If an engineer like me can leave his engineering career and enter into an advertising agency, so can you. It might seem hard right now but trust me it is easier than you think. Just keep reading this blog and I promise you that this will give you the right direction that I was seeking before I got into advertising.
Good that this question came to your mind and you know what you want to do in life. This is a question that I was asking myself when I was thinking to get out of my graphic designing job in a small startup during my final year of post graduation in a design college. I just had no idea how can I get into the advertising.
Not because It was my childhood dream to be in advertising, but when I heard about the working culture, time flexibilities, creating and designing ads and all the fun that it involves. It was just way too exciting for me at that time. And trust me it is not just a hype. All this is true.
I work in an advertising agency and the company that I am working in is my second company. And I know all the secret doors that you can use if you want to get in, but only the worthy ones would be able to enter! Lol I am kidding anyone, literally anyone with any graduation degree can enter the door of advertising, If you want to be a creative resource then you just need to have the basic knowledge of the software like; Illustrator and Photoshop which I am guessing you are already aware of since you are already searching to get into an advertising agency and if not, then do not worry it would take a couple of months to learn them. Otherwise, there are some other prerequisites for other jobs in advertising.
There are three major ways through which you can get into advertising;
1. As a creative
2. Client Servicing
3. Strategy
These are the three basic pillars on which advertising is standing on, also there are other resources as well like finance, programmers for digital and website building, HR etc but I will focus on above three jobs in this blog.
You need to understand all the of them in order to figure out how you can get into the advertising.
Creative:
Obviously, you guys would have already guessed that I am also part of the creative team, it is not that hard to guess after going through the website, and if this is the first time on this site, this is an important piece of information that you should keep in mind. These are the people who sit behind a Mac or write their butt off all day long and curse about why the hell the client cannot understand the creative perspective of the ad.
As a creative our job is to write and conceptualize the Print or Digital ads, films and radio, In mainline advertising, our responsibilities are print ads for newspaper, hoardings, or other print mediums, films, campaigns, radio etc. And in digital advertising, it is about social media posts, digital campaigns, digital campaigns, online video, ads, and some occasional layouts to be posted on the website etc.
Client Servicing:
These are the ones which most of the creatives think are just having fun and they do not have an actual work to do rather than just talking and bringing them shitty briefs. But that is not true at all after having so many friends in servicing I understand their pain and problems, And I might be betraying my creative society for saying this but they do have a serious job in advertising Lol. Pray that my team and Creative Director doesn’t ever find out a word that I have said. They might boycott me.
These people are responsible for talking to the client and understand the work that needs to be done. And according to that, they write a brief to give to the creative team.
Basically what they do is they take all the client’s frustration sometimes and they take the creative’s frustration as well for why the work has been rejected. But they cannot say much in their defence for two reasons, number one they cannot say a word to the client, second they want the creative to be made so they cannot try to piss off creative people.
Strategy:
Responsible for the intensive research of consumer and market, they put their brains to work for the study on a product or the campaign by getting aware of the details and statistics, And as their designation suggests they make strategies, most of these people always boast from the college they have done their MBA’s. But there is always one thing that the conversation will be pretty good when you are talking to them, they always have too much information about every topic for the conversation.
Now as you know about what might be the work that you can do in advertising let us talk about how you can go about it.
How to make your way in?
To get in as a creative resource you don’t need to hold graduation in Art or advertising. Any formal graduation would be sufficient for that. But what is important is you ought to know how to work on Illustrator and Photoshop if you want to design or you need to be good as a writer.
To get into client servicing also doesn’t need you to get a particular graduation degree, any formal graduation would be good. Skill wise some good talking skills would be better and if you don’t have those just get in and you will learn how to get your work done.
To get in as a strategist I am not aware whether the MBA is necessary or not.
As an intern would be the easiest way to get into advertising, enter as an intern which is for around 1-2 months. It would be a little hard for you to get your ads released unless you have the creative talent, good command over your software. But you don’t get paid much as an intern.
Then when your internship is about to get over, talk to your Team head or Creative Director to promote you as a trainee, and traineeship can vary from 3-24 months and sometimes even more. For me, it lasted for 3.5 months. It depends on your performance and luck. But you need to push your team head or the reporting Creative Director to get you promoted as a trainee.
After your traineeship, you will be a junior Art Director or Copywriter. ( In some companies they might give you a designation of visualizer as well, but don’t worry work will be the same. It depends on company to company.)
From here there is only way up and you will get the rest. All you need to do is be persistent with the action and always put in the time to learn more and research about the great work being done in the advertising by other agencies.
Also, one important thing would be if you have your sources and contacts it would be of great help, it just saves you a lot of time.
P.S.- Always spend some time studying and researching about the great work being done by other agencies to have an edge and be expose to what is being done. This will lead to your own growth. ( I am not asking you to copy other’s work but just learn and get inspired to do great work yourself, the agency world is pretty small and it will be exposed if you are doing plagiarism)
