Week 3.5: Credibility and Responsibility

Three weeks in and I've already missed a week. Shameful.

Usually I write these posts on the weekend, but this last one was unexpectedly busy. I promise it will be the exception, not the rule.

Anyways, today I want to talk about a really interesting situation I've found myself in. Due to the amount of work going on (and hopefully the quality of my work), I've been trusted with a lot of responsibility recently. Which is fine, and I'm very happy about it, it's just more than I had expected.

For example-- We got a (relatively) small project, and I was given a charge to do some product and category research around it. Then, as other projects escalated, my scope of research grew and grew until I was responsible for all of the preliminary research findings. I wasn't given free reign by any means, and I was careful to consistently make reports to my strategy supervisor to keep him in the loop and get his feedback, but I owned the project. It was a great experience, and it was very rewarding to have my insights and research validated in internal meetings and client calls.

I guess what I wasn't prepared for, however, was the scope of credibility and responsibility then assigned to me. Since then, I have been the expert for this product and its target audience. I'm sitting in meetings with people who have decades more of advertising experience and acronyms like VP in their job title, and they are looking at me to settle debates on the audience and the messaging. And this isn't a first for me, either. I've had a creative director to the same thing to me during an internal review. It's a little intimidating.

Luckily I have had great strategists to work under, and I've invested a lot of time into that research, and I know it well enough to answer the call of duty and whatnot; but it is very humbling to see the amount of confidence and trust that is put into the strategist position.

So I guess the lesson is that even at a junior level you have to take this job very seriously. It's still a very creative position and you can have your fun, but you had better do your due diligence. When the questions start coming you'll always wish you had had more time for research.

It's amazing to me that advertising ever got anywhere before account planning was a thing.

-Aaron