How do you break into advertising?
That was the question I found myself asking after I decided to try my hand at writing for commerce over art. After 10 years working in advertising, I’m not sure there is a single good answer. But the one I found was the kind that generally works for me: following directions.
Back in early 2009 when I made this decision, Toronto’s Humber College offered an eight-month-long post graduate “certificate” program in Advertising Copywriting—the internet suggests they still offer this. All you needed to apply was a Bachelor’s Degree or College Diploma, the ability to write a spec ad (industry slang for “speculative advertisement” if it isn’t obvious enough), and the wherewithal to pay roughly $10k in tuition—the internet suggests tuition is currently around $9k… which might make more sense once you’re done reading about my experience.
Being only one year out of university without any job prospects beyond being a cook or a disgruntled freelance journalist, going back to school felt like a logical step. And thanks to an early (pre-death) inheritance of exactly $10,000 from my grandfather and my Mom agreeing to let me move back home, I could afford to go. The only barrier that remained was creating a spec ad. The assignment called for us to make an ad promoting the nutritional benefits of peas. Since it was 2009, and because the program coordinator didn’t have a finger anywhere near the pulse of current advertising (more on that in a bit), it was a newspaper ad. Now, you might be reading this hoping that I managed to dig up a copy of my application so I could show how bad my ad was. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find it.
Fortunately, I remember exactly what I submitted.
I likely only remember this, my first ever attempt at advertising writing, because I’m embarrassed by it now. Not because it’s a pun, but because it was my first idea, it feels lazy, and because it could be misread as “pees.” (Also, the ad doesn’t really make a lot of sense.) It’s been too long at this point, but I don’t think the quality of our spec ads is what decided whether or not we got accepted into Humber. It was likely more of a test to make sure we had decent grammar and didn’t create something (too) inappropriate. But looking back on my experience in the program, it might have been a sign that the program wasn’t exactly at the forefront of teaching innovative advertising.
What the program was in fact was utilitarian. At the time, it was one of two school options in Toronto for an aspiring advertising writer. It was a well-oiled machine that existed to get students to graduate—not necessarily graduate as students prepared to excel in advertising, but you’d definitely graduate! By this point you may have guessed that I didn’t have the most positive experience at Humber. While you’d be right, the program did expose me to some of the basic tenets of advertising writing and conceptual thinking, not to mention connecting me with fellow students I’m still friends with to this day. (Oh, and I eventually worked for one of my teachers.) The thing is, I feel like this all happened despite the program rather than because of it.
In the eight months I spent at Humber, I was sometimes confused, often flustered, and always worried about if what I was learning would actually help me land an internship at an ad agency—a requirement for graduating. This uncertainty was largely driven by the behaviour of the program coordinator who, along with being one of our teachers, had been overseeing the curriculum and structure of the program for a number of years. This person started things off by openly admitting they would have favourites (“superstars” was the preferred parlance) by the time we all started applying for internships. They then assigned us several outdated books on advertising copywriting to read, yet somehow failed to include the best book written on the subject: Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This. (I now believe you could read through this book a few times, create a portfolio of spec ads based off what you learn, and get an internship that way. In fact, I worked with someone who did just that.) Then, to really make sure we felt we would be prepared for the ad world, they had a meltdown in front of our entire class about how we weren’t learning enough about the latest trends in digital advertising. This happened two months into the program, but they assured us that next year the program would be brought up to speed and be better for next year’s class. Again, this was being told to us by the person that set the curriculum. The reception of this meltdown can best be summed up by this reply from one of my classmates, “So… should we reapply next year?”
At around this moment, many of us in the program realized that being told to “work harder” or “put another six hours towards it” maybe wasn’t the best instruction for creating good ads. Some of our instructors still held full-time jobs at ad agencies, but most had gone freelance long ago. Whether they had done so by choice or had been forced into it became a subject of debate amongst our class. I personally felt that there were only two good instructors in that first semester: Matt (shout out to my future/now former boss) for sharing actionable creative thinking methods and having the insights of a working creative director, and Gord for his blunt, fair feedback and showing us what it meant to truly “push” an idea to the edge of irresponsibility. Matt ended up having to quit after the first semester because his agency job was too busy. He was replaced by a person with an email marketing background who spent our second (and final) semester asking us to mock up emails for a portfolio that the program coordinator insisted should be full of big ideas for out of home ads, stunts, mobile apps, etc. The rest of our instructors were made up by ad veterans who liked to tell us stories from their glory agency days and to also get frustrated that we weren’t “getting it” without seeming to realize they were the ones responsible for helping us get it. Our most infamous instructor talked frequently about his recently deceased wife and opined on how he wasn’t sure he knew what he was meant to teach.
It might seem like I’m being overly harsh or oblivious, considering I did graduate, I did get an internship, and I did work in ad agencies for many years. And I am. The elapsed time and the fog of memory have made it easy not to focus on the foundational skills I acquired at Humber, though I mostly attribute that to Matt, Gord, and one of the better books we were assigned. I learned a lot more in my first few years in an ad agency (though maybe not quite enough) than I did in ad school, and it almost seems like the curriculum banked on that. The program only had to prepare us to be just rusty enough to have someone take a chance on us. There was a bit of a churn and burn mentality to getting students out the door versus preparing them to be the next generation of Judy Johns or David Drogas. And fair enough, Humber is running a polytechnic college and not Miami Ad School.
It’s still amazing to me the number of people I met throughout my agency years that had also gone to Humber and also had similar feelings about their experience. However, I have to admit that the program was successful because back then nearly every copywriter in Toronto had been through it. How many of us could have broken into the industry without it is something I still think about. It feels strange to say, but in 2009 if you Googled “how to get into advertising” you wouldn’t easily find online courses, an active advertising subreddit, or a listing for Hey, Whipple on Amazon. Humber felt like my best shot at getting into the agency world, and I did create a portfolio of student spec work there that landed me an internship at Grip Limited upon graduation—despite me not being one of the program coordinator’s “superstars.”
What my experience at ad school didn’t give me was the more practical creative and ideation skills and exercises that I later found in books through my own searching. It didn’t emphasize the importance of building those skills and how to use them to work through the bad ideas to get to the good ones. Instead, we were told to spend hours and hours thinking about new ideas for our spec ads—we were told to think creatively but not how to do it. I’ve sometimes wondered if I had a better process for creative thinking and writing if I would have been more successful in the agency world and never left. Realistically, the factors that caused me to leave were more external to my abilities (or lack thereof) so probably not. I mostly think I wasn’t as prepared as I could have been for what was to come, though that’s true about most of life I suppose. (Hope you came here for some deep thoughts.)
In a way, my time at Humber did set the tone for my career in advertising. Unfortunately, that tone sounded something like “What the hell is going on?!” Given the chance, I’d probably go to Humber again simply because it still seems to be the shortest advertising education program available in Toronto and one of my primary deciding factors was how soon I could start making money and move out of my Mom’s house. What I didn’t realize was that nearly all internships at the time were unpaid, so I had a few more months left of living at home combined with the anxiety of trying to break into advertising by surviving the day-to-day realities of agency life.
That’s a topic I’ll cover in my next post. Until then, I’ll leave you with one of the better ads from my final student portfolio. I made it to promote Humber’s industry portfolio show, where creative directors from Toronto agencies were invited to see if any of us students really “got it.” Why would they want to hire us?