I joined the Grip team back in May, just before graduating from the Humber College Creative Advertising degree program. Since then, I’ve completed my degree and also learned a great deal about my craft here at the agency. With a little more experience at my first real gig, I can look back on my four years of ad school. I now realize that there are some things I wish I knew from day 1.

Make an effort to learn something… anything.
My advertising classes began with a open discussion of the newest and coolest news. People didn’t just talk about viral videos and advertising stunts, it could be anything that was interesting to anyone. Understanding the world of advertising is important, and understanding what fuels it even moreso. Professors can’t make you read advertising blogs in your spare time (although, you should), so find something awesome and know about it. If reading isn’t your thing, watch vlogs or interviews. It’s easy to be inspired if you listen to smart people talk about what inspires them.

Pretend it’s due a week before it’s actually due.
When it comes to due dates, dupe yourself. Write down the wrong day. No, you won’t always have it done by your imaginary due date, and yes, creative ideas can come out of high-pressure, last-minute cram-sessions. But every extra day helps. Buying yourself extra time through trickery can give your creative campaigns more breathing space. The real work begins when the project is finished – when there is something concrete to sit back, think about, and perfect. Critiquing and tweaking the project is where the magic happens – where ideas can grow, evolve, and improve. Once you have something ready to hand-in to your professor (before the night before it’s due) you have everything you need to launch into improvements. There is nothing worse than presenting work with errors and missed opportunities glaring you in the face.

Schmooze your profs.
If you want the answers, you have to go to the source. Setting up a meeting with your professor to talk about your work isn’t cheating, it’s getting insider advice. So talk to the people who teach you – they know things. The more people you can share your work with and get feedback from before your imaginary due date, the better your stuff will be. If you take the time to meet with your professor, you could get the glue you didn’t know you were missing.

Start creating your personal brand.
I’ve been told by many people in the industry: don’t attach a PDF to your email – share a direct link to your website. Today, there are no barriers to creating a digital portfolio that is easy to share. So start your portfolio website now; get your work and your personality online. It’s not all gimmicks, people actually get hired in this industry via Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs. If you can’t design and code your own, buy a website template online. If that’s too difficult, start a blog to showcase your work.

Find your competitors, and make them your partners.
Don’t just compete with yourself. Recognize good work and strive to beat that person. Grades suck, but if you can motivate your work with healthy competition, the work you produce will surpass any standard of quality you could set for yourself. Work with the people you want to work with, and not just your friends. You could find a great partnership, propel each others skills forward, win student awards, land a job together, or work at neighbouring agencies.

Reading over this back-to-school advice for ad students, I noticed that a lot of it directly applies to the agency process as well. Funny how that works.

Another year at the Canadian National Exhibition (variously “the CNE,” “The Ex,” the “thing where my mom buys all those novelty cleaning supplies”), has passed. While we could wax philosophic on the sheer volume of ill-fitting pants, adrenaline-powered self congratulation and ingenious deep frying, there is one lesson that is more germane to the purposes of this blog.

Simply, this: Carnies are marketing geniuses.

In the flesh – Carnies are little more than teenagers looking for a summer gig. Or somewhat more grizzled types, who – who knows? – may live out Carnie-dom as a lifestyle, packing themselves into vans alongside the autopsied carcass of the Tilt-a-Whirl. Some are even nomadic “lifestyle” Carnies, roving from town to town, peddling the high-pitched buzzing business of WINNING, by God.

In lore? Small hands, smell like cabbage. Displaced the Simpsons from their Springfield home for a full episode. Appear in plainclothes in Lynch films. Carnies. Smiling and inviting, with with a pop cultural portrait that rivals that of Dorian Gray for grimness.

Fast-talking, fun peddling – Carnies know how to win an audience. The “games people” can make men feel like they can conquer anything with a baseball or tethered water gun; win the stroke-faced elephant, and they will have the respect of their children, or the heart of their date. Meanwhile, there are the “rides people” – lulling you into a false sense of security before strapping you into a ride that should, by any definition, seem like certain doom to the thinking class.

Witness the Polar Express. A midway classic and potentially one of the most uncomfortable physical experiences you’d ever consider actually paying for. The worst of Top 40 pounding in your brain. A backwards trajectory. An operator with a diabolical lilt worthy of a John Waters film. Do I “want to go faster?” Well, if having inertia smash 125 lbs of my friend into my side at 80 mph is any indication, yes. I do. I actually do, you smarmy Carnie bastard. Against my better judgement, I’ll even have another go.

This summer, I witnessed my friend – a woman who has argued criminal cases in courts of law – question her motives for NOT wanting to win a 3′ Smurf. How could she not? With this many tries for that many dollars? She’d be perverse to pass up such a deal. Which one was her favourite? She hadn’t watched the show since she was 5. But the anxiety had already begun to take hold. She looked helpless and eerily “spendy.” With some gentle probing (it was her first visit to the Ex), we extricated ourselves. It may have been one of the most challenging debates of her week. And she had it with a Carnie.

You would imagine that parting an advertiser or lawyer from their money would be like selling encyclopaedias to an encyclopaedia salesman. But not 5 minutes later, I was pumping $15 into more rounds at the machine gun game; the one that is an utter failure if even a peek of the target remains undecimated. Don’t worry – I’ll get it next time. Another $5 is nothing stacked against 3 minutes of proving one’s own self worth.

Carnies, those clever carrion feeders of the midway. They sense our need for summer spoils and have a preternatural touch for luring us in. But how?

Lesson #1: They make it personal

The path to purchase is cyclical at the county fair. Hell, you may even have tried to catapult rubber frogs into the lilypad thing to the tune of $20 already, but they know that unless you’ve won that giantess of a cockatiel, there’s a never ending cycle of opportunity to reengage you. They identify where you went wrong, offer a few hints, make the damn-near-impossible feel like “only a matter of time.”

Carnies know that nothing motivates people better than a sense of renewed possibility.

Lesson #2: They know the value of personality

Carnies have the unenviable task of overcoming negative perceptions. Take that game with the weighted milk bottles, for example. “It’s fixed!” my mom would trill, “you can never win!” But even so, there was a patriarch, glazzy-eyed and wallet in hand. Why? Because good Carnies know their greatest asset is their engaging personality and creativity. They use funny turns of phrase and humour to draw you in, make you feel like this is someone you could split a few suds and some laughs with. Next thing you know, you’re handing over Lauriers before you know what the hell happened.

Lesson #3: They pay attention

Carnival people are anthropologists and armchair psychologists at $8 an hour. Their job is to watch for windows of opportunity. As such, they learn to read people like paperback novels. That age/weight guy? He looks at your hands and hairline. That Fortune Falls guy? Sees you holding hands and knows you want to show off a bit. In the end, we’re transfixed (and sometimes horribly insulted) by the ability of another human being to size us up on such intimate levels. But you can’t refute their refined ability to assess signs and capitalize. Every major think tank in the world know that magic happens when observation happens. It’s the details that offer the answer.

It’s a lesson in being shrewd. And fun. But shrewd all the same.

It’s my thought that the teenage carnival workers of today will have a strangely potent skill set for tomorrow’s world: an appetite, energy and keen ability to assess people – all valuable in working the room.

And, better still, they will know how to beat that damn milk bottle game.