The world of advertising and how to survive it

Thomas Dirnberger, also known as Mr Dirns, said in his presentation at Wintec’s Spark Festival that  being able to look at your own work and judge it from an outsider’s perspective is a hard but important skill to learn.

Dirnberger has had an 11 year career as a health care advertising designer, and talked at Spark about the ‘10 things he has learnt the life way’ and why he loves his job.

“We go through life picking out what is cool and what we think is not cool. When you come to judging your own work you are your harshest critic and I think becoming a creative director in an ad agency that is one of the biggest hurdles you need to get over,” he says.

Dirnberger started his speech with his biggest failure, an advertisement for Viagra.

“I worked on Viagra for the last 10 years, across three continents and over the last 10 years I’ve never managed to get anything out of it. Pardon the pun.”

The reasons for his failure is pointed out in his first bit of advice.

Create ideas with people.

“The thing with Viagra is that everyone wants to own it. As a brand everyone goes, yes I want my name on it and yes that’s fantastic and I want to be a part of that. And the problem with that is you get a lot of people that live in this silo, live in this bubble and can’t open to collaboration,” he says.

This is a big problem in the advertising industry, according to Dirnberger, because what the brand manager wants the designer cannot always communicate through his work.

He says you need to use people for what they are good at and uses the metaphor that you would not get a plumber in to fix your toilet and then tell him how to fix it.

“I spent about eight to ten months on one brief and that was coming up with ideas every day and presenting them to clients and brand managers. Over time the ideas ran out and the reason for this is because we were dealing with brand managers that wanted their own input onto the ideas and wanted to see their ideas on paper and they weren’t open to collaboration,” he says.

But failures do not take the joy of his work away from him.

In his spare time Dirnberger created a Movember campaign where he and a few friends stuck moustaches on the bus ads and the like just for fun and to prove the point that if you enjoy what you do then you do it all the time.

“Enjoy what you do,” he says. “I don’t think I could 10, 11 years in an ad industry, design industry if I didn’t enjoy what I’m doing and I think the way that you tell whether you enjoy what you’re doing is that in your free time you are doing what you do at work. I think that’s when you know you’ve made the right choice.”