1. How 10 months changed my life.

My time at Barn Ad School.

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How was Barn? Was it worth it? What’s Tony like? These are the questions I get asked the most.

Like most who get into advertising, I took the scenic route but thankfully, I was prepared for Barn, as I studied the ad legends such as Bernbach, Dave Dye, and Dave Trott as well as a lot of 1960-90s ads from the golden age of advertising. So when I got the opportunity to meet Tony Cullingham, I had a good idea of what to expect.

Barn was challenging with a lot of long hours and weekends dedicated to learning what an idea is and how to be simple. Between the 8 of us, we worked on over 300 briefs and produced over 10,000 scamps, 10,573 to be exact and this didn’t include the tactical ads/projects for LinkedIn or live BBH projects.

We also had our fair share of fun moments too, from listening to Tony make bird noises around the office to making Christmas-related comedy films or turning all the BBH’ers into grandparents and leaving personalised Wethers Originals on their desks.

Even though the course was in-house at an agency, Tony made sure our primary focus was our books because it was clear from the offset that BBH was only going to hire one team. Tony set us up with great creatives such as Rosie Arnold, Dave Dye, Graham Fink, and Paul Burke, as well as individual mentors outside of BBH. Martin Reed in particular gave us priceless Helmut Krone books and booked a session with BBC comedy writer Chris Head.

In the end, Jordan and I didn’t get chosen to stay at BBH but we did get to pick where we were going next since we had offers from Droga5, Mother, Lucky Generals, Anomaly, VCCP and Ogilvy.

So yeah, Barn is by far the best thing that has happened in my life so far and I’m saying that as someone who’s joined Skepta on tour and filmed Lewis Capaldi's biggest single ‘Someone You Loved’.

But it’s not better than getting married, which I did halfway through the course 😄.

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