That Ad I Posted

About two days after I posted that ad, I got it (I think). In my defense I noted that it wasn't that great of an example of the "esoteric" ads I spoke of. Of course I could have deleted the example and no one would ever have known, but I'm going to leave it up. Anywho, so, the tag is "For Those Who Know What To Look For". And all that is really decipherable is a man and a woman drinking, also a bottle of what is presumably Johnny Walker Blue Label. So I guess if you know what to look for, that's what you see.
Ya know what though, it actually may be a tolerable example of what I was talking about. The feeling I have now that (I think) I get it is a flat, somewhat disappointed, "Oh, alright". They made it look really cool and pretty and interesting... but that's it. I suppose I get it, but there's no rewarding "Aha" factor.

Taco Bell

So, in the little title section of this blog I mention that I work at Taco Bell. The sad truth of the matter is....... I really do work at Taco Bell. In my defense, it's the Taco Bell on campus and we don't make fricken chalupas or cheesy beef melts or whatever other riduculous things regular Taco Bells make. My favorite part of working at Taco Bell is making things "Supreme". You can actually make anything in the world "Supreme". All you have to do is add sour cream. I could make the fricken Trevi Fountain supreme if I just could procure one of the spiffy sour cream guns we use at work.
Anywho, the point of this post is that I am currently fighting tooth and nail to keep my minimum wage job at Taco Bell. The problems began about 2 weeks ago. Two coworkers and I were inbetween customers and in the back of the little Taco Bell area. There is this lady that buses tables in West Commons (the food court in which my Taco Bell is located). She is this funny Serbian lady named Buba who wants me to marry both her sons, as they are apparently of marrying-age (I'm supposed to decide which one I prefer by next Monday...). In brief, Buba is my buddy, I help her with her English during my 15 minute breaks and when she gets a break meal, I always hook it up, hella cheese and chicken on her quesadilla. On Valentines Day I even cut a heart out of one of the tortillas and attached it to her steak burrito supreme (it looked like I had artfully embossed the burrito).
So my coworkers and I were in the back chatting, waiting for customers when Buba came over. She was asking what the different meats were, she pointed at the steak, I told her it's steak, she pointed at the chicken, I told her it's chicken. Then she pointed at the ground beef and I told her it was dog meat. In a thick Serbian accent she expresses her disbelief that this country allows ground up dog meat to be sold. (Try, "Vat ees thees? They allow thees een thees country???!") Then I tell her it's just ground up beef, cow meat kinda like a hamburger. We all laugh a little, end of story.
No, it wasn't the end of the story. Some random lady (age 35 or 40) is walking through the storage area behind the food places and comes up to us. The following script is roughly how the conversation between her and I went:

Random lady: You better not say that in front of customers.
Ashley (me): There are no customers.
Random lady: I'm serious, you really can't say that in front of customers.
Ashley (me): There's no customers.
Random lady: You better watch what you say in front of me.
Ashley (me): Okay, but there are still no customers.
Random lady: You obviously don't know who I am. (Then she stalks off)

Aaaaappppparently she manages the Starbucks in West Commons and her name is Gina or something. And apparently she told my boss on me and I got written up and now they're threatening to cut my hours. Ridiculous. Given, I could probably have handled the situation differently, but seriously, the "You obviously don't know who I am" line? No "Gina", I am not familar with who you are, I suppose I missed the special feature in the Aztec Shops bimonthly employee newsletter about you and the true dedicated pizazz you bring to the San Diego State University's West Commons food court. Ridiculous.

Esoteric ads continued (an example)

There are a lot of better examples I have come across in regards to ads that look very very cool, but are virtually pointless. Just to get an example up, I thumbed through Lüezers and this ad is the one that took me the least amount of time to find.
These are two ads in the same compaign for Johnny Walker Blue Label, a blended scotch. Tagline "For those who know what to look for". I suppose they are going for the look of the liquor itself... if you have any deep insights as to what they're going for with this ad, do share.
I'm too cheap to subscribe to Communication Arts, so Monday I'll thumb through my agency's magazines and see if I can come up with a better example.
(Click on the image to make it bigger... I noticed it makes it a lot bigger than the size I scanned it in at, somewhat disrupting the colors, sorry about that.)

Best Portfolio Schools (or the ones I'm most aware of)

There are many portfolio schools in this world. Below are some of the main ones and their websites. There are a couple others I have kinda heard about, but the ones below I've heard about at conventions, from people in the industry and I've seen winning student entries in trade publications and award books from students in these programs with some frequency.

1) VCU (Virginia Commonwealth University)BrandCenter... use to be called AdCenter I think
www.brandcenter.vcu.edu

2) Miami Ad School
www.miamiadschool.com

3) Chicago Portfolio School
www.chicagoportfolio.com

4) Creative Circus
www.creativecircus.com

5) The Book Shop
www.thebookshopads.com

I don't want to clutter this post... so I will allow you the pleasure of my naive analysis of each school in another post.

Portfolio School 1 (I'll get back to putting up an example of an esoteric ad soon)

I found out about a year ago that I will most likely have to go to portfolio school. I have heard different things from creative directors and copywriters on this matter. Some have insisted that it's really not about having this perfectly art directed, aesthetically pleasing portfolio and if your creativity/abilities are apparent, that is sufficient. On the other hand, I have heard (more frequently) that your portfolio is of utmost importance, this is a competitive industry and your portfolio does need to be properly art directed and very aesthetically pleasing... it ought to be professional-looking regardless if you are yet to become a professional. On one last hand (that gives us three hands I suppose... which is odd but necessary), in my personal experience you need a good portfolio just to get a fricken creative internship, let alone a job. (I'd like to thank the creative director of MeadsDurket for teaching me that lesson, even if it was the hard way.)
So that leads to portfolio schools, where the entire purpose is to make a creative portfolio that will land you that junior position. My understanding is you are in the program with copywriters and art directors and you work together, complimenting each others skills to create this bomb-diggity portfolio that gets you a job. In addition, the schools usually have some form of professional connections and you are taught by professionals.
I have to go to class, so I will continue on portfolio school next post.

Esoteric ads

You ever see an ad in one of those advertising award magazines like Communication Arts or Lüerzer's Archive and it looks really really cool, super art-directed, interesting, etc, but you barely get what it's selling or the point? Or you get it but it takes you a lot of time to get it... And that ad won an award or was considered so good it got put in a trade publication. If I didn't get it and I'm hoping to be in advertising, it makes me wonder how someone stupid could possibly have understood it. And if advertising is to get masses of certain people to perform a certain action (like buy something), how would that ad acomplish that? Maybe I'll go through one of my magazines and put an example up of what I mean... not today though.

Okay in Hebrew

A couple years ago, my friend Claire (future account person, clairet3@hotmail.com if you want to give some random chick briefly mentioned in a student blog a job in your account department, she's very good at what she intends to do...) went to Israel. To begin, I am not religious and did not go on some mission to the Holy Land to retrace the path of Jesus or reconnect with my fellow Chosen People. I was raised Jewish, did the whole Bat Mitzvah sheh-bang, then went to Catholic high school (go figure). I did get to go for free, (hell yeah bitches...) all because I'm kinda Jewish. You can do it too. They really don't do much in the way of background checks and it's a wicked-cool trip. For a small fee I can teach people to pretend to be Jewish... email me - ashleyecrandall@yahoo.com.
The most important thing that came out of that trip is we figured out how to say "okay" in Hebrew. (Did you know that the word "okay" is the second most used/recognizeable word in the world? I think Coke or CocaCola is number 1.) It's spelled chhhhokay in English... In Hebrew it would go something like chet, o vowel, kaf, yud with this other vowel that when combined make an "ay" sound. Make sure the sound of the chhhh comes from the back of your mouth and is obnoxiously overdone. People that speak German and Scandanavian do very well with this sound. Spanish speakers come very close to the right sound as long as their English isn't too good and they still mispronounce words that start with an "h" like hotdog... try chhhotdog.
Anyway, that will be all.

Advertising Education at a State University

I'm currently sitting in a room at San Diego State University... there is a feeling I'm currently experiencing that falls somewhere around mildly irritated. I am in a group meeting for an advertising campaigns course I have to take. Let me preface this by if it wasn't for this class I would have graduated a semester early (was only offered in the spring). I will say the teacher for this class is very cool, interesting and quick, probably the second best teacher I've had at State. (The only one better is this teacher I had for philosophy a couple years ago that looked like Socrates, he was a very wise philosophical man.) I don't know if anyone knows anything about Communications majors with "advertising emphasis" but somewhere around 90% of them are pretty fricken incompetent. And I am sitting in this group dying a painful death as members throw out every overdone idea in advertising history. And I'm not going to be the bitch that shoots each one down. We're supposed to do a "youth prevention campaign" from beginning to end, research through creative... an excruciating process. I'd like to think that this is not how things will be one day in the exciting future in which I will be a copywriter. First off, I will not be a researcher, account person etc. And second of all, I imagine I will be usually to always working with very smart people, people way smarter and more experienced than myself. Anywho, I have a class at 11 I ought to head off to...maybe...

About this blog

Certainly, as a student with no real job experience, aside from a creative internship in Santa Ana (www.thetruthagency.com), everything I write about advertising is going to be something along the lines of naive. But that's how things go and I gotta start somewhere. Also, since I am yet to have a career in advertising, some other stuff will make its way in here, like my thoughts and opinions on inane subjects that I deem perfectly sensible to discuss.

First and/or last posting...?

So commences the first posting of my blog. I intend to continue it and actually keep up the damn thing, but we'll see.
I was searching copywriting in Scandanavia and I came across this one dude's blog. I ought to look a little deeper as it wasn't clear how he popped up in the top 3 for this search considering he is a senior copywriter/creative director in Hong Kong... certainly not Scandanavia... Maybe he has the keyword Scandanavia secretly embedded all over the blog and I just missed it.
The point is: he writes all about his life in advertising and what not and supposedly the blog landed him a job at Ogilvy and Mather, Hong Kong... all this from a blog. So I'm going to start a blog.

I encourage anyone and everyone who reads this to offer me a junior copywriting position at a good agency, especially if you are really indeed qualified to offer me such a job.