength of the one decent idea in his book.  That’s all.  The rest of his book was garbage, but that one good ad let the creative director know that the guy was trainable. And trainability isn’t just about what you show in your book. It’s also about what you show in your attitude.

Advertising is a business that humbles all of us sooner or later.  You will be much happier, personally and professionally, if you choose to humble yourself right now.

© 2011 Suzanne Pope - http://www.adteachings.com/post/3217718212/on-the-single-greatest-threat-faci...

The Terrors of Writing. What Scares You?

This article came to my attention by Executive Creative Director Suzanne Pope of john st. Advertising in Toronto.

The absolute truths are brilliantly presented.

The Terrors of Writing

by Professor Reinekke Lengelle
Athabasca University (Canada)

The Terror of Procrastination:

Weeding the garden or sorting the kitchen junk drawer can become incredibly important when we have writing to do. In his book The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes says: “fear and courage are like lightning and thunder; they both start out at the same time, but the fear travels faster and arrives sooner.” The good news is, if you start writing despite the fear, “the requisite courage will be along shortly.” Three tips to combat this terror: focus solely on the task at hand, drop perfectionism, and identify who your reader is. This applies whether you are writing a promotional message for your new business, a difficult e-mail to your boss or union rep, a patient chart, an essay, or a novel.

The Terror of Rejection:

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck was rejected 14 times yet later won a Pulitzer. Mary Higgins Clark’s work was rejected 40 times before she sold more than 25 million books. She didn’t give up when one editor told her, “your stories are light, slight, and trite”. Even The Diary Of Anne Frank received the following rejection comment: “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the curiosity level.” It was rejected 16 times before being published by Doubleday in 1952; more than 30 million copies are now in print. So, take heart and remember that rejection shows up in every aspect of life; writing just teaches you to deal with it sooner.

The Terror of Revelation:

Flannery O’Connor wrote that anyone who has survived childhood has enough to write about for the rest of his or her life. Some people want to climb K2, others psyche themselves gambling, but not you – you want to tell the sweet and bitter truth about your family, even if it’s fiction-wrapped. But you’re human too. Is it any wonder that Canadian poet and author Lorna Crozier didn’t tell her mother about the essay “What Stays in the Family” when it was published in 2001 in the anthology Dropped Threads. In her piece she wrote about her alcoholic father peeing in his shoe. About five years after publication a junior minister used parts of Crozier’s essay in a sermon in her mother’s home-town church. I’ll leave it to your imagination what kind of message Lorna’s mother left for her on the answering machine. There is no definitive way to avoid or solve this terror to anyone’s satisfaction.

The Terror of Criticism (or worse yet, the terror of “reader silence”):

Dorothy Parker once wrote, “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Yet, a scathing review can sell more books than a good one. However receiving criticism on your work is like being told your child is ugly, failed, or fat. Reader silence might be worse though; the “that’s nice” look in the eyes of someone you respect can leave you tossing and turning. You will haunt yourself with what you believe they are thinking about you and your work, while they are off getting a good night’s rest.

The Terror of the Blank Page:  

Your cursor blinks at you; a shadow falls on the too-smooth page of your new journal. But how different is this kind of resistance compared with going to the gym, sorting through a messy closet, or walking the West coast trail? You will face this terror again and again. If the blank page never daunts you, you may have set your standards too low. Failure isn’t a shame, not starting is. And a consolation: writing is hard work because you are creating something ‘new’; as Anais Nin once said, “The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”

The Terror of (perceived) Mediocrity: 

Consider this: before Elizabeth Gilbert wrote Eat, Pray, Love, she had been writing for more than a decade for a small dedicated group of readers. She wrote about men and men’s issues. She wasn’t famous. On Ted-talks, she spoke about the terror of not being able to reproduce her success. (Though her latest book Committed is now on the New York bestseller’s list). Let the words of Madeleine L’engle inspire you to simply get down to work and forget about achievement for the moment. “A book comes and says, Write me. My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.”

The Terror of Comparison: 

This last terror is my favourite. Imagine this. Your newest book is just out. You are happy to notice the only irksome thing about the finished product is that you’ve used the phrase “it struck me” three times on page 34. You read your bio a few times, smile, then pat yourself on the back and go to bed. Once in bed you pick up a book by – say someone like Elizabeth Gilbert – you read her bio and compare it to yours. You realize she is younger than you. This kind of envy has caused writers to reach for the scotch. I go for chocolate and tell myself that Elizabeth Gilbert has no children to raise and interfere with her writing; I start to collect evidence that childless women are more successful as writers. Then I remember that Ursula LeGuin has three; Barbara Tuchman had five; I (re)consider the scotch.

Attention Young Copywriters: READ THIS OR DIE

So no matter how I hard or any of my colleagues try (and boy do we try… like all the time), we preach… no strike that, plead that young copywriters understand that there's an art form to great writing.

The art of finding the BIG IDEA or CONCEPT is a major challenge, but bigger is the issue of great "wordsmithing" or "crafting" the words that in fact connect with the audience. Connect and inform. Connect and feel. Connect... period.

Suzanne Pope, the GCD of john st. in Toronto has written a brilliant piece that helps young copywriters better understand the "craft". Suzanne breaks it down into Thematic, Hyperbole, Paradox, Personification you name it, it's there in black and white.

She has demonstrates with dozens of examples, she makes a point that great headlines and great concepts drive advertising.

But hey, you don't listen me or Lisa Atkins enough… you know the basics… but then again don't take my word for it. Check it out.

It's a must read. It will become a great reference.