Even before the balloons were dropped and the tassels were shifted to the left side of graduation caps, the Class of 2024 was laser focused on their careers. Some already landed jobs, while others anxiously awaited responses to their multiple applications.
At DePaul University last week, graduates of the PRAD MA program heard from one of the dynamic icons of the advertising world, Tonise Paul, former chairman and CEO of Energy BBDO. In her keynote message to students, faculty and industry professionals at the annual Future Leaders Showcase event featuring graduates and their portfolios, Tonise provided important advice for anyone beginning a professional career. Here are her remarks:
When I was in my master’s program at Illinois I took a multi variate statistics class, so I am always looking for a high R-squared. The fewest number of things that will explain the greatest variance in performance. And that is what I will share with you today, 3 things that I believe were the greatest determinants of my own success. Things I didn’t
know on Day 1, but that ultimately unlocked my potential and, as important, gave me deep professional satisfaction. Wishing this and more for all of you, here they are framed as advice that you can begin to use tomorrow and for the next 40 years…
Make THE WORK your beacon
At BBDO we have a saying, in the absence of great work, nothing else matters. Because it is the work that meets people where they are. It is the work that gets your brand noticed and remembered. It is the work that incites emotion and activates behavior. It is creatively superb work that works.
It’s the quality of the work that defines an organization. And an individual.
You didn’t work this hard to go into the world and do mediocre work. You have worked so hard to be excellent.
But doing so is a hard choice you have to make. Today. And everyday.
If you wonder why this is a hard choice, it’s because doing great work is incredibly difficult. That’s why it is a small fraction of the work you see out there.
Making the work your beacon begins with finding a workplace that values great work. There is no way to achieve it in a culture that doesn’t understand it, believe in it or prioritize it.
As your potential employers – now or in the future – are assessing you, assess them…Are you familiar with their work? Do you wish you’d been a part of it? Do they want to spend their time with you talking about their work and yours? You are not just looking for a great job, you are looking for a job that will enable you to do work that will make you proud and that makes a difference.
Once you’ve found that good home, making the work your beacon means being a vigilante for creative excellence. Whatever role you are in, make it your purpose to make the work better. This means helping steward the work to greatness.
Part of this will be navigating the headwinds that work against great work. The route from great idea to brilliant in-market activation is a treacherous one. With the work as your beacon be indispensable in keeping the train on the track despite inevitable changes in client direction, convoluted process or slashed production budgets…..Don’t follow the rabbit off the road, stay focused and committed to excellence.
I urge you to take this to heart. Because doing great work is the greatest source of satisfaction you will know as a communications professional. If you make the work your beacon, you will be associated with work that transforms the fates of brands and businesses. When you win your first Effie or Cannes Lion it will be so gratifying it will set the trajectory for your future. You will never look back, you will only want more.
Respect talent, efforts and ideas of others
You have chosen a career that is a team sport. You can’t get to great work without a phenomenal, diverse collection of talented teammates. But having them is not enough, you have to bring out their best. And nothing will energize people more than when you show them the respect they deserve for their talent, effort and ideas.
Collaborations today can often be elaborate with people representing many different disciplines, often different companies, different geographies (for global brands) not to mention clients.
Too often people approach collaboration as a process they must endure while trying to preserve their own ideas. This doesn’t serve the work, it serves the self and erodes trust.
But for those who relish the opportunity to riff and build with other brilliant people who know things they don’t, the fruits are incredible.
One of my best career experiences was a massive global business win that was achieved through multi-company collaboration. Letting go of our own proprietary approaches, 4 agencies -creative, media, shopper and PR – wove ourselves together with one unified process, one set of operating principles and one set of tools. We were able to do that only because of the enormous respect we each had for, and showed, each other and the trust that was built out of that respect. Our shared-respect made us formidable creatively and proved to be our competitive advantage.
And our relationships endured. We each helped each other win other clients with effusive testimonials.
As important as demonstrating respect for your cross-company colleagues in high stakes scenarios, is genuinely and generously respecting those at every level around you every day.
A couple of years ago I received a call from a female entrepreneur of a research company. This woman had worked at our agency as an insights strategist when I was a young CEO, and she was right out of school. She asked if I would address a global research organization she was chairing. I agreed to do it and when she introduced me, rather than share my credentials, she told the audience that I had always made her feel like she had something important to say. That I went out of my way to ask for her point of view when she was no more than a pup. Needless to say I started my talk by wiping my eyes and blowing my nose! It deeply reinforced for me the importance of the point I am making to you today. Respect always the talent and ideas of others.
Be a student of the business
Just when you thought you had completed your journey as a student, you are about to start it all over again, IF you want to truly excel as a professional.
As a young account person, a senior client of ours made a comment to me about a visiting BBDO executive. He said he always valued this executive’s visits because he was a “student of the business” and he always learned so much from him. This gave me pause, I asked myself, am I a student of the business? My honest answer was no. I was a master of tasks, deeply knowledgeable about my brands but not truly building my broader thought capital about what works in brand communications and marketing. I was missing an opportunity that would allow me to add more value to my client partnerships and to make the work better.
So right then and there, I flipped a switch that impacted my career at every step.
For starters, with the work as my beacon, I set out to define for myself what I considered to be great work. I gathered a sizable amount of work that I loved and I knew had been effective and I spent an entire weekend studying it and trying to synthesize why it was so good. It was hard to sacrifice that weekend but talk about a return on my investment! Going forward, when I reviewed work I knew exactly what I was looking for. I became a much better contributor. And it set in motion a never ending quest for me and then my agency to always be conversant on the best work of the day to keep our bar the highest and inspire our teams and clients to increasing heights.
Fast forward to being a CEO, our agency vision was to “be known and respected as the leading edge creative organization that energizes people and brands”. Maybe you caught the two most important words. “Leading edge”. If you are going to be leading edge you need to always know where the edge is to play on it.
With this as our vision, we didn’t just study shifts in consumer and media trends, we invested heavily in studying, developing points of view and acting on unresolved macro issues of the day…
Our points of view on emotion in advertising, digital transformation, modern integration, defining brand meaning, and creating innovative brand experiences directly impacted the quality and effectiveness of our work and, with it, our appeal to existing and prospective clients.
And now there is the magnificent moose on the table, AI. I know you are students of this and you have to be. But you don’t have to be versed in every facet of it including whether it will supersede humanity. Go to the very best minds (beyond our industry) and listen (i recommend listening to a dozen Lex Fridman podcasts on the topic because he is speaking with the supreme thinkers and practitioners). But then consider the highest order of relevancy to our business. Ask yourself how this magnificent creative power tool can be used to make your brands more meaningful to people, your work more effective or easier to create. Study the best use cases to the minute to inspire your thinking. Here’s one for you. Almap BBDO in Sao Paolo was the most effective agency in the world last year. Look up VW Brazil Volkswagen 70 Years to see a highly relevant application of AI that will make your heart dance. And then keep seeking other examples to shape your POV and inspire your imagination.
So,
Make the work your beacon.
Respect the talent, efforts and ideas of others.
Be a student of the business.
If you do, you will unlock the potential of the work, of others and of yourself. And you will find unimaginable joy and reward in your work and in your career. Godspeed ahead and congratulations to you all. – Tonise Paul