By Dennis Engel

#D&AD + #BallsyBQ + #FreeBooze + #AwesomePeople = #Networking

It’s Friday and I am tipsy again. 

To be honest it’s definitely not the first time I went out for a drink to network in the sake of my future career and I f*cking love it. 

Tuesday I already visited the Mofilm / D&AD Next Director Award where I met Clair, a filmmaker from Thailand and two film directors from LA, who won the Next Directors Award the 5th time in a row already. 

The event took place at a crazy bar called “Bounce – The Home of Ping Pong”. Mofilm booked a separated room for this event — free booze, free finger food, two ping-pong tables and of course “only guestlist”.  

It took me a couple of  warm-up beers and some nice conversations with producers, screenwriters and filmmakers until I found myself swapping business cards and twitter accounts between flying ping-pong balls and flirting film makers. What a wonderful evening!

The next morning I told my mum during our weekly Skype session, that I went out for

 “networking” while I enjoyed a cup of instant porridge for breakfast. 

I never thought that networking would be such an easy, brilliant thing. You not only collect dots to get some new ideas and inspiration from other creatives, you also built some interesting, new tunnels and bridges that help you to come up with new opportunities, passion project and point of views (and yes, free booze makes the decision easier to join an event after a looooooong SCA day.) 

Friday I visited another awesome event called “BallsyBQ” hosted by our mentor Jon
Burkhart at the co-working space WeWork, London. After starting the event with shaking hands, watching creatives giving interviews to the youtube plattform Source LF, I listened to Jon’s talk about newsjacking, online racist bashing and the development of
real-time-content on social media platforms. 

Afterwards six other talkers shared their thoughts about:

life hacking

the importance of irreverence

the burning man festival and randomness 

how to end up on BBC news with a “you cunt” t-shirt 

how to get paid to play Lego with CEOs

All in all I think learning at SCA is just one part of the game. Marc likes to use the quote of John Hegarty: “80% idea, 80% execution and 80% selling to your client”. 

But I disagree: I think the quote should be: “80% networking , 80% idea, 80% execution and 80% selling to your client”. Meeting the right people at the right time can have an tremendous impact on your ideas, future projects and your career later on. Cheers! Dennis