So The Alek Journals are over. It has been an amazing experience for all of us, mainly because of the fact that what we were doing had never been done. Reality TV in the CDN ad industry. Who would have thought of it?

So Alek didn’t land his dream job in 30 days, but he certainly went through advertising boot camp hell and back. I am sure that he could have an interview with Paul Lavoie tomorrow morning and not sweat a drop after what he has been through.

The reason I knew we had to make the Alek Journals was simple; I knew, from just talking 5 minutes to Alek at Ihaveanidea’s Portfolio Night in Canada that he was going to go very very far. I never even looked at his book before offering him to do the Alek Journals. Why? Because I believe that every single person has the capabilities to make a 10/10 portfolio and get a job in advertising. If there is a goal, which Alek has, and if there are enough energies inside you, anything and everything is achievable in your life.

Sometimes we put a lot of emphasis on the book, the book and the book. Personally, I think that portfolios come attached to human beings. I value people that are ambitious and humble more than I do those 12 ads in a book. I think a good creative director will (and should) be able to make a great person with a regular book come up with award winning ones, but it is highly unlikely that he/she can make an asshole with a solid book become a nice person.

The Alek Journals has been a big lesson to not just Alek, but the thousands of people that logged in. He approached all angles of the industry in order to find a job, and did everything from invade agencies like Taxi and Leo Burnett to convert brutal feedback into solid ads.

Advertising is not about how hard you can hit, but about how many punches you can take. Alek made mistakes, and like a man, stood by them. Unlike the many people that sent insulting messages from the anonymity of the Internet, he was able to publicly confront the entire advertising community, with his portfolio out in ‘the nude’ in Portfolios.com and judge from himself what mistakes he made according to his own judgment.

What I personally found very revealing is how sometimes there was an overwhelming negative wave of feedback from the community when Alek pulled of something creative like writing his entire portfolio in Scott Towels and delivering them in person to John St.

Looking at the comments now, it seems that some people enjoy stomping on other people’s ideas. The irony was that despite all the criticism that he received, Creative Director Stephen Jurisic actually got back to Alek and told him that he liked his stunt/idea and agreed to meet him late in April.

For an industry that feeds on creativity, I think some of us were perhaps a bit to quick to reach judgment and kill creative ideas. Maybe this happens because we work permanently getting our ideas killed by everybody our CD and the client’s wife. It was a lot easier for people to say “Hey your ideas sucks Alek” than to say, “Hey Alek, that’s good, but what if you try this?”

When comments were constructive, it was evident that as a group we were helping Alek develop himself. We were learning from each other, feeding from each other’s experiences and having fun at the same time. This 1+1=3 is ihaveanidea’s philosophy and I encourage you to embrace it as it will help us get to places as an industry that we haven’t been to before.

It is very clear from Alek’s last thoughts that the project helped him develop as a creative. So job or no job, I deem the journals a success. Ihaveanidea will continue to press on for positive changes in our industry even if they happen one person at a time.

Ignacio Oreamuno
President
ihaveanidea