Advertising Spec Portfolio Dos and Donts

Advertising Spec Portfolio Dos and DontsAdvertising Spec Portfolio Dos and DontsWhen youre showing your book around, either as a student or someone looking to switch agencies or careers, you are looking to impress people. Your portfolio should be a concentration of your skills, featuring solid work spanning multiple mediums and product segments. The work you show, and do not show, is paramount. So here are some things to avoid when preparing your book. Never Choose Easy Projects For Yourself Just for a moment, put yourself in the shoes of an advertising professional. They have taken the time out of their insanely busy schedule to look through your work, either with you present or by viewing your website or book. When the pages are turned and endless campaigns for Nike, Wonderbra, Viagra, Victorias Secret and Red Bull appear one after the other, you are giving a clear indication that you dont like to challenge yourself. A quick look at a site like Ads Of The World will give you a good idea of this phenomenon. There are dozens of campaigns for Wonderbra. Its easy to advertise big breasts and the outcome of them is a simple idea to get behind, and its easy to be visually funny and verbally concise. Most dont even have headlines. If you want to impress, do ads for bland products or services that have no easily-identifiable or unique traits. Choose an airline, dish soap, a wireless carrier, or something else that you have to use your brain for. You need to create a strategy rather than piggyback one. You need to think, and thats what employers want to see. Spec work should not be easy or like shooting fish in a barrel. Do Not Throw Money At The Problem Heres another classic mistake that many up and coming creatives make. A book filled with creative but extremely costly ideas is not going to do you any favors. Advertising and design agencies rarely have the huge budgets to work with that theyd like, and often have to think of creative ways to use the increasi ngly shrinking budgets that clients supply. By filling your book with $10 million solutions, no matter how creative, youre pigeon-holing yourself as someone who can only do good work if the budget is good, and 90% of the time, the budget is mediocre at best. By all means, have examples of places that you could take the campaign if the budget allowed. Dont fill your book with overpriced billboards, stunts, and Super Bowl ads. If you can give people a great idea that costs just pennies, they will know you can do something just as cool with a ton of money. Dont Ignore The Unpopular Types of Media Billboards, print ads, guerrilla and TV scripts are what most student books are filled with. Theyre big, sexy and fun to work on, but you can have so much more impact if you take your campaign to places that most people want to avoid. Radio, direct mail, websites, point-of-purchase, packaging, these are mediums to explore. Its easy to find people who can produce great billboard ads, but gr eat direct mail, thats another story. As David Ogilvy proved, its a very effective medium when done right. Dont Spend More Time on Polish than Ideas Great execution and polish have become commonplace in modern portfolios, but an agency cannot live on looks alone. There needs to be substance behind the style, and if you sacrifice great ideas for beautiful printouts, youre in trouble. In this day and age, its easy to go straight to a Mac, knock out an idea and then polish it to perfection, but if the idea is weak, the ad will always be weak. No amount of Photoshop can save it. Add polish if you like. But make sure those ideas and campaigns are concrete and your best work before you start shining. Dont Include Anything Youre Not 100% Proud Of A portfolio is only as good as the weakest piece in it. By filling your book with mediocre campaigns, youre taking away from the great ones that are in there. A good way to check this is to run through the portfolio and present it to a fri end. There will be some pieces that you cannot stop talking about. Youll be excited about them, and will be genuinely proud to show them off. Then, there are those other pieces, the ones that, when you know theyre coming up next, you get gelbkreuzgas for words. The ones youd rather skip past to get to the next campaign. These need to be cut. If your book goes from 15 pieces to 10, fine. If it goes from 15 to 3, youve got issues and your book needs a lot more work. And its also for this reason that you need to constantly update your book. Something you were proud of five years ago may not have stood the test of time. If in doubt, take it out. Never Start Strong and Finish Weak If you follow the advice above, you wont have any weak work in your book anyway. Even amongst great campaigns, some work is better than others. If you put all that up front, you will definitely make a statement. But as you continue, youll fail to top it and that does you no good. Follow these tips, and you should be well on your way to assembling a portfolio that will get you noticed in any advertising or marketing agency.