The art of selling, while not selling out your soul

"How to work in advertising and not hate yourself" was the eyebrow-moving title of Rothco's laugh-laden presentation to the Offset design and creativity festival in Dublin last Friday and, as a pitch for both industry recruitment and Rothco itself, it couldn't have gone much better.

Beginning with the premise that many of the people in the packed Bord Gáis Energy Theatre audience were the kind of artists who neither have the need nor the desire to sell their souls to advertising, Rothco's trio of agency producer Jessica Derby and copywriters John McMahon and Shane O'Brien stuffed their presentation with good gags and admirable levels of colleague-to-colleague bonhomie.

Not every morning is spent composing “culturally relevant tweets for an insurance company” while wondering why an insurance company needs to be culturally relevant anyway.

Sometimes, as O'Brien outlined, "we use our power for good" (and score a rare Irish win at Cannes Lions for their trouble), with campaigns such as A Shred of Decency – its idea to make confetti for stationers Daintree Paper that was "recycled" from homophobic literature in the run up to the marriage referendum and watch the media coverage roll in.

Some days at the advertising agency may be more surreal than others, judging from an account of walking into a meeting with Dublin Bus executives carrying "a football on a stick". This became the deliberately makeshift puppet "Network Noel", a passenger windbag character that was, essentially, a football on a stick.

Working in advertising is not terribly conducive to the philosophy of achieving contentment by living in the present moment, aka mindfulness. In their business, “the present moment is always being invaded by the future”, explained McMahon, joking that it was a state of “mindfulnesslessness”.

This was good news for anyone who might feel like a sellout: “You can’t hate a self that is constantly changing.”