3-Day weekend

Leave early.

Do not think about work.

Drink heavily.

Fresh Beef on Tuesday.

How to get a job in advertising

Chapter 3-The website

Everyone has a site today. Mothers, grandmothers, quilting bees, hate groups. And for a person looking to get a job in advertising, it is a goddamn necessity. Just do the math. If you have one portfolio, you can send it to one agency. If you have 20 portfolios, you can send them to 20 agencies. But if you have a website, every agency in the world can look at your stuff. You’ll be getting job offers from North Korea!

But before you start writing ads for the great leader, you have to actually put your site together. Logically there are two ways to do this:

1. Do it yourself
2. Have someone do it for you.

There is a third option. Try to do it yourself, but ask a web expert so many questions that all you are essentially doing is pushing keys. I highly recommend this method.

Before you do anything, you will need a domain name. Unfortunately all the good names are taken, so you can either go with a longwinded name like iamanartdirectorandiamlookingforajob.com. Or you can construct a complicated combination of letters, numbers and punctuation marks that kind of spell something (e.g. c@pywr1t3r.com).

Now all you have to do is ask your web expert how to construct a site, add copy, upload images and video, link to your email and add a pdf of your resume.

Done? Good. Now just sit back and wait for the offers to come in.

FAQ
Q: Should I tell potential employers that I built the site myself?
A: Of course.
Q: But what if they hire me as a web designer?
A: No problem. The expert who helped you with your personal site can now help you with your job assignments.
Q: Today’s post isn’t very good.
A: That’s not a question!

How to get a job in advertising

Chapter 2-The Portfolio

(Note: This is for creatives only. Account people can read Fortune or watch Mad Money.)

All new creatives need a spec portfolio. It’s your tool to show a potential employer just how creative you can be when you have no client, no boundaries and no budgetary or legal restrictions. Now first you’ll need a portfolio case…

Oh, I know. “Why do I need a case, Old Man? I don’t live in your meat universe. I’m 100% digital and all my shit’s going up on my website!”

Good point (asshat). But the people who will be looking at your work are old, very old. The kind of people who don’t use email because it’s too difficult to learn. The kind of people who hear the words, “video game” and instantly think of Pac-Man. The kind of people…you get the point. They want to hold your work in their wrinkled, liver-spotted hands. So you will need a physical portfolio.

So as I was saying, the best place to pick up a portfolio case is at your local art supply store. They will have an impressive selection and even more impressive prices. Seriously, $75 for a plastic notebook with clear sleeves. Are you fucking kidding me? I mean, sure, the emo girl working the register has impressive tits, but come on!

Now that you have your super-expensive case, it’s time to put some work in it. Everyone’s portfolio is different, but all junior books must include the following:

• An ad for an adult bookstore.

• An ad that looks exactly like one that appeared in this month’s Archive.

• An ad for a local business that features a huge celebrity (Shia LaBeouf loves Marge’s Muffins!)

• Lots of jokes about shitting your pants.

• An ad featuring pictures of sperm.

• A shaky TV spot you and you friends shot while you were completely baked on Northern Lights.

Okay, now print up your ads, stick them in the sleeves and you have your very first portfolio!

Now all you need is a website.

“Wait, you said we needed a portfolio!”

Yeah, well, you need a website too.

How to get a job in advertising

A sarcastic and extremely unhelpful guide to getting your first job in the exciting world of big-time advertising. Think you have what it takes? Then read on.

Chapter 1-The Resume

Yes, you need one. The people in charge still expect a one-page summary of your life, filled with typos, exaggerations and outright lies.

Name
Yours obviously (It helps if your last name is the same as the general manager’s)

Objective:
Account people should put something boring like, “An entry level position in the account services department of a major advertising agency.” Creatives should write something bizarre and pretentious like, “Pilot a spaceship to the outer reaches of the Delta Quadrant.”

Education
If you went to a school that no one has ever heard of, replace it with a more recognizable institution. Moon Park Community College=Harvard Business School

Employment
As an entry-level person, you will not have much applicable experience. That’s okay. What you want to avoid are those dreaded employment gaps. No agency wants to hire someone, print up a box of business cards, enter their birthday in the agency database, and then see them quit so that they can backpack through India. So fill in those gaps with impressive sounding experience. If you spent a year smoking pot and watching Friends, say you were doing research for a study on how mass media affects the youth market.

Awards
Did your 4th grade teacher ever give you a gold start? Put it in.

Interests
As an entry-level person, this will be a large part of your resume. The point is to make you sound like an interesting person. If you are looking for an account position, make it seem like you have been spending your whole life preparing to be in middle-management. List activities like golf, yachting and big-game hunting. If you’re going for a creative position, list a bunch of strange hobbies like bullfighting, midget tossing or cross-dressing. You MUST say that you play guitar!

Address
Do not leave this out. The person who receives your resume may want to come for a visit. You might want to get a dog.

Tomorrow! The portfolio.

The end

Now that the Beijing Olympics are over, I want to say a few thanks yous:

Thank you Beijing for the wonderful and slightly terrifying open ceremonies.

Thank you NBC for letting us know that Heroes is back, again and again and again.

Thank you Visa for your inspiring commercials staring Morgan Freeman. American may not be ready for an African-American Presidents. But when it comes to Voice-Over…

Thank you Lenovo commercials for reminding us that just because an ad is weird doesn’t mean that it will sell.

Thank you Kinesio athletic tape. You were a mystery that turned into product placement.

Thank you gymnastics for showing us that it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, as long as your birth certificate is in order.

And finally:

Thank you Kerri Walsh for showing us the true Olympic spirit and the finest butt in all of Beijing.

10 cool things to say Friday at 5

“Take it sleazy.”

“One more week in hell.”

“Fuck it. We’ll finish next week.”

“Think the client is gonna spend the weekend in their mansion or on their yacht?”

“60 hours with no fucking changes!”

“See you Monday, dickweeds.”

“Hey, I made it through another week without snapping!”

“I started drinking at lunch.”

“I’ll be unreachable.”

“This weekend, I’m totally gonna finish my portfolio.”



And 1 very uncool thing

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

You're old

The Beloit College's annual Mindset List is out!

For those of you not familiar with this list, it is a snapshot of how this year’s college freshmen (The class of 2012) view the world. It is a list filled with items like this:

7. Gas stations have never fixed flats, but most serve cappuccino.

19. Films have never been X rated, only NC-17.

This list is supposed to give us in the media a better understanding of youth culture. What it really does is make everyone feel freaking old. It tells you that everything you thought was current is old-school and everything you thought was retro is ancient fucking history.

It also believes that the new freshmen are a bunch of illiterate morons. It assumes that they know nothing about the world the existed before they were born. Come on! They’re college students! I assume a few of them might have read a book or watched an old movie. (I have never seen a piece of fly paper in my life, but I know what it is thanks to its use as a gag in about a hundred Little Rascals’ films.)

But this year’s list has a very curious item, and it’s right at the top:

1. Harry Potter could be a classmate, playing on their Quidditch team.

Uh, no he couldn’t. He’s a fictional character. I don’t care how young you are, you’re not going to be spending the next semester flying around on a broom chasing snitches and looking out for Voldemort.

So read the list and email it to your friends. But keep in mind that a large group of people is a messy, gooey blob that cannot be easily summed up in a list of 60 items.

On the other hand, you may want to rethink that ad making fun of Gorbechov’s birthmark.

The complete list is here.