How to Start Your Career in Advertising

We're happy to announce a new Makin' Ads ebook called How to Start Your Career in Advertising.

Why'd we write it?

As a college student, I wanted to get into advertising. But in retrospect, I really had no clue what that meant. I took an internship at an agency in New York, and ended up in the accounting department.

When I finally realized what the creative department was, I tried a second internship. When the creative director asked to see my work, I handed him a stack of short stories I'd written.

We wrote How to Start Your Career In Advertising for those clueless 20-year-old versions of ourselves. (It's free to view and to download, because our 20-year-old selves wouldn't have paid for advice either.)


If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know this stuff. But maybe you have a cousin who's graduating high school this year. Or the neighborhood kid who mows your lawn. Or a college counselor who put you on the right track and still has a bunch of mass comm floundering in a sea of not knowing the difference between PR, marketing and advertising. Send them a link to the book. It's no Hey, Whipple, but it's free, it's a quick primer, and hopefully, it'll help a few more good people stumble into this awesome industry.

Disclosure on the design: We had originally opened up the design of this ebook to readers of the blog. However, the submissions we received fell into two categories: 1) not very good, and 2) good, but communication with the designers petered out - which is understandable since all those submissions were from portfolio school students who are busy putting their books together. This version was designed and Illustrated by Copywriters.