I’ve been doing advertising in one way or another since the summer of 2006.
I started out by helping my mother, a copywriter, with all the things she would rather watch Swedish Idol than do herself. This usually meant such commendable work as spending hours perfecting leaflets about lipgloss. My mom taught me a lot about the business, and about life in general (as mothers do). But after a few years of freelancing in Sweden, and after graduating at my art college, I was struck by what I like to call the Swedish boredom. In the winter of -07, I made a decision to move to Dubai. Don’t ask me why.
Once I arrived and settled in this desert city, I somehow found my way to the local BBDO office. A nice traffic manager decided to take on this inexperienced 19-year old as a freelancer, and assigned me to write Barclays bank brochures for a couple of weeks. After some successfully produced ads about loans and accounts, someone introduced me to the creative director. A few days later, I was a full-time copywriter at BBDO Dubai.
Two years later, I had produced TV spots for Pepsi, Mirinda and Anchor, won local awards for a Barclays outdoor campaign, and even managed to do my bit for humanity by creating some cute prints about eating vegetarian food to prevent global warming. I liked my job, but was sick of the city. In June of -09, I resigned from BBDO and moved back to Sweden.
During the following summer I worked as a full-time freelancer for two related projects; a medieval-themed park, “The Medieval World”, and their on-site music festival, “The Arn Festival”, which featured some of Sweden’s biggest artists in addition to the activities of the theme park. My role here was to attract visitors to the park and generate ticket-sales for the festival. Besides traditional media usage like print ads, we created funny radio spots (for example, a medieval remix of a classic song by one of the festival artists) and a big medieval flashmob-event, while also using a lot of social media-outlets like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.
While working with this project I got to be involved in every single step of the process; from creative ideas to buying media and planning. So besides being a copywriter I also acted as a project manager and media planner, which of course, gave me some useful experience.
After completing the festival project at the end of the summer, I went to NYC for a few months, went back, went to NYC again, learned how to build websites, started a blog that attracted around 2000 unique visitors per day, lost my mobile phone (twice) and held an English lesson for a bunch of fifth-graders. I was also assigned the position as official Twitter profile-designer for my mom’s Twitter account. Over this time, I gradually moved away from writing towards design and illustration.
Currently, I am living in New York, freelancing as a graphic designer, and looking for more things to do. If you’ve got anything, don’t hesitate to drop me an email.