Junior Jabbin': Jed Cohen on His First Years
Mother LA's Award-winning ECD opens up about what he learned in his early career in our new series.
Junior Jabbin’ is a new content series about the important lessons that creative leaders learned during their years as juniors in the industry. This week, Jed Cohen speaks about what he learned during that time to help him become the titan that he is today.
Jed today: A LinkedIn comedian worthy of a Netflix special. Award-winning Executive Creative Director at Mother LA. Bearded.
Jed as a junior: Potentially funny wordsmith. Copywriter at RocketDog Communications. Unbearded (presumably).
What’s the only thing that’s changed since then? I’ll give you a clue — not the amount of facial hair that blankets the bottom half of his face. “I almost have to see three steps ahead of where the idea lands,” he casually says over a Zoom call a few months ago, reflecting on nearly two decades of industry experience. “Is that on strategy? Is the client going to buy it? Is that even makeable? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that there's much of a talent difference, it's just more about knowing now what's going to work and what's not going to work.”
That’s surprising to hear because we generally assume that the industry giants know everything about what it takes to be a creative in this space, but, for Cohen at least, he’s still learning and has questions — such as one that through me for a loop. “By the way, are these answers shitty?”
For the last hour, Cohen’s been hitting me over the head with gem after gem about his upbringing, his career, and what he learned as a junior that’s helped me become the legendary ECD that he is today.
As a kid growing up in Johannesburg in South Africa, Cohen was always fascinated with American culture. From watching bootleg tapes of Ren and Stimpy to obsessing over VHS tapes of The Simpsons, Cohen developed a fixation on the culture that continued even after relocating around the world to Miami.
From having four cereals in South African stores to hundreds in America, Cohen was blown away with his new life. He started watching American TV and was interested in the ads that ran — perhaps even more so then the shows and movies that he saw (but he loved those too).
Determined not to get a regular desk job when he got older, Cohen started his own web design company at 16 with two of his friends. One of their first clients was his friend’s godfather who developed the biggest condo complex in Miami. After making one successful website for him, they were asked to go get some files from an advertising agency in South Miami to build a website for another property.
During his visit to the agency, he discovered the career pathway that interested him the most. People were playing video games and ping pong on a Wednesday morning — most importantly not sitting behind a desk bored out of their minds.
This experience, combined with later winning a competition to write a radio ad for piano store, taking an eye-opening advertising class in college, and even loving the Taco Bell Chihuahua so much that he got a poster of it for his dorm, inspired him to go into portfolio school and get become a copywriter.
Now, years later after he’s been Emmy-Nominated, named one of Adweek’s Creative 100, and, of course, has won his fair share of Lions and Pencils, Cohen reveals the secret that got him to where he is today.
“Everyone needs a mentor,” he says. You can't do this by yourself. Everyone needs a village of people supporting and helping them.”
Here’s Cohen on being a junior.
How different was junior you compared to you now?
I don't think that I was any more or less good at the job when I was a junior than I am now, truly. But I think that what happened is, when you're a junior, you spend so much time chasing down the red herrings or going down dead ends and working really hard on things that might not be right. So it's not like I don’t think of the dumb things any differently than I did when I was a junior, I just know now that something’s never going to work.
I almost have to see three steps ahead of where it can be. Is that on strategy? Is the client going to buy it? Is that even makeable? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think that there's much of a talent difference, it's just more about knowing now what's going to work and what's not going to work.
During that intro period of time, did you have any spectacular, really memorable failures? And if so, what did you learn from those?
I didn't have any spectacular failures until I became a senior copywriter where I had a very spectacular failure of a commercial. It was a spot where everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. The clients were spending a lot of money on it. They hadn't ever done a spot as big as the one we were making. There's a lot of drama within the agency around it. And my partner and I, it was probably only our third commercial that we'd ever shot and we had just started at the agency, so we didn't know what to do.
I think the biggest failure, as I look back on it now, is that I just went along with the process even though I knew everything was bad about it. I should have been voicing my opinion and not just listening to the feedback, but actually trying to figure out what's going to make this thing really good, not being so passive and so giving into the process, and not taking no for an answer.
I think if I look as a junior where I failed, I think so much of it was just about knowing, not understanding that this job, this career as a marathon, not a sprint. I think that seeing, especially when you're starting out, all of your peers or your friends or people having success early and winning Lions, getting their write-ups and making big work and Super Bowl spots can get to you if you’re not doing it as well. I was like, well, I'm making banner ads, where's my shot? It started to really mess with me a little bit. Am I good? What's up with me? Why is everyone else doing so well? When is my shot going to happen? And it drove me crazy. It started driving me crazy. I was like, this isn't fair. Why is this not happening? And then turns out that it all worked out.
What did you learn as a junior that helped you take your career to the next level?
I think you can only control what you can control. There's so many talented people in this business, but so much of it is about timing and luck. Were you in the right place at the right agency, on the right team, on the right brand with the right brief? When you got the brief, did you come up with the right idea? Was the client in the right mood to buy that idea? Did they not kill it when you got into production? Did you make all the right decisions? Did you hire the right director or the right production company? Did you cast it right? Did you make the right music? Did you find the right editor? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.To make something great, all of that stuff has to have happened in your favor and a lot of that you can control and a lot of that you cannot.
And I think that controlling how you show up, what you bring, how you push the work, your ability to have a point of view, your ability to write the things that you want to make and then not ever give up on making the things you want to make works out in the long run. As long as you bring your best self and your breath and the work and you genuinely care, it tends to be okay.
Has there been any feedback that you received that you've internalized and made an important part of your creative process?
The best piece of feedback I ever got was just about when I first started, I would write ads, scripts, scenarios and so forth and they just weren’t very funny or good. Someone told me, just write who you are. They're like, you are funny. When we talk with each other, you're interesting and you make people laugh, but when it's on paper it's not translating. He was telling me to basically just write for yourself and that's always stuck with me. Don't try and do the thing that you think is what everyone else wants to see. I think write the thing or create the thing that you want to make. If it doesn't sell, well then congrats. You're not making something you didn't want to make. And if it does sell, congrats. You are.
I had a conversation with Mischief’s ECD Bianca Guimaraes where she said that she wouldn’t have hired her junior self, which I think is so interesting. Would you have hired the junior version of yourself?
If I was looking at my book now, probably not. I've always tried to be the kind of person that I would want to have hired and certainly when I talk to the people who are coming to Mother now and I look at them, I'm like, there's a lot of myself that I see in them sometimes. Like cool, you are ruthlessly devoted to making this thing as great as it can be. And I'll always love that. But yeah, I don't know man. Probably not. My student book was terrible.
If time machines were invented tomorrow, what would you go back and tell your junior self now?
Everyone needs a mentor. You can't do this by yourself. Everyone needs people supporting them and a village and people helping them. And I think what I would have done and told myself is, an agency is just a name on a door. It’s a collection of people. And I think it's about when you're looking for a job, it's not just about, well, was that one ad that they did last year that won all the awards? Is that cool? Because guess what, only one team got to work on that. And that's not a guarantee of next year they're going to come up with something cool. But you look at the people who work there and you look at the work that they've done and the kind of people they are, that to me would be the only criteria I would use to evaluate an agency I would work for as a junior.
Do you want to be interviewed for Junior Jabbin’? Reach out to alstontreyl@gmail.com and let’s chat.
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