"You'll never be ready for anything" - DigitasLBi CCO Ronald Ng gives advice to intern in Q&A

During the interview, 21-year-old Michael Sojika asked Ng questions about who inspires him, what he thinks the biggest issue facing the industry is, and what advice he has for students hoping to start a career in advertising.

Sojika participated in DigitasLBi's intern program this summer when he worked as a copwriter.

This fall, he will be a senior at the University of Missouri.

See the interview below:

Q) Who had the greatest impact on you growing up?

A) My mom. She brought up six kids and she was an office typist. She always laughed; she never told us there were problems. I think she had a tougher job than I have right now.

Q) What about non-family members?

A) Not a single person, but quite a few people. I guess all the bosses I have worked with. They have in varying ways impacted me. Some bosses have taught me what I need to do if I was ever in a position of leadership. Some have shown me what I shouldn’t do. So you learn both sides, what’s good and what’s not so good. I guess some key people that have helped shape who I am as a leader are Dharma Somasundram, because she always took a step back and let me shine. Even though she was a huge name in the industry, she always let me step forward, and that sort of helped set the way for me to get my first leadership role. There’s also David Lubars, (Global CCO, BBDO)—for someone with that reputation, he’s probably one of the most hardworking guys in the industry. The cliché is “you’ve already reached that level of success, relax a little bit”—but he was about the hardest-working man in the industry.

There’s one more person who played a pivotal role in shaping who I am and his name is Chris Thomas (CEO of BBDO Americas). He basically opened doors for me to have international exposure and gave me opportunities while I was in a small office in Malaysia. His thought was, “you don’t just hire people, you give them the opportunity to shine.” And that’s what he did.

Q) Did you have one job early that changed your life?

A) No, every job has shaped and reshaped my career every step of the way. I was very careful in deciding what my next job would be. I always looked at my next job as an opportunity for the job after that. A lot of people make the mistake of moving for $1000 more but then when they get to that shop, they’re not able to build a portfolio, and if they stay for two or three years, then it’s like, wasted time.

Success only comes when you have opportunities. I have offered my services for free. When I was two to three years into my career and working as a junior writer at an agency, I went to Yasmin Ahmad—she was a legend at Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur—and I said, “I’ll work for you for free for six months, and then you decide if you want to hire me.”

I didn’t get a job. That’s how bad I was! So even with me offering myself for free she still declined. She very politely said, “Oh I don’t have a position”. It was a great wake up call for me. I had the right intentions because I wanted to work in a great agency, but even offering myself up for free was declined. I could’ve gone to a corner and cried. But instead I said to myself, ‘that means you are just shit, do something about it.’ That really drove me to try to improve and improve and improve.

Q) Do you have any advice for a student like me?

A) There are so many things. I think opportunity first before salary is the most important thing. You are really building the foundation of a career. You need to look at what the opportunity is, not just the shiny name on the door, and ask yourself, “what would you get to do at that place?” Then I guess the other piece of advice is curiosity. I think we all are bombarded with so much information right now we take it for granted, but we really, really, really need to be more curious and dig deeper for what makes what we do great. I research everything. I know every campaign that’s out there because I have a fear of not knowing. I think curiosity is the most important thing, because if you don’t know what the benchmark for the best work is, you don’t know what to beat, you know what I mean? I ask people all the time, “what are you benchmarking your work against?” A 100-meter runner needs to know that 9.whatever is the mark to beat. Otherwise, we all think we’re the fastest runners because, you know, we’re running our hearts out.

Q) Do you have a motto or mantra you live by?

A) Hard work. My mantra is “99 per cent sweat, 1 per cent ___.” I’ve given a lot of speeches with that as my title. I talk about what it takes to keep a job in advertising and be successful, and then I reveal what the 1 per cent is in the end…it’s more sweat.

Q) What’s the best advice you got?

A) It was from Dharma Somasundram (executive creative director, Bozell). Even though I was in the number two position in that agency (and she was number one), she always put me forward as the rep for the agency at that time. I always sort of hesitated and said, nobody wants me there, they want you. She hit me with a line—I don’t think she even thought about it—and it’s stuck with me. It’s going to stick with me forever. She told me, “Ronald, you’ll never be ready for anything.” And that’s brilliant. Because that’s what I tell myself with every job that I take. There’s no university that prepares you for your next job. There are always going to be different people, different dynamics, different organizations, different objectives, and different ambitions. There’s nothing that can prepare you for the next big step, so that’s the best career advice ever.

Q) Is there any part of your career that you wish you’d done differently?

A) I’ve made so many mistakes in my career. There are too many to name. Maybe it was a mistake to go offer up myself for free. But you just move forward. This is the best job in the world, but it’s the toughest job in the world. I love this job, but it’s tough. You have a win, then a loss, a win then a loss. But you keep moving forward. I can’t even… there are too many to name.

Q) What is the most important quality in a leader?

A) Be constantly insecure. You need to think that your work can get better. You need to have healthy paranoia because if you ever reach a level where you are not paranoid anymore about the quality of your work, that’s when your work suffers. So that’s one. Then on the flip side, you need to be secure enough to hire people that are better than you. When you do that, you get out of the way and let them shine.

Q) What inspires you?

A) People. I’m a serial eavesdropper. It makes life very interesting. One thing I tell myself is “always behave like a tourist.” Because you discover that if you live in a place for too long, you don’t see a lot of things that tourists see.

Q) What do you think is the biggest issue in advertising right now that nobody is talking about?

A) We are very taken by shiny things—the latest technology and whatever is the new launch. But we need to ask, “What is the intention for all those things?” What does Google do? They simplify everybody’s lives. What does Facebook do? Facebook connects people. So what is really the thinking behind all those toys that are available to us? I think we are not focused on what the idea is. I recently judged a big awards show. There was a student category apart from the professional category. While there was great innovation and use of new technology, there was a very clear lack of marketing ideas in the work. That is a real concern to me because the appreciation for the idea has sort of diminished. You know with technology coming so strong at everybody—and I love technology, don’t get me wrong—but I always ask myself, “Ok, why are we using this technology?” Technology is not a checkbox for communication. If it’s something we need to check off, we need to give it a reason. One of the pressure-test questions we ask ourselves when we judge work is, “If we are going to give this idea a gold, will it still hold water five years from now?” If the technology goes away, maybe the idea can come in a different form, right? Maybe it’s not Periscope, it’s something else in five years. Will that same thought still be relevant? If it is, it deserves a gold. Ideas need to be timeless. Technologies come and go; ideas are timeless. The idea is king.

Quick-fire questions (answers are the first word or phrase that came to mind)

Q) If you could snap your fingers and be anywhere else in the world right now, where would you be?

A) Bali. Have you been to Bali? It’s outer space, man. It’s amazing. It’s a set of islands in Indonesia. Even for Indonesians it’s mind blowing.

Q) Do you have a guilty pleasure?

A) I love raw cookie dough but I haven’t had it in a long time. Also flossing my teeth.

Q) If you could ban a word or phrase from our industry vernacular, what would it be?

A) [the word] NO.

Q) What color comes to mind when I say the word “creative”?

A) Yellow. It’s my favorite color.

Q) What is a phrase that your mom or dad said to you as a kid that you swore you would never say to your own children?

A) My mom used to tell me “Children are to be seen and not heard.” My mom was a taskmaster. I love her to death but she was tough.

Q) What do you think will be the next big shift in advertising?

A) If I knew it, this would be a very boring job. The best thing about this job is you never know where it’s heading, which is why it's interesting every day. I’d be a liar if I said I knew.