Jr. Creative Advice: Grab Yur Pardner Dosey Doe

this is Krystha (left) and me (right) our first semester of grad school.

Today's advice is more for the rockstar adgrads still in portfolio. Get yo self a pardner. If you're an AD find a CW, if you're a CW find an AD. Find someone you really mesh well with and don't mind being around for 36 hours straight. Work with them relentlessly. Build a team book and really sell yourself as one cohesive unit.

In grad school I teamed with a lot of different copywriters. At the end of portfolio 3 I was looking for a new copywriter. Krystha had done some good writing and I wanted to work with her. So I asked . . . asked again . . . and again. She put off giving me an answer for about 3 weeks. Then she tells me that she is working with someone else. Alright fine, so I start to work on a campaign by myself. Then a couple days later she comes to me and says that the girl she was supposed to work with was working with someone else. Come to find out she was intimidated to work with me . . . .

We hammered out the two campaigns in two days. These were the only campaigns that needed a little to no tweaking at all and you guys know how long it usually takes to get something approved by Matt, Maria or Sean.

As we left grad school, Krystha already had an internship in New York (lame, jk), and I went straight to LA. Three months later she moves to Dallas for another internship . . . I wasn't so happy but I figured that at least she was slowly moving west. I was right, finally after NY and Dallas, Krystha finally decided to come to Cali and try to sell ourselves as a team. First try, we got hired.

Our current bosses sold themselves as a team when the concept was unheard of, but they have been together for 19 years so it seems to work out well.

I came across this funny posting of two creatives who currently work at W+K talking about how people react when you are talking about your creative partner.