WEEK 2

(Day 8-9) Do you remember that thing…?

10/10/2022 – 11/10/2022

I was under the impression that advertising would entail working on a project for a few months then moving on to another once the first project was finished or nearing completion. I was wrong.

Projects came and went quite randomly with no insight beforehand. We would attend a briefing for a new project then have it get discontinued indeterminably or handed over to a different team, which was the fate of the first two projects I had seen on my first week.

This was my first time attending a briefing for a food brand, in this case a sports drink that was popular among old people. They wanted two different different presenters – a famous footballer and a Thai actor that was currently popular with young women. My team was immediately apprehensive – what did this guy have to do with the brand? How would they justify using him? How do we connect these two wildly different people?

I witnessed starting a project from scratch, and it involved a lot of mental power.

Do you remember that ad from four years ago?

A lot of the earlier brainstorming was finding references for the possible different directions the project could take, which mostly involved my boss trying to recall the many ads he had seen over the years and me looking for them online.

An issue with the client, as told by one of the copywriters in the team, was that they could be quite conservative with the ideas, not wanting to try out different ways to market their product and leaning more towards the old conventional way.