By Ethan Bennett

Just grew myself an opinion.

After spending a week working on an agency pitch, my partner and I had been quite set back on the portfolio brief.

A week without mentor advice, focusing on a different brief entirely.

I think everyone knows how thrown about you can get while working on briefs at the school.

As Victoria said, opinions are arseholes, everyone has one.

It’s a maze navigating your way through so many voices, taking on advice until your idea is just a melting pot of nothingness.

So, bringing it back to our set back.

We won our first brief as a team this week. The one we’d spent the least time on. And guess what…

We didn’t run it past any mentors, at least not in any detail, and took on no advice.

In fact we only really spent 4 days on it, and nearly half of that was execution.

Reflecting on this, it just goes to show how easy it is for an idea to become convoluted when there’s so many voices and too much thought going into it.

Our idea was by no means the ‘right’ idea. In fact, it’s probably very wrong.

However, it was simple, and followed the mess, problem, insight, solution.

More importantly, it was OUR idea. So we could tell the story of it convincingly, in our voice.

Graham Fink was generous enough to give us his time this morning and present one of the best talks we’ve ever had.

In which he stressed how important it is to put yourself into your work and to have an opinion.

This resonated with me a lot.

Looking back through the book we’d built over the last 4 weeks, I found it hard to really see any of myself in it.

The scamps were mediocre, the ideas undeveloped.

So after a sudden high and hard low, I’ll be sure to ride a positive change curve and come out higher than before. Just in time for D&AD and Cannes.

A Cannes do attitude.

Mentor advice will be welcome, and very much appreciated, we can’t get enough help and advice, but will be filtered.

The book will have a voice.

It will have an opinion.