Advertising. The business in which you can become rich and famous before you're old enough to shave or wear make-up.
Because advertising gets as much attention as it does, and since you've probably heard that people in advertising are all incredibly wealthy, with a different colored Lamborghini for each day of the week, you'd be entitled to think that's what it's like to be in the "ole ad game."
The trouble is, you'd be wrong.
The real advertising world is nothing like the one portrayed in a Tony Curtis movie, and it isn't the free and easy life with nothing but jeans, high salaries, and no real responsibilities, either.
Don't get the wrong idea, though. A career in advertising is a far cry from life as a cloistered monk: you can have a lot of fun and the financial rewards can be great. But you'll have to work for it.
You've got to know what's going on in the world, too. It's been said that people in the advertising business are the genre artists of our time. They show us a vision of our world in print and on radio and television. Its beauty and its horror. They show us ourselves. Who we are. Who we want to be. If you want to get into the advertising business, you must have the ability to do that, too. Some people call this a talent, and part of it is. But part of it is simply looking at what's around you and describing it without feeling embarrassed or afraid; and, with a little practice, you can learn how to do that.
It's traffic's responsibility to keep track of every job in the agency: who's working on it, the exact stage that it's in, what has to be done to get it to the next stage, and exactly when it's scheduled to get there. One or possibly two traffic people will be assigned to do this. Before long, everyone in the agency will count on traffic to know everything about every part of the job. (Incidentally, that is why a job in traffic is a tremendous way to learn the agency business, even though it's thankless work in many ways. The only time the people in traffic are really noticed is when they make a mistake, which means that if they do their job well, they never get much attention at all. They get lots of work, but not much day-to-day "Hey, you wanna have lunch" attention. And never-but never-as much credit as they deserve.)
Over the course of the next few weeks, the creative teams do concept after concept. When they arrive at an idea for a television or radio commercial that they like, they call in one of the agency broadcast producers and discuss it with him. When they get an idea for a print ad, they talk it over with the print production manager. They do this because there's no point in doing concepts which, for some reason, aren't feasible to produce.
When the creative teams have arrived at ads and commercials that they think will do the job for Mr. Brown, they have a meeting with the creative director. If the CD doesn't like what he sees, the teams make changes until he agrees with what they've done. Then, when media has gone through the same steps and has arrived at their recommendations, they meet again with the creative and account service departments to plan the presentation to the client.
Naturally, traffic is involved too. Traffic is involved with everything.
Needless to say, there's a lot at stake in any advertising venture. That's why advertisers and agencies alike must be very choosy about the people they hire, and why the best people get the best jobs. An advertising agency can be responsible for spending hundreds of millions of dollars, and no company spends their advertising bucks, even if they amount to only hundreds of hundreds, without expecting to get some very positive results.
The heat is always on the agency. Jobs at the agency are always on the line. It's just something you learn to live with. The bigger the client, the bigger the expected results, and the more jobs at the agency that are on the line. And when a client leaves an agency, agency jobs usually follow it out the door.
People who work on the client side of the business - for advertisers - have just as much at stake, and feel the pressure for results just as sharply; because, when the agency's marketing, media, and creative executions are ineffective, the product or service the advertiser sells collects dust instead of sales receipts. Usually, the advertiser feels the heat is on him to make sure the agency does its job, because if the advertising doesn't work for the client, some of the people in his own office won't work there anymore, either.
It's a pretty simple equation when you stop to think about it: money from conducting business equals money for jobs.
With pressure like that, it's no wonder that agencies and advertisers want only the best people.
There's another side to this story, though. Just as advertisers and agencies can say, "I want only great people working for my company," a job hunter can say, "I want to work only for a great company."
This is not a ludicrous statement, and it's one that far too few people think about. True, you've got to put rice in your bowl and a roof over your head, but the fact remains that not all companies are right for all people. A firm where your friend works and to which he is fanatically loyal may be the worst possible place for you. So, you must interview companies while they're interviewing you. You must ask yourself whether you think the work a particular company does is merely adequate, or absolutely tremendous. If you're so impressed with a company's attitude and work that you'd do anything to work there, then do anything to work there.
