It Starts Here.

A Short Lesson in Perspective

Insightful and painfully truthful article that dissects and describes life in advertising, first from the inside, then from the outside. 

I’ve lost count of the number of articles that all seem to be trying to tell me the same thing. Their message is familiar, basically the same words that ad people told us back at uni: it is going to be hard. You are going to sell your soul. You do it because you love it, then you are going to hate it, but you will deny that you hate it and keep chasing the dream.  You will be surrounded by people who want to take advantage of you. You will drive yourself deeper into your work to escape the politics, the power plays and the stupid clients because when you finally hit that golden idea, there is no sweeter tasting victory.   … Meanwhile, your precious nugget of world-changing creativity is earning more money for someone else than it is for you.  

Oh yeah, that’s right. The world revolves around money - not ideas.

These articles that are slowly turning my passionate, ad-loving heart into a withered, fragile husk. It’s all I can do but to read them hungrily to absorb the battle-scarred experiences of their authors. I know that I’m tucking away the lessons they’re teaching somewhere in my brain so that twenty years later I can look back and say they were right all along.

I hate these authors because I know they’re telling the truth. They’re trying to prepare me for what’s up ahead. They want me to learn from their journey. But if I listen to them, I’ll feel like I’ve quit before I’ve even started. 

Actually, that’s not true. I have started. I feel like I looked into a pretty painting of a swimming pool and then leaped, only to have that painting taken away once I was airborne. Now gravity is pulling me irresistibly towards a violent ocean filled with sharks and slimy jellyfish.  There’s no turning back now. I’m going to become one heck of a swimmer.

Here’s the latest article that made me think long and hard about the path I’ve chosen.

 A Short Lesson in Perspective

And this is the introduction that the author wrote about himself:

British born, Linds graduated with a degree in Graphic Design, and launched straight into a career in advertising having been told by a fellow student it was a guaranteed way of getting fabulously wealthy very young. Twenty five years later, he hunted down the person responsible and killed him with a baseball bat and buried the body in the woods.

Linds worked as an Art Director for several agencies in London and Edinburgh, before emigrating to New Zealand with his family in the mid nineties. He worked for most of NZ’s top creative agencies, Saatchi, DDB, Colenso and The Campaign Palace before leaving agency life at the millennium to pursue his interests in Motion Graphics and animation. For the past ten years, Linds has run a successful animation studio designing and producing TVC’s for tne New Zealand advertising industry.