Those who have watched the American TV series "Mad Men" should know that there is a girl named Peggy Olson in the series. During a brainstorming survey at the Sterling Cooper advertising company, she accidentally said "basket of kisses", which led to her talent as a copywriter being discovered. She proposed a new advertising concept "Mark your man" for lipstick for young ladies and successfully convinced customers to buy it.

From then on, Peggy began her glorious advertising career with her outstanding talent, from a timid secretary to a copywriter with her own office and finally to a creative director. Not only is Peggy gifted, the hero Don Draper also possesses an innate insight and creativity.

Let’s look back at the real advertising circle. It seems that each of these famous advertisers, such as David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Rosser Reeves, Neil French, etc., has outstanding talents.

(Still from Mad Men, Peggy is the first on the left in the back row)

But nowadays, when many top advertisers share their experiences, they only mention how they polish each advertising work, shoot each TVC carefully, or execute each communication campaign. Few of them would attribute their success to talent, or rather, talent has become less of an important factor.

In the advertising industry, which places great emphasis on insight and creativity, people seem to take it for granted that talent is important. However, the truth behind their talent is that these top advertisers have created high-quality mental representations through long periods of deliberate practice, which allow them to interpret and organize information quickly and efficiently.

When there is no need to rely on talent, there may be a way for us to become an outstanding advertiser.

1. Clarify your goals and practice with purpose

We often hear the saying "Don't use tactical diligence to cover up strategic laziness". This tactical diligence refers to what we call "naive practice" in daily life, which is basically just doing something mechanically and repeatedly, and expecting that repetition to improve knowledge and skills; this naive practice is also the wrong method that many people in the workplace are using.

If you want to achieve unimaginable progress, you must adopt "purposeful practice": purposeful practice requires setting clear goals and plans, and breaking down long-term goals into highly targeted short-term goals; ultimately achieving long-term goals through the "small steps to a thousand miles" approach.

Take writing a brand integrated marketing plan as an example. Usually a complete plan will include: market plan (market research, competitive product analysis, product and pricing strategies, etc.); consumer plan ( consumer portrait, consumer behavior analysis, consumer insights, consumer usage scenarios, etc.); brand plan (brand positioning, brand core values, brand cognitive map, brand visual system, etc.); communication plan (communication strategy, creative strategy, event strategy, interactive strategy, media strategy, public relations strategy, etc.).

The scope and knowledge covered by brand integrated marketing are so vast that if someone wants to achieve everything at once and practice and master all the professional skills and knowledge at the same time, it must be a pipe dream. At this time, you need to continuously break down and refine this huge knowledge system, and then focus on breaking through each skill within a period of time. After fully mastering it, you can focus on practicing the next knowledge point.

2. Use your brain’s adaptability to get out of your comfort zone

The brain is like a muscle; the more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes; exercise it hard enough and long enough, and the brain will rewire itself in various ways to accommodate the change.

In his famous concentric circle theory, American psychologist Noel Tichy divides human knowledge and skills into three levels: comfort zone, learning zone, and panic zone.

The inner circle is the comfort zone: it is the area that has been mastered. It will be difficult to achieve a significant improvement in skills by practicing the content in this area.

The middle circle is the learning area: the knowledge and skills in this part have not been fully mastered, and are mostly in a state of half-understanding, or they are known but have not been skillfully applied to become "skills". It feels a bit "laborious", but with a little effort and persistence, they can be fully mastered.

The outer circle is the panic zone: the knowledge here is more difficult to understand, and you may even feel you have no idea where to start because it has exceeded your limits. Here you can only feel frustration and cannot make progress through minor corrections.

The learning zone is a "sweet spot" that is outside the comfort zone but not too far away. Practicing in the learning zone will help you improve your abilities most quickly.

3. High-quality mental representation and rapid information processing

A mental representation is a mental structure, concrete or abstract, that corresponds to an object, an idea, some information, or anything else our brain is thinking about. Simply put, it is the image that directly appears in your mind when you think about something. For example, when it comes to international 4A advertising companies, many people will immediately think of well-known old brands such as Ogilvy, McCann, Leo Burnett, BBDO, and Dentsu. This impression is a psychological representation formed in people's minds.

Great advertisers have practiced for years, changing the neural circuits in their brains and ultimately creating highly specialized mental representations. The role of high-quality mental representation is mainly reflected in the following aspects:

Psychological representation helps to find routines. Why does Durex always attract attention by following hot topics? Why do NetEase’s advertisements always go viral on WeChat Moments? Because they have mastered a set of effective creative rules through their deep insights into social culture and users.

Mental representations help process information, quickly understand and interpret it, store it in memory, organize it, analyze it, and use it to make decisions. It allows us to greatly improve our learning efficiency when learning professional knowledge by reading books, communicating with others, attending lectures, etc.

Psychological representations help organize information. When faced with market difficulties encountered by client brands, excellent advertisers use high-quality psychological representations to accurately diagnose problems and provide solutions after analyzing customer information, market environment and consumers.

4. Find an excellent mentor and establish a feedback mechanism

Find the most outstanding person in the industry you can get in touch with, and if possible, ask him to be your mentor, or ask him for advice on how to effectively improve your professional skills. Under the guidance of excellent mentors, the speed of progress will make a qualitative leap.

Outstanding predecessors usually have mastered the best order to improve professional skills. They understand and demonstrate scientific practice methods to demonstrate a variety of skills, and are able to design methods specifically to overcome specific skill deficiencies and provide timely and effective feedback during the practice process. The most important role of a mentor is to help create high-quality mental representations, monitor and correct your performance.

How to practice without a mentor? Remember the 3Fs: focus, feedback, and fix it. Break down skills into component parts so that you can practice them repeatedly, analyze them effectively, identify your shortcomings, and then come up with ways to solve them.

Try hard to replicate the achievements of outstanding people. If you fail, stop and think about why you failed. Enter the cycle of "practice → feedback → improvement → practice" and eventually succeed in creating effective mental representations.

5. Focus and commitment are crucial

If you're distracted or relaxed at work, it can be hard to make progress. Focusing 100% of your attention over a shorter period of time will lead to new skill levels more quickly than focusing only 70% of your attention over a longer period of time.

Concentration is directly proportional to work efficiency, so maintaining a high level of concentration not only helps us complete our work efficiently, but also allows us to improve quickly. There are many methods on the Internet about how to concentrate. I have tried the "Schulte Table" training method, which involves using your fingers to point out the positions of numbers in the table in order from small to large. The shorter the time it takes to count all the numbers, the higher your concentration level. This method is simple and convenient. You can practice it a few times on your mobile phone as long as you use fragmented time.

I believe that people who have worked in advertising companies know that working overtime at night is often more efficient than working during the day. Many good ideas come to mind during overtime, many PPTs are typed out in one go during overtime, and many graphic ideas are created by designers during overtime.

During the day, the office environment is noisy and thoughts are often interrupted by others, making it difficult for people to fully engage in their work. However, the dead of night provides the best creative state, which explains why people in the advertising industry are always happy to work overtime.

6. Stay motivated and overcome the “New Year’s Resolution Effect”

Continuous self-improvement means constantly stepping out of your comfort zone. No one likes this state. Maintaining motivation may be the problem that everyone will eventually face in deliberate practice.

In order to quickly improve my proposal-writing ability, I copied out all the high-quality PPT proposals from the company's shared disk, and set a goal for myself - to digest one PPT every day (including studying the structure and thinking logic of the proposal, understanding the core strategies therein, learning the wording and professional terms in the proposal, etc.); I started to take action, it was exciting and encouraging, imagining how good it would feel to be able to complete various planning proposals independently and brag about them in front of clients.

However, after a while, reality hit me. Because I was busy and tired at work during the day, it was difficult to motivate myself to study when I got home at night. My original determination to achieve my goals began to wane. This phenomenon is called the "New Year's Resolution Effect."

How to overcome the "New Year's Resolution Effect" and continue to maintain motivation to learn? It can be divided into two parts:

One of the most effective ways to weaken the reasons for stopping is to set aside a fixed time to practice without being disturbed by other distractions. You will find that over time, your body and brain will get used to the pain of practice, and sticking with it will become more and more natural.

Strengthen your tendency to keep moving forward, create strong external motivation, and surround yourself with people who support and encourage your efforts and appreciate the progress you make along the way. It can also bring together people who are interested in the same thing and entice them to join an existing team, which is very helpful for adults to maintain motivation.

7. Roadmap to Excellence

After careful study, we will find that the career growth of most top advertisers follows a similar path:

1. I became interested and heard several seniors in the industry say the following at their sharing sessions: the advertising industry has a lot of overtime and high pressure, and the income level is average. What makes us stick here and create? Because of love!
2. Getting serious requires having the self-fueling motivation to do the hard work, to experience the rewards of hard practice, and to become increasingly self-motivated.
3. Commit yourself to it and devote your time and energy with an all-in mentality.
4. Be innovative, go beyond existing knowledge in the field, and focus on thinking about what may drive the industry forward and develop continuously.

May you become a " practitioner " and take control of your own potential!

Author: Lao Pao

Source: Laopao