JLM & Associates offers personal development counseling to help you take control of your personal and business success. Learn how to seize the kind of income you deserve and achieve the successful future of your dreams.

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Discovering Opportunity In Adversity

My first job as an advertising copywriter was for a small agency that handled mostly car dealer and radio station advertising. Their ads up to that point were not very creative so I made it my first priority to improve them. Every time I got an assignment, I wrote two commercials: one the way the agency had always done it and a second that was more creative and exciting.

Every time I presented the commercials for approval, they always chose the one that was just like what they had always done, stuffy and boring. Their attitude was that if they had not done it before, they weren't going to try it.

I would have gotten depressed, but I had a good friend who had been in the business a long time and he kept telling me that every defeat sowed the seeds of success for the future. I became determined to wear them down. I tried even harder. If they saw my “better” commercials enough, eventually they would see the light and start to use them. I had been with them for a year now and I would give it just one more year.

As it turned out, they never once used one of my “better” ads. They never even showed a single one to any of their clients to see how they might react to them. It was a tough year, but by the end of it I had built up quite a portfolio.

Armed with my new portfolio, I arranged interviews with some of the biggest advertising agencies in the country. One of them loved my commercials and offered me a job on the spot, at almost twice the salary I was earning at my current job.

When I informed my boss that I would be leaving, he told me that while I was a nice enough guy, he didn't give me a year at my new job, because the agency I was going to was much too big and competitive for me. He said I stuck to my own ideas too much and that would get me nowhere. He said big companies like people who go along and don't make waves.

To make a long story short, it's been over twenty five years since I left and I'm doing great, but today that small agency is out of business. As a matter of fact a few years after I left the company I learned that many of the agency's clients had left them for one simple reason: They felt that they were getting the same old thing year after year, and they wanted fresh and original commercials, something I had tried to convince them to do for the two years I worked there.

If my friend had not given me the courage to believe in myself and my ideas, I would have never kept writing commercials the way I believed they should be done. I would have given in to their way of thinking. I would not have developed a portfolio that allowed me to find a better job and I would never have started and built the successful business that I have today.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home