What's it like working at an advertising agency? -2

Previous Episode (Episode 1)

Freeing Myself from Old Assumptions

I'm a bit worried that my discussions about advertising might give the impression that they're the be-all and end-all. That's not actually the case. Advertising is created for a wide array of purposes and meanings, and personally, I've simply chosen to focus on 'value.' My experiences as a current affairs and documentary PD in the past are central to this choice.

While covering individuals in various situations, I often witnessed how their realities differed significantly from the keywords and news articles that the media used to condense them. For instance, there were instances of scheming and violence among former gang members who became Buddhist monks, a case of a government official in the southernmost part of the country, Haenam, embezzling the living expenses of welfare recipients to buy a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and the 5-year trail of an Interpol-wanted child sex offender who was a native English teacher at a domestic elementary school, among others.

The above examples may seem like sensational topics, but I've included them because they represent individuals we encounter and interact with in our daily lives.

People's realities are diverse, contradictory, and, most importantly, different from how they appear from the outside.

These individual facets, which cannot be easily summarized or described, combine to form social phenomena. The media, in turn, conveys them using simple terms and expressions, albeit in a fragmented way. People develop their understanding of the world based on these news stories, which then form the basis for their evaluations and arguments.

Looking back, I realized that when I was creating advertisements, I understood the client's world based on this fragmented information. I also clung to the obsession with ingenious ideas, believing that they would pique the client's interest, and diligently produced results for several years. But then, I was able to identify a point that had subtly deviated and that no one in the advertising world I inhabited had questioned. This led me to make a different decision.

After that, I decided to once again focus on understanding people's daily lives through observation, interaction, and conversation. To understand how the value of the products/services that the client believed in was experienced in reality, I decided to delve into the lives of potential customers, comprehend the 'context' within their lives, and create a process to obtain data that would allow for 'value judgment.'

Carrying this odd name, Reason of creativity, I spent the entire year of 2017 relentlessly visiting CEOs and executives at foreign and domestic advertising agencies. While experiencing numerous rejections and occasional ridicule, I secretly hoped that things would be different overseas. I hoped that foreign advertising agencies might understand this aspect.

And on this day, through conversations with other creative directors I met at an advertising festival, I was able to reaffirm that my previous decision to start alonewas the right one.A friend from Thailand jokingly told me, 'If you're going to pay that much attention to people's daily lives, you'd be a great politician.'

Thus, I experienced another unique journey.

P.S. Finally, I'd like to share a rough summary of an interview with a brand manager from a former client company that spent hundreds of billions of won annually on marketing. At that time, the brand was conducting a massive advertising campaign (including TV commercials and the production and distribution of digital content) with a large, comprehensive advertising agency.

"The ads themselves are okay. But our main customer base is 20- to 30-year-olds, which is who we charge for, yet for some reason only teenagers are enthusiastic about our ads... The advertising agency CEO is my Facebook friend, and when I see his posts celebrating the successful campaign using our brand's ads, I get angry, to be honest. We're the ones who spent the money, but the sales impact is minimal, and they're the ones who get to celebrate the achievement..."