10 Lessons I learned from a career in advertising

So you don’t have to

I have a friend who’d been working in China for a long time. He said that after a week of being there you feel like you can write a book about China. After a year, you could manage an essay.

After ten years of living in China, you would probably end up with a postcard.

Advertising is a bit like China in that way. After almost 20 years of doing it, I feel I can barely squeeze out a few core themes that would fit on the back of a postcard. Maybe after another 10, I could write one on the back of a business card.

I got into advertising because it was my Plan B. When I was in high school, I read a novel which was set in an ad agency. I knew the author had actually worked in advertising before, so I presumed that some of it was based on real experience. In the story, I got the feeling, that advertising would be a place where you could earn a decent living, without any formal qualifications.

You’d only need your ability to think creatively.

From that point on, I parked a career as an advertising copywriter as an escape hatch - an industry to go to if my plan A bombed out.

Plan A did in fact flame-out in spectacular fashion. Towards the end of my 19th year in this world, I found myself trying to sell the most awful copy test (a set of lateral thinking problems agencies used to test a person’s ability to approach advertising briefs) to…