Whether you’re two months or two years away from graduating, these tips may help you land your first job as an advertising creative. If you haven’t figured it out by now, shaping and refining your work is a never-ending process. It’s a labor of love that sometimes feels more like labor than love. But if you stick with it, you’ll end up with a nice body of work. Good luck and please let me know if you found this helpful.

-Mike

1.     It’s all about ideas born from refreshing insights. Whether you’re an aspiring interactive designer, writer, art director or technologist, try to base all of your creative thinking off of strategic insights that go beyond the obvious. A campaign for Tobasco sauce that centers around its spiciness, is an example of what not to do. It’s way too easy. A lot of ad students think that creativity begins with coming up with clever executional ideas. It actually begins with strategic insights that are, well, insightful. Strive for ideas that are brand appropriate and based off a unique strategy. That way you’ll develop your creative problem solving skills to be more well-rounded, which will serve you far into your career.

2.     When creating an integrated campaign, think beyond the media checklist. You get an assignment to sell more Acme Cola. You work night and day generating concepts on how to do just that. At some point you hit a eureka moment and come up with a big, platform idea. You start by making some ads and maybe a microsite. Somewhere along the way you receive some feedback that you should blow out your idea across all mediums, so you create a Facebook page, some billboards, a smart phone app and maybe an alternative media placement. Nothing is inherently wrong with any of this as long as you’ve thought about which mediums are pertinent to your idea and to your audience. However, if you’re just creating a laundry list of media vehicles with no clear reason for their being, a creative director reviewing your work will pick up on it right away. Another way to look at integrated campaigns is less like a checklist and more like a marketing ecosystem. In an ecosystem, there is symbiosis between mediums and all necessary elements must exist for the campaign to reach maximum success.

3.     Demonstrate simplicity with a highly-technical product. Let’s face it, it’s a little bit easier to come up with something cool for a motorcycle or beer brand than it is for a variable annuity or data server solution. The problem is there are only so many beer and motorcycle brands out there, so it's likely you'll need to be able to show that you can solve problems for more technical products. If you don’t have a campaign like this in your book, pick something that you’re mildly interested in, something reasonably complicated and create really good work for it. See if you can reduce what is complex about this product down to a simple sentence to generate ideas off of. Once you have some ideas that you like, test your work by showing it to someone new without setting it up. If they get it, you might be onto something. If they get it and dig it too, you may have a keeper.

4.     Polish, polish, polish. Thanks to technology, the expectation of craftsmanship in your work is remarkably high. It needs to look as finished as the produced work you’re seeing coming out of agencies. Sorry. If you’re a designer, make sure your type is carefully chosen and perfectly kerned. If you’re a writer, use the body of your work to show that you can capture the tone of a variety of brands. If you’re an interactive creative, details-R-u. A bonus for interactive work would be to actually make it live so creative directors and recruiters can interact with it.

5.     Study up. Don’t wait until the night before an interview to get up to speed on an agency, their clients, their leaders and the work. Try to immerse yourself in as much great work happening in the world as possible and try to learn which agencies are behind all of it. It will not only provide you with inspiration for your own work, but it will help you sound passionate about being in this business. Here are a few questions that I often ask junior candidates to get a sense of how passionate they are about getting a job. Why do you want to be in this business? Why do you want to work here? Aside from here, where would your ideal job be and why? What kind of work have you seen lately that you wished you had done? By knowing what’s going on in the industry, you’ll have a good sense of where you’re aspiring to work. And look smart in the process.