With the deepening crisis of an increasing unemployment rate for young jobseekers, fresh graduates every year face fierce competition in the Korean job market. Taking a year off before heading into the job market has now become a custom among students who are about to graduate. The unemployment rate of jobseekers in their 20s recorded the highest with 9.1% this year while the jobless rate declined overall compared to the same month last year.

As a way of helping those students who need to plan ahead before entering the job market, Review has brought you a very special project in 2013. To help those Kookminans who are considering oversees employment and to those who are pursuing careers in specific industries, Review will meet some influential professionals from each industry and have in-depth interviews with them.

This time Review introduces a creative art director, Ha Sung-Kwon, who is currently working at Post Visual, a creative digital marketing group in Korea. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts, a multidisciplinary college of art and design in New York City known for its innovative curriculum, and which has many significant records from prestigious competitions like Cannes Future Lions; a competition designed for students and juniors.
He also has work experiences from renowned advertising conglomerates like Leo Burnett and Mullen, which are dream workplaces for many advertisers. The following is an edited transcript of the interview. For more on Ha Sung-Kwon, go to his website: http://sungkwonha.com/ and view his latest works.

What is the most memorable project you’ve ever worked on?
The most memorable project would be ‘David on Demand ? The World’s First Twitter Controlled Man’. My partners and I worked on that project for two years, and the working process was rather challenging, not to mention that it was a 700 million dollar idea.

Leo Burnet, my company at that time, always hosts a ‘Wild Fire’ seminar at the advertising festival to let people know about the latest trends and projects of the advertising industry. The topic of the seminar changes every year and the topic for 2010 was ‘Spontaneity of Modern Marketing’. To make people at the festival enjoy the spontaneity of modern marketing, my team came up with an idea of creating ‘a twitter controlled man’.

‘David on Demand’ may sound like a simple advertisement, but its production process was not that simple. From naming the project to making the actual set, everybody on my team worked hard to find out how to make the promotion as effective as possible. We wanted to make people participate in the promotion. Just looking at an advertisement does not do anything. It should be interpreted into people’s actions, and I think that is what the advertisement was all about.

When the production for the promotion set of ‘David on Demand’ was completed, the time difference of countries from across the world rose as a big problem for us. In the case of Korea, if a twitterian sent a message to David’s twitter in France, it took 47 seconds until the message came up on the page. If the message did not come up on David’s twitter right on time, people would not feel like they were controlling David, and that would have made the project meaningless since it was all about promoting spontaneity. To solve the problem, what we did was to use two-way radios to contact David to follow orders from twitterians. Whoever saw the message first, would contact David through two-way radios. Another thing that challenged us all was the changing of batteries of the live camera, because it took the efforts of 6 people who were following David. However, I have to admit that doing the project is one of my best experiences.

 
What do employers want from a job applicant? 
Job applicants should be aware of the characteristics of a company and know the company’s vision. When I won a prize at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the world's biggest celebration of creativity in communications, what I used was an application system which was not common at that time. I knew that digital marketing was set to prosper in the era of smart devices, and coming up with an idea of doing a promotion with an application, got me under the spotlight after winning an award at Cannes Future Lions.

My partner and I, Michael Oh, created a mobile application called “Be Steady” for Starbucks. When you download the “Be Steady” application, it leads you to the map of coffee shops around your location. The promotion was to attract young customers who use smartphones. If a customer carries a cup of coffee without spilling a drop, the customer gets a free latte. After winning the prize from Cannes Future Lions with the ‘Be Steady’ application, Leo Burnett, one of the renowned advertising conglomerates in the
United States, offered me a job.

Get yourself prepared
Your portfolio is not everything. You have to be adaptable to this fast-changing society and be able to anticipate the future. Rather than focusing on winning an award in contests, you should try to find things that only you can do.

One time, I met a very interesting job applicant at the interview. The applicant made a campaign with ‘poop’, and I was stunned by his approach. He created a refreshing idea from a thing that everybody thinks useless. Like that job applicant, you have to show the interviewers what you can bring into their company. After all, what they are looking for is a talented person who can bring something beneficial to their companies. Make sure to find what you are good at and make it become your strength.

Recruitment policies of companies are now changing the schools’ systems due to the increasing unemployment rate of young jobseekers. Before the economy went bad, companies were able to assess job capabilities of applicants by their affiliated colleges. But as education is becoming equalized, one’s practical ability starts to mean more than one’s affiliated college. Everybody faces this question at one point in his or her life: “What should I do and where can I go?” Remember, one simple question can change your life. Do not follow others. Find your own path.

Do not be afraid of making mistakes
It’s important to be wrong sometimes. I think youngsters need to fail a bit at first because it is a process of learning and these days people value the results of the work. Winning a prize requires continuous effort. If you can get a great result from your first trial, it is great, but do not get disappointed because you did not get any awards. It takes time to learn, so do not doubt yourself. I could not get any award from contests for the whole year after I first started participating in contests.
 
What is your philosophy of advertising?
I do not like an advertisement that only talks. As I mentioned earlier, advertisements should be about changing people’s actions. When I was invited to the Cannes Future Lions for my Starbucks ad, I saw another prize-winning work that was made by European students, and it was truly amazing. The ad was an electricity advertisement, and it was different from what you normally see. When you look at electricity ads, you usually see friendly characters with cliche campaign slogans, but the prize-winning ad was made in a way that actually makes people save energy. Their idea was to make a gym, and when people work out at the gym, people could get discounts from their electricity bills. That, I think, is a real advertisement. Ads should become a part of people’s lives, and that is my philosophy.

What does it take to become a successful creative art director?
Frankly, I do not have a perfect answer for this question. All I can say is do not be afraid of making mistakes. What people see when they look at my resume or my portfolio is only one side of the coin. They see the records of all the prizes and awards I got and say that I was born to become an advertiser. But if they saw me before winning any prizes, they might say exactly the opposite. That is why I always tell my students to think of it as a learning process when they do not get any results from contests.

When I first started preparing to submit my work to a contest, I did not know anything about digital advertising technologies. However, because I thought that the digital medium would become a new trend in the advertising industry, I learned web codes by myself and used iWeb, a template-based website creation tool developed by Apple Inc., to create digital advertising.

Therefore, learning the importance of process is essential in the creative industries. When I graduated from the SVA, I counted all the ideas that I had come up with in university, and the entire bookshelf was packed with all the notes and memos I wrote. Thousands of papers and pencils were thrown away until I got the attention of the advertising world. Do not think that you can’t do it. Everybody can do it. Learn anything and be prepared.


What do you think students need to do to win prizes from creative competitions?
In 2008, there was a contest held to advertise an island located in Australia. The award-winner created an advertisement by creating a job whose responsibility was to run a blog to promote the island. During the 2008 World Economic Crisis, the economy had collapsed and millions of people lost their jobs, and the prize-winner’s idea was to promote the island by creating the world’s best job. How great is that? If you want to win an award at a contest, you have to research first to know how the award-winning work is made. Doing things that others haven’t done is important.

Do you have any mentors?
Actually, I don’t have just one person to name for this because I’ve met many wonderful professionals throughout my career. However, just to name a few, I want to talk about Dave Weist and Tim Vaccarino. They currently work as Executive Creative Directors at Mullen, a renowned creative agency in the United States. I met them when I was working as an art director at Mullen back in 2011. Although they won prizes at the Cannes Grand Prix, they did not put the awards in their office. Most people in the advertising industry want to feel like stars when they win a prestigious award, but they were different. They were humble, and if you saw them working, you would understand what ‘sacrifice’ means. They both have had a moral influence over their employees at Mullen.

People these days like to quit their jobs when they don’t like something. Life can be hard, and your work can be demanding sometimes. But if you quit whenever you face difficulties, you cannot dream about having a glorious future. If you become an advertiser, you should always keep this in mind, “Are you going to be a sales advertiser? Or do you want to change the world?” In that sense, Tim and Dave showed me what it means to have a living mentor. Remember, just creating nice slogans and making impressive images is not all there is.

Do you have any advice for students who are planning to pursue a career in the advertising industry?
Show the interviewers what you can do for that company. It is possible for anybody to succeed, but young jobseekers lose confidence in themselves as the unemployment crisis in Korea keeps getting worse. Do not underestimate your abilities. Have faith in yourself. Trusting yourself is the key to success.

I hope more students are willing to go beyond their abilities even though they fail to succeed. Everybody goes through hard times, and everyone struggles during those hard times. Greatness does not come knocking at your door, you have to earn it. Find your greatness, just like a famous sport brand’s campaign’s slogan.

What is your vision?
Witnessing the irrationalities of the education system in Korea, my long cherished ambition has always been to build my own creative school. I want to bring out the best in students.

As an influential creative art director, Ha Sung-Kwon wants to become a living mentor to students in Korea. Starting as an instructor at Sookmyung Women’s University, Sung-Kwon will broaden the scope of his career by becoming a professor. “Do not be afraid of failure.” That was the last comment he made to the Kookminans.