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It’s Time To Play: Ad Agency Bingo

Working at an ad agency is hard work. Not hard work the way that “working on a construction site” or pretty much any other job in the world is actual hard work– It’s hard work in the sense that you sometimes have to work long hours on free computers in well lit, temperature controlled rooms. Still, people in the advertising industry face a significant challenge that people with blue-collar jobs don’t face– tolerating the obnoxious nomenclature and set of insider rituals accepted as industry commonplace. If you work at an ad agency, you’re probably well familiar with the jargon that gets thrown around the office.

So why not have some fun with it at work today? You’re invited to play:

Anyone can play! Just print out this bingo board, leave it on your desk, and bubble in each instance as it occurs. Here are the prizes:

If you get a straight line, you can take it to your boss and ask that he promote you. Art Directors can become Senior Art Directors. Junior Copywriters will become Senior Junior Copywriters. etc.

If you get a diagonal line, you get to raid the office supply closet, Supermarket Sweep-style.

If your coworker gets a straight line, but you contributed by saying one of the things that helps them fill out one of the squares, you can scan their filled out sheet and put it in your portfolio as a project you worked on.

If you give the sheet to an intern to and they get a straight line, you can take credit for it as long as you write them a nice LinkedIn recommendation on their last day.

If you fill in a couple of the bubbles then get bored, fuck it, it’s 11:27. Lunch time. 

[juniornotes-blog]

Your Ad Agency Horoscope

Horoscopes can be fun predictors of what direction your life is headed. Unfortunately, using the general time frame you were born in doesn’t always provide the best perspective on what supernatural forces dictate your fate. 

Your job, on the other hand, provides a pretty surefire indication of what might happen to you on any given day. So I consulted the stars (and the resource management handbook) to write some new horoscopes. 

Art Director

As a reward for spending the last 6 weeks working late on pitches, your creative director will semi-apologetically give you a tedious project fit for a junior designer. Your hangover will worsen throughout the day, and eating a salad for lunch won’t really help it as much as you think it might. As you’re waiting on work from your copywriter, he’ll inform you that he’s having a “weird skin thing” going on right now and won’t be able to “come up with anything good” for “at least a couple of days”.

Project Manager

You will be blamed for titanic failures that you are in no way responsible for. However, the titanic failures that you are responsible for will go largely unnoticed by everyone except creative, so nobody will care. You will send out emails to ungrateful and uncooperative teammates that have in no way done great work (and have in no way acted as a team) that say, “Great work team.”

Account Executive

Be careful about bringing your work life home with you– Your new significant other is becoming increasingly unnerved at your nervous insistence that there’s “High ROI in this relationship”. Now would be a good time to make life investments, such as investing in some clothes that aren’t from Brooks Brothers. Good fortune is impending, in the form of one of the creative directors having a hypoglycemic attack and having to leave at lunch, allowing you to actually do work today.

Copywriter

Your prowess at indiscriminate meeting skipping is both your key to your success and your greatest weakness– you skipped a 3 hour meeting on utilizing Facebook analytics, but you also skipped your performance review where you were going to get your scheduled raise. You’ll spend that time you’ve carved out for yourself loudly asking everyone around you questions you could’ve easily Googled and complaining that your Seamless order hasn’t arrived yet.

Producer

Your life will continue to exist in a whiplash-inducing flux between eye-of-the-storm quiet and mammoth catastrophe. Amidst everyone making unrealistic demands and presenting timelines based on vast misinformation, you’ll find solace in the 6-week vacation you take 5 times a year.

Strategist

Today, you will be confronted with the startling realization that nobody at the agency is clear on exactly what you do, even though you work harder and longer hours than everyone else. Towards the end of the day, Powerpoint will crash, beginning a chain reaction sending your life into a hideous downward spiral of despair.

Creative Recruiter

Today you will be betrayed, as a candidate you’ve been courting for weeks will leverage your offer of an exorbitant salary to get an exorbitant salary at his existing job. You will lobby management to fire your enemies so that you can hire their replacements towards filling your hiring quota.

Finance

Your afternoon will consist of browsing medical school websites, as you will wake up realizing your mother was right and you should have become a doctor like your older brother.  An Excel error will cause you to have to stay late until 4:47pm today.

Biz Dev

Today, you’ll manage to pry an RFP out of a company you’ve been aggressively courting for the last 7 months, but you’ll accidentally lose it when you forget the contact’s name, and subsiquently, your email password. Your initiative towards making the office more like your college fraternity by organizing events and team-building exercises will backfire, and generally make everyone more disconnected with the office culture. 

Creative Director

Your theory is correct- every single creative team under you is working to sabotage you, and that’s why they misinterpret the specifics of every simple assignment given to them. Some of your employees are even lying about being sick on Mondays, and using that time to go get drunk at the park– in perfect health! The best thing for your career and for the company would be to immediately fire everyone under your jurisdiction.

[juniornotes-blog]

Ways to Make A Little Extra Cash Around The Ad Agency

Jay-Z was right. ‘Mo Money ultimately does lead to ‘Mo Problems.

When you get your first job, you feel like the richest person on earth, because a salary in the mid 40’s/low 50’s feels like a titanic amount of money to be fed consistently year round. But it doesn’t take long before you make friends with other agency people, many of whom are several years into their career and thus making over double your salary. You quickly start to discover that you aren’t in fact rich, but actually quite poor. 

The concept of wealth is a rich tapestry built on relativity. 

But there are workarounds: Sure, it’s your first year, but there’s no reason you can’t supplement your salary and cut down your expenses with resources lying around your workplace. Put the creative back in creative money making schemes! To get you started, here are a few suggestions:

Refer a Friend

Agencies are always clamoring for new talent, but simply don’t have ANY resources, whatsoever, to find anyone to hire on their own. There’s literally no way they can find anyone! That’s why companies rely on employee referrals, and will pay exorbitant stipends of cash for you to send a recruiter a link to your portfolio school buddy’s portfolio.   

Potential Value: Roughly $1000.

Sell Your Business Cards to Somebody With The Same Name As You

We’ve all struggled with our namesakes- when it comes to buying your name domain, or just general googleability. So why not turn that struggle into cash? Just mark out all your personal information with a black-tip felt pen and get in contact with one of the many people who share the same name as you. What do you need business cards for anyway? “Networking”, I’m sure.

Potential Value: About $10, depending on the quality of the card stock.

Live On Agency Food

Hunger for success is proven to cause proportional hunger for actual food. But having Hale and Hearty everyday can get expensive, especially if you get a medium soup instead of the combo size. So find some food lying around the agency! Camp outside of catered conference rooms. Remember- meetings mean eatings.

Potential Value: Up to $13 a Day.

Don’t Get Fired (Or Die)

Getting a raise in advertising is easy- all you have to do is not get fired (or die). You see, in most industries, your salary is calculated by your job performance, how many of your goals you’ve met, the competitive landscape ratio, inflation, the economy, professional decorum and the number of Linkedin friends you have. 

In advertising, Money = Time. Sure, having a good portfolio, employment history and winning awards is important to advancing the first 15-20 years of your career. But later down the road, if you work in the industry long enough, your book and where you’ve worked all blur into a beige-colored milkshake of the past. 

Potential Value =  Potential Time. If you start your career at 18 and live to be 105, you could theoretically make a 100 million dollars a year. 

Get Fired (Or Die)

On the other hand, advertising agencies offer both amazing health insurance policies and severance packages. If you work at a company with the right policies, you’re worth your weight in gold either dead or with discontinued employment. So really, the most profitable thing you can do is either be an egregious enough an employee enough to warrant termination, or such a diligent one that you die at your desk.

Potential Value: Dead, I’m not sure, I’m not an expert on life insurance policies. I think it’s relative to your height?  But fired, I think it’s about 2 months salary. Ask me again when this blog is published and I’ll be able to tell you exactly.  

Opt Out of Health Insurance

Look, you’re young and you’re going to live forever. Why not take that extra $36 a month for opting out of your health insurance? Sure, you may have to pay thousands of dollars in premiums at some point if you do suffer a serious illness (or even routine ailment that requires standard care). But for $36 you could pay for all your monthly subscription services, like Netflix and Spotify and Tidal (just kidding, I know you don’t use Tidal). Sure, you may get sick and die for a nominal stipend each month, but that’s a small price to pay to find out what happens on this season of Peaky Blinders.

Potential Value: About $36 a Month, I think. 

Pawn Your Awards

Congratulations! You’re one of the cutting edge creatives winning awards and pursuing new frontiers of excellence in your industry. You get a trophy. But do you really need this thing? It makes you look pretentious and is just taking up space around the office. And really, if they could have just given you what you really wanted as a prize (a moped), they would, but it just isn’t practical to give out 50 mopeds at an award ceremony. Where would they even store all of those mopeds?! Anyway, you already got to write that you ‘got it’ in your portfolio, so let’s turn some gold into paper. And then buy a moped.

Potential Value: It varies, but a guy told me once you can get $800 for a one show pencil on CashForGold.com

Get Your Company to Sponsor Your Content Series Blog

Uhh...let’s talk about this later.

Potential Value: Talk later.