Advice on Advice: Take It or Leave It
There’s a tonne of advice out there for juniors wanting to break into the industry — books, blogs, and people wanting to give you their two cents. But advice comes from experience, and experiences are personal. Which means there’s a lot of conflicting advice out there. In a regular column Lauren Ami MacDonald tries to make sense of it all.
It’s hard to know how to put together your book when different ECDs look for different things. Some want awards, some only care about real work, some have a magical number of pieces in different mediums they want to see, then there’s the ideas that were never made, and the interest in personal work.
A good friend of mine’s putting her book together at the moment. Most of her book is spec, but she has included work she’s not proud of, simply because it’s been produced. I couldn’t understand why. Why would she want these particular pieces of work to be (partly) what represents her, and her capability?
While I have no idea how it’d ever be possible to create the kind of book that’d please every ECD, it is possible to create the kind of book that pleases you. The kind of book you’re proud of, that’s filled with the work you’ll be happy to present in an interview. Because there’s really nowhere really to go from “Hi, my name’s Stephanie, I know this is shit, but at least it got made”.
Lauren Ami MacDonald is a Copywriter at The Secret Little Agency, Singapore. She’s got a lot to say about the advice she’s collected.