Adlads is written by Anton and Sam, a dynamic duo of advertising know-how brought together by the pleasures and frustrations of the advertising world. We’ve decided to come together on our own digital corner to rant, rave, help, brain dump and generally comment on how we see the communications landscape today.
Anton started out at the funky hot shop that was Leonardo for part of his university placement year. After which he went on to experience life at Leo Burnett working on McDonald’s loving the return to his home town, Newcastle and getting into arguments with ‘alternative’ friends in fields on the topic of global fast food brands. When not holding a shield with a phat yellow M on it he was contributing to the launch of Salads Plus and Maccy Dee’s Euro 2004 Sponsorship.
Wanting to finish his placement year on a high note Anton applied to the Saatchi & Saatchi Summer Scholarship Scheme. Not happy with his brief to take an A4 poster with ‘Nothing is Impossible’ and put it somewhere ‘interesting’ he and two friends convinced the industry that they had hacked M&C Saatchi’s website and animated the poster over its homepage. Anton attracted attention from M&C’s lawyers, a Gold DMA Award (2004) and a place on Saatchi’s Summer scheme working on Visa.
Returning to University for a finale of studying and indulgent abuse he applied to numerous agencies for graduate recruitment, accepted 1 of the 3 offered for reasons such as ‘greater training’ and ‘a more integrated approach to a heavily fragmented media space’ but we all know it’s because they offered him more money.Anton is now a Planner getting filthy in traditional and non traditional media, can’t stand networking but loves to bore those who he finds natural and good with his visions of how to fuse TV with digital and theories of restructuring agencies.
Sam was born on the hallowed shores of Halifax, West Yorkshire on a winter’s night. He promptly upped and left for the shores of the land of the free, and alternated between there and the Middle East as his parents’ work required until his teens, when he was banished to Abingdon School in Oxfordshire. GCSEs and A-Levels later, Sam set about trying to delay picking a university course for as long as possible, but eventually relented and chose Business Administration and Psychology at Aston University.
His decision to crack the advertising industry started before university when he stumbled across Andrea Neidle’s ‘How To Get Into Advertising’. This accident turned itself into work experience stints at BBH, Saatchis and Leith London. Fate was to further shepperd Sam down a certain path when he and Anton met on this wonderful thing called the internet many years ago. This meeting was the genesis of the AdLads, a journey that continues today.
The summer of 2007 saw Sam apply for Saatchis Summer Scholarship, where he turned the brief ‘Turn this poster into a job’ into a virtual job, fooling Saatchi employees, bloggers worldwide and industry press into thinking it was indeed a real job. Sam currently plots his entry into planning as an advertising mercenary, counting the days until he his handed his degree and jumps eyes closed, head first into all that adland can throw at him.
In his spare time Sam rocks the guitar, uses the word ‘awesome’ excessively, martials an art and follow his Dallas Cowboys wherever they go. When asked for one piece of advice Sam replies: “You can’t treat every situation like life and death, cause you’ll die a lot of times.”
To get in touch with the AdLads fire an email off to theadlads@gmail.com
