Kong and guilt-ridden thoughts about advertising

Some words about Kong, who kindly came to see us, to talk to us and to et us to soncider an internship with them on their newly founded agency. Them, in this case, are Jacob Vijn (creative director) and Sean Chambers (planning director).

They came last Monday, but Monday was hell day motion wise, so they didn’t get the attention they deserve in my blog at the time.

Anyway, they said a lot of interesting things; they talked a lot about the values by which they were going run their agencies. That was interesting since we are working on our own values for the class at the moment. Personally I thought they had a bit to many of them, I like it when you have just a few words to always keep in mind, instead of a long list.
The first one was about trust; “hire people you trust, trust the people you hire”. This is important but hard, I have never hired anyone but to know if you can trust him or her after a few interviews must be close to impossible. The second thing I really took to heart was “add value to the web”, there is a lot of crap out there. It goes together for me with “do work that has real value”.

And this I want to talk more about. Value is important to me. During this “lecture” I got the distinct impression that many in our class (I do not say all, but the part of the class that made the most noise certainly) is interested in money above anything else. They do not really know yet what they want to do, but they want to make money while doing it.

I on the other hand am suffering from moral qualms about the whole industry sometimes, but mostly about advertising. Most of us will end up there, or so it feels, in the countless agencies around the world, tapping into our minds to make us desire things. In an industry who’s job it is to sell people things they don’t really need, adding to the materialism and exhaustion of this planets recourses. That may be taking it a bit to far; I am exaggerating a bit to get my point across here.

I talked to Jacob about this after the lecture and he said that the only way of avoiding the guilt is to do things that you feel have value. It might be doing a campaign site for the Red Cross, or it might be constructing a function that will make things easier for its users, but it need to have a real value.

And I think he is right. To do that with every job you get might not be possible, but I will try. And I will also try not to end up in advertising.