Lifestyle and Hours

People think of advertising as glamorous, and it can be. There are extravagant Christmas parties at the big agencies-one insider tells of being delighted when he got to his Christmas party and learned that Los Lobos would be the band. There are ballgames with the client, client dinners at excellent restaurants, two-hour lunches courtesy of the magazine rep, trips to film on location in Fiji or Rio de Janeiro, and opportunities to befriend the famous people who star in the ads. There’s also the constant opportunity to create an ad that makes a permanent mark on popular culture. But that’s not all there is to advertising. Behind the bright lights and the glitz are thousands and thousands of hours of hard work. (Those in PR, unfortunately, get all the hard work but usually significantly less glitz, though they can still get some fun perks, especially at big agencies with wealthy or plugged-into-thescene clients, as well as the opportunity to create a buzz or contribute to a story that becomes part of popular culture.) While most people in advertising and PR work the kind of hours that get you home in time for dinner, when a deadline is approaching the hours can skyrocket. We’re talking 90 hours a week during crunch times, conceivably. And when the client makes a request for an emergency press release or a revision to an ad? Well, you can kiss your dinner-and-a-movie date good-bye, and your weekend trip to the beach, too. Even advertising creatives, who can really slack off when they’re not under gun, can be at the office until late at night when there’s a deadline approaching. “I work between 35 and 90 hours a week,” one creative says. “It’s all project-based work, so it’s feast or famine in terms of the hours.”

Along with the hard work comes occasional high stress. You might be in advertising account management and freaking out because a mechanical that had to go out at 5: 00 isn’t ready yet at 5: 15. You might be in advertising production and freaking out because the account executive who’s waiting for you to finish that mechanical is standing over your shoulder, freaking out herself. You might be in PR and freaking out because the client-company executive you’re supposed to brief before tomorrow morning’s press conference is stuck in a meeting that’s supposed to last well into the evening. And there’s a lot of money riding on your work in an advertising or PR agency, so you don’t want to make mistakes. “You have to be able to handle pressure,” says insider. If you screw up—or even if you haven’t, but some bigwig at your agency or the client thinks you have—you can end up out of a job in a hurry. And if your agency loses a key account, you might be out of a job no matter how well you do it.