Isaac Ferre

Creating ideas, pitching ideas, selling ideas. Then, sometimes, those ideas get made into work. This is the life of L.A. advertising copywriter Isaac Ferre, where “Sometimes, my job is just to be as funny as possible as fast as possible.” From the fast pace of agency life to staying humble on the job, Isaac shares below how to get started on the right foot in the advertising world.

About my work

My creative practice
I am a copywriter at Media Arts Lab. My creative partner Reagan Sweat and I come up with advertising ideas, pitch those ideas and produce them. My role involves everything to do with words: from describing ideas to writing scripts to social media captions. And sometimes, my job is just to be as funny as possible, as fast as possible.

Influences and inspiration
Together they sound odd, but I have two main influences that impacted me growing up: comic strips like Calvin and Hobbes and Nike soccer commercials (think 2014’s "Risk Everything" World Cup campaign). I love witty jokes as much as I do intricately imaginative stories, and I think both fictional tigers and soccer cleats still inspire my imagination (and personality) today in their own distinct ways.

My training
I was a student in BYU’s AdLab program, which is an undergrad program that operates like its own mini ad agency while you build your portfolio. I had excellent mentors there like Jeff Sheets and Pat Doyle, who taught me how to come up with excellent ideas and bring them to life. What I learned above all was to just get out there and start making things – the creative magic happens in the doing, not just the thinking.

Favourite recent project
This March, Reagan and I worked on the launch film for the new MacBook Air, called "TABS". Our initial pitch was to see how many open tabs Mac could handle at once. What made that even cooler was the story those open tabs could tell about the person behind the Mac.

The film became a choreographed dance of opening and closing windows on screen, all set to Fela Kuti’s iconic track “Let’s Start”. It was a bit of a beast to design and coordinate all the programs you see throughout (which we actually did on a real MacBook Air), but the final product turned out to be a blast.

A day in the life
In advertising, it’s hard to say what “normal” looks like. Sure, there are meetings, reviews, ideating or days on production, but each day really is unique. Sometimes I'll spend hours scrolling TikTok or Instagram to find creators to work with and other days are spent building out dozens of slides in a pitch deck.

Each day, my partner and I have to become experts in a new field, whether that’s coral reef restoration, college basketball or manga artists. Then, it’s about figuring out the right story to sell an idea.

A starter pack for my job:
Eyecannndy.com is a must-have for getting film ideas across, especially for short-form content. Creative directors and clients are smart, but showing a technique is always stronger than trying to describe why your idea needs a dolly zoom.

How I got here

Starting my creative journey
It was a bit of a rude awakening. To come from college, where you can basically make whatever your imagination and limited budget can conjure up, to agency life, where even your best ideas die faster than you can come up with them, it was easy to become discouraged. 

The fact is, I am reminded every day how little I know and how subjective creative work can be. I once heard a wise person say, “Come what may and love it”: having a good attitude is essential to getting started on the right foot.

Landing my first few jobs, clients and/or commissions
Thankfully, it was a combination of reaching out to recruiters and being connected through my school’s programs. I was very fortunate to have been able to physically visit several agencies during college, so making connections that way was a start. Once my creative partner and I interviewed at Media Arts Lab, it was just a process of really being ourselves, asking questions and saying our prayers that we’d get hired.

Biggest challenges along the way
One of the toughest things that you might not learn in school is how to sell work – something I’m still figuring out project to project. Deck-building and refining an idea to be sellable to a client is just something that’s hard to practice before being in the industry. It’s still a learning curve with each project and different creative directors, but it’s always exciting when something works.

Everyday skills I’ve found helpful for my creative work:
As a copywriter, I think having a good knowledge of film/TV is a must. The more names of actors, celebrities and directors you know is so helpful to instantly make connections and start office conversations. Also, getting to know commercial and music video directors has been vital, and something I wish I’d known sooner.

My social media and self-promotion vibe is…
I’m not much of a poster, and I do tend to be a bit of a social media critic. 

I like to keep a running collection of creators that I save to pull in for different projects, but more importantly, I try to have a clear sense of what the internet thinks is actually cool as opposed to what is just a temporary trend.

Three things I've found useful in my career:

My greatest learnings when it comes to making money and supporting myself as a creative:
I think the most important thing I’ve learned is to make sure my home life is as stable as possible so that life stress doesn’t bleed into work stress. That can be hard when making ends meet, but when I’ve avoided letting life problems pile up, things have gone way smoother at work. 

Advice

My most useful career tips
Never be above any job. The best leaders who I’ve learned the most from are unafraid to get their hands dirty and go to work on even the smallest details of a project. It’s a huge show of good attitude and creative humility to be willing to do even the most menial of tasks with a smile, and peers really appreciate it.

Where I go to feel connected as a creative
I get into the office when I can to connect with my creative department. That’s where I feel I learn the most, even if it’s just through conversations about life. Staying around the nearest creative people I can has helped me feel sharper. On the flip side, going out into nature helps me destress and focus too.

What I'd say to someone looking to get into a similar role
Get writing! Get reading! Get watching! Take in meaningful media like TV and film, practice creative writing of all kinds and go read a good book or two. They say write what you know, so the more you know, the better.