I think I’m starting to finally settle into Irish life. Well you know what? It’s about time…on October 4^th I celebrated my one year anniversary of being away from my dear city of Toronto. One year! My how the time has flown.

To re-cap my last year away from home, these are the places I visited: Dublin, Belfast (and all around Northern Ireland), Galway, Tuam, Brighton, London, Manchester, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Paris (where I ran out of money and ended up back in Northern Ireland) – I also went back and forth to Berlin quite a lot. I’m in love with Berlin.  Oh, and I also traveled to Madrid with Brando – I’m pretty lucky.

When I write it out like that it doesn’t seem like I’ve been to too many places. Good thing I’m sticking around here for a while! Once you make it to Europe, the rest of Europe doesn’t feel too far away – because it isn’t. I do like the whole back-packing thing but as I have mentioned in previous posts, I would way rather live somewhere and really get to know the people and the culture. I am doing that in Dublin, while working at a great Digital ad agency. What more could a girl want?

Things have been changing quite a bit here at Brando. After winning a pitch for the mobile company TU in Madrid, I was fortunate enough to travel there to work on some pieces for their launch. I’ve never traveled with work before (unless you count the Adecco training I had in Birmingham…I don’t think I’m going to count that) so this was a new experience for me. I’ve also never been to Spain. I was working quite a bit so I didn’t get to see much of Madrid, but what I did see - I loved! I’ve talked about this before but I think the moment you land in a new city you immediately feel a vibe for the people, culture, and your surroundings. Well I do anyway, and can pretty quickly feel if I would love this city and could see myself living there or if it is just a place for a visit.  Madrid fell into the first category – where for example, London fell into the latter.  The people were great, the tapas were great, and the weather was amazing! After a pretty dismal Irish summer even a few days of heat was unbelievable.

Tourist picture in front of my hotel.

 Bernard and I.

I will have to find out the name of this…

Giant baby head at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

Last weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving and I cooked my first ever turkey. I just wanted to mention this because I am so proud with myself! I feel like an adult now.

Tonight I am attending “It’s a Wrap!” party for the UpStart Poster project. UpStart are a group of artists who put up art and poetry around the city during the Irish General Election Campaign. They are holding an event of art and performance tonight which will bring together artists, writers, volunteers, and supporters to mark the close of the poster project. I think it’ll be a great night! I will definitely let you know how it goes.

In other news: Dee (another intern at Brando) and I have started a joint blog to document our trip up the ladder from our life at the bottom. This blog will be updated regular with goodies we find, events we attend, tweets of the day, and music! Add it to your list of blogs to check regularly.

Goons and Loons after the jump.

 ALSO! I have booked my flights back to Toronto for Christmas! I’m really excited to set foot on the motherland once more. Can’t wait. 

Til next time!

I started this post awhile ago but the busy-ness of life got in the way. It was about my experience of trying to win tickets to Electric Picnic because I wasn’t able to afford tickets. Last minute my boyfriend and I did a quick budget plan and decided to head down anyway. It wasn’t an experience to be missed! I was dyyyiiing to go! I wanted to go last year but for the people who follow me you know that I only made it to this side of the world in October. Finishing up my contract at Anderson was more important to me than going to Electric Picnic. Although I would have had a blast!

For you Canadian folk who don’t know what the Picnic is, it is an amazing music festival here in Ireland. I mean look at the line-up! http://electricpicnic.ie/lineup The only downfall I can see right now for E.P. is the ridiculously priced tickets. It’s insane! And if you take into account getting to the festival, food, camping equipment, drink, new rain boots (it’s ireland) then it could cost an arm and a leg. 

Okay so now that we’ve established that Electric Picnic is amazing, that I was dying to go, and the ridiculous price…where does that leave me? As a broke bum in an expensive city called Dublin. I made it my mission to try and win tickets. I have never gotten so into any competition before in my life. There were a lot of little ones but my favourite and the most stressful was the ESB Electric Ireland competition that went on at the end of August.

This is how it worked: You tweeted #ShareTheEnergy to reveal the whereabouts of a Sparkhead. Who looked like this:

Kinda terrifying and leaving nothing to the imagination.

You would tweet for the map on the ESB’s facebook page to zoom in and show the whereabouts of the blue guy. Once you find out exactly where he is a codeword would appear in the map. Then you have to run like mad to find Sparkhead and be the first one to tell him the code. 

I tweeted up a storm! The Sparky blue guy ended up in Dublin on Monday and Friday. On Tuesday he was in Galway so I had my boyfriend and his friend into it as well since he is located that way. You win 5 tickets! There would be enough to go around. Let me tell you I was sooo close. On Monday my friend Dee and I came up with a plan. When the map zoomed in close enough to know roughly the area that Sparkhead was going to be, she would head down there and I would call her with the code to win the tickets. It was stressful but so much fun!

My friend Junior at work was so close to winning on the Friday. He thought the tickets were his before a man in a business suit slid in underneath him and grabbed the tickets from right under his nose. The video of that experience was the best. Check it out here: http://on.fb.me/obZ4xl

Junior is the one who looks like a Brazilian version of Morrissey.

I was about ready to accept that I just wasn’t going to Electric Picnic, when my plans changed for the better! It was fantastic! A little rainy, but hey what else would I expect from Ireland. Highlights of the weekend were definitely Arcade Fire, The Go! Team, Beirut, and Best Coast. If you don’t know those bands check ‘em out I tell ya!

Some photos for your viewing pleasure:

A man all dressed up for his big day out.

Me and the photo bombing nose?

The sun came out at the beach Bacardi party for a second. It almost felt like I was in a different country!

A bunch of happy festivalers.

The tent and the sky. Possibly my new band name.

A great performance by Irish artist Mundy.

Mark and I having fun at Arcade Fire.

Arcade Fire! Well coming soon…I don’t have any pictures of the set.

The Minutes (another great Irish performance).

Cool, but not sure what I would call them.

James Vincent McMorrow.

Bad picture but definitely one of the highlights of Electric Picnic. Best Coast was unreal!

I have a couple other blog posts up my sleeve, one of them being about my short trip to Madrid for work. Madrid! It was my first time in Spain and from what I saw, I loved it. Brando has been very busy lately. It has been great though! I am getting to work on a lot of great projects and I feel very lucky. Talk soon!

If you follow me on twitter you would have seen last week that Brando launched a twitter campaign called “Tweet Sweets.” If you missed it you will be able to check it out this Friday when we run it again for the afternoon.

Tweet Sweets was a fun little Twitter campaign we had going on here playing with the hash tag #tweetsweets. Remember that Arduino class I participated in awhile back? Well we hooked up an Arduino kit to a gumball machine so that whenever someone tweeted @Brando_Digital using the #tweetsweets tag it would release a sweet into our office. Hence the name Tweet Sweets!

Let me tell you, I have never eaten so many candies in my entire life. Friends and followers alike were sending me candy requests all day. I think everyone in the office was on a massive sugar high for two days! We also had requests for fun challenges, such as an office conga line, a who can eat the most gobstoppers competition, a re-enactment of the final battle of Harry Potter, as well as a game of charades, and tons more!

I got a little competitive and became the Top Eater here at the office. Not sure if I should be proud…or disgusted.

I’ll be keeping the Dublin Dentists in business.

Here are some screen shots that people took from the 2 days.

All the gumballs. ALL OF THEM!

Bad news bears.

Conor and I doing the wiggle.

See you next week!

I have started all over again. Although when I first decided to do this, I didn’t feel like I was starting all over again. Dublin isn’t that far from where I was living in Northern Ireland. 2 hours on the bus. I was going to be doing the exact same thing if I stayed in Berlin. Although it seems I have a few more friends in Berlin, and one of my best friends from high school. So right now Dublin seems strange to me and like I am starting all over again with a new life, without my family and without any of my close friends. Okay, that’s fine. I can do this. 

When I got back from Berlin I remembered I didn’t have a home yet. I decided to stay at a friend’s house for a few days while I figured out what I was going to do. Let me tell you, the first day at a new workplace is stressful enough… on top of that I was also homeless, sleeping on a friend’s couch, living out of a suitcase and in a foreign country. I hardly slept at all the night before my first day.

It has now been almost a month at Brando and it’s awesome! The Creative Directors really push your creativity and they are extremely supportive. There are so many exciting things going on over here. I will reveal them here when I can!

I have written a couple blog posts on the Brando website. Nothing about my ad-ventures, mostly just about random things. It’s nice to write about random stuff every now and again.  Here’s the link for my Greasy Goodness post http://www.brando.ie/?p=2823 and my one that was posted today called “Horror Movies are Bad for Good Imaginations” http://www.brando.ie/?p=2850 This one has started a trailer watching train of horror movies at the Brando Headquarters. And nope, I’m not even good with the trailers. What a wimp.

I also was able to partake in an Arduino workshop here at Brando. What is Arduino you may ask? Well it was a class on building robots! Yeah I know, I’m a genius. Actually I thought I would be completely lost and would hold up the class, but I really only held them up slightly. By the end of the workshop I learned how to build a propeller that I could control through my laptop, and a breathalyzer test that could tweet your alcohol levels…okay that one didn’t really work properly but others in the class were able to make theirs work properly.

Here is me looking very confused about all the gadgets:

Look how cool the kit is though!

Anyways, I am delighted to share with you that I now have a home! A really great apartment in an equally great area in Dublin called Rathmines. It is amazing how much you take for granted sleeping in your own bed and having your things unpacked and in a closet. A closet! I will never take you for granted again.

Now that I have a home, and the internet I can keep in contact with you so much more! I missed you dear blog. Stay tuned for an exciting project that you can interact with at Brando. It’s pretty sweet. The launch is on Thursday I believe. You won’t want to miss it!

I will leave you with some shenanigans the interns have been getting up to here at the office.

Conor is a writer intern who I’ve been working with. Check out his blog at http://chunksadspot.blogspot.com/

Me at my desk.

The Mustache Octopus. Feel privileged to have caught a glimpse of this rare creature.

Dee is the other Art Director intern. Check her out on twitter at @deegeoghegan

Until next week!

On the week of Portfolio Night, I was fortunate enough to have a really good chat with Brendan O’Flaherty at Brando. Brando (http://brando.ie) is an awesome digital shop in Dublin and Brendan was really excited about all the cool things that they are up to at the moment. I would be excited too - they are doing some really great new things that I didn’t even think was possible! The office is also a great environment with retro couches that make you feel like you are stepping into an episode of Mad Men.

And Brendan is an ultimate Mad Man. He started out as an art director but really is a fantastic copywriter. A lot of Creative Directors told me that at Portfolio Night when I said I went to Brando for a meeting. Everyone only had the highest respect for the place. Brendan freelanced since the late 1980’s and worked at a handful of shops in Dublin as well as McCann Erikson in Kuala Lumpur before he opened up Brando with Darren McGrath in 2005 - and it has been growing ever since.

Right now Brando is busy working on a few big pitches for new and old clients. They are also working on a very cool art installation that will work through social media and act like an archive of the people who have left Ireland. It’ll be a way for the people who have left Ireland to tell their story. I’ll post more about that when it is launched, which will be sometime during the Fringe Festival.

Brendan decided that advertising was the industry for him when he went to DIT. He went to see his careers counselor in high school to figure out what he should do. He was always good at art and when the counselor handed him a book on advertising he knew that that’s what he wanted to do. He made his first ad at 17 which was an ad for mastercard. It was the image of the creation of Adam where God was handing him a mastercard saying “Adam, you’ll need this”. 

There are 21 people working at Brando with 6 in the creative department. However, everyone seems to be involved in the creative process. The programmers are amazing and come up with all these nerdy cool robotic things and figure out a way to create any brainy idea that is thrown at them. Brendan describes it as a whole bunch of people doing crazy stuff. 

As stated in previous posts with other CDs, Brendan feels that the biggest issues in advertising today is money. Budgets are down and expectations are up. He feels that creativity is the currency. But he also thinks that training can be an issue. It seems that the colleges in Ireland don’t have an integrated approach to advertising. There are not enough people out there who are actually crafting and becoming the best at something. He thinks that copywriters need to read more, and that watching Hitchcock films is good research. Every character type imaginable has been created in a Hitchcock film.

At the end of our meeting I asked Brendan to take a look at my portfolio, as I always do at the end of a blog meeting. It took a few days to figure it out but I have now accepted an internship at Brando! I am extremely excited, and also a bit terrified. The things that Brando are doing at the moment are just crazy and I hope I can be a part of it all. My first day is on Monday and I’ll let you know how it goes!

Here is Brendan, looking like the ultimate Ad Man. Check him out on twitter @brenoflaherty

Until next time! I’m off to go brush up on my Hitchcock.

Can we talk about Portfolio Night 9? I’ve been dying to talk about Portfolio Night 9 for days now!

On Thursday May 26^th the sun set as hopeful young creatives waited for the whistle to blow to begin their PN9 experience. I was one of those hopeful young creatives at Portfolio Night in Dublin. As you all know I also attended Portfolio Night last year in Toronto, so I wasn’t new to this experience. It was actually nice to be able to compare the two experiences. Apart from the location, they were pretty similar. My book had also improved since last year and I had put a new campaign in so it was nice to get some feedback on that.

One of the things that were different was that I didn’t know many people there and I was entering the doors of Ogilvy by myself. Two designers saw me standing there looking lost and took me under their wings. I also met up with a couple Twitter friends that I was finally able to meet as real live humans. Isn’t twitter great?

Overall I had a great experience. I met with Robert Boyle, an art director at Ogilvy Dublin, as well as David Connor whose formal title is Founder and Chief of Strategy & Innovation Officer at eightytwenty/4D, and Donal O’Dea of Owens DDB who I interviewed back in November for the blog. I also informally met with a handful of great Creative Directors during overtime.

I received some pretty good feedback and some constructive criticism. It is really hard to take everyone’s criticism in as so many people have so many different opinions. From what I have learned during my time away from home is that I should take in the criticism that I agree with and work with that since there are so many opinions being thrown at you that it is hard to be able to take every bit of it to heart (if that makes sense to anyone).

I left the night feeling really excited. And by the weekend I was overwhelmed with excitement! As of Friday I have accepted an internship in Dublin! Meaning that yet again my plans have changed. But I’ll tell you all about that next week.

Here are some photos of that night that I stole from the PN Dublin twitter page, as I was too nervous to remember to take out my camera. Plus my hands were full of portfolios, goodie bags, food, and glasses of wine. 

dun dun dunnnn….the big red door that I had to walk through by myself having no idea what to expect on the other side.

The creative wall of doodles and quotes that was filled up by the end of the night.

The waiting area, I’m there somewhere.

Where the sessions took place, I’m probably there somewhere.

Thanks for a great night PN9 and Ogilvy! Until next week!

It’s a Monday post! I’ll be going back to posting every Monday from now on. Today will be short as I have to get back to packing. I am a terrible packer. I always bring too much stuff with me. Packing like that is not smart when you are trekking around Europe.

So these are my last few days in Northern Ireland, and it feels a bit strange. I have been wanting to get out for awhile but now that it’s actually happening I am a bit scared. Scared and excited! I am leaving my family and security in Northern Ireland, but it is going to be such an adventure! I’m heading to Dublin, and then on Sunday I fly out to Berlin. I am also flying out to London on June 8th for a job interview, which I will tell you more about later as I am scared that I’ll jinx it. Yes, I can be superstitious. 

I am really scared and excited for Portfolio Night 9 in Dublin. It’s in three more sleeps! I have spent the last couple of weeks fixing up my portfolio and working on some new campaigns. I took a trip into town today to print my last campaign, so it’s all coming together! I hope everyone’s Portfolio Night experience will be amazing, and I can’t wait to hear about everyone’s night. I’ll share my experience with you next week.

Tonight there is a screening of the documentary Ad-venture: A Map to Your Creative Future. I had no idea this existed when I named my blog! I swear! My blog was originally titled Portfolio Suitcase and then changed to Ad-Venture. The documentary looks awesome and their site is full of awesome little nuggets of information. Check them out at http://theadventureteam.wordpress.com/ And hopefully you can all tune into the live screening tonight.

I will leave you with some more tourist-y pictures. My aunt has took me to Mount Stewart and the Ulster Folk Museum to do some last minute site-seeing while I’m still in Northern Ireland. We are both terrible at picture taking because when we got to Mount Stewart (which was beautiful by the way) the two cameras we had died. Here is what we managed to take:

What is art? Is this art? Is art, art?

The back of the Mount Stewart home. The camera died before we got to the front. It was amazing though. We went on a tour of the house, and it smelled like bacon and eggs because the family still lives there.

These ducks were awesome.

See you next week! 

I have made a new tentative plan….wait for it…wait for it…I’m moving to Berlin! The coolest city in the world! As you may have noticed, I love that city and try to go back as often as I can. You also may have noticed that my blog has been changing over the past few months. It has been less of an ad-venture travelling blog and more of the musings of a nomad trying to find her place in the world. I am completely not ready to go home yet. I figured that one day I would just wake up and feel it. I would just know that I am finished with my time in Europe and it’s time to go home. I have yet to have that feeling. Awhile ago I woke up thinking that maybe I need to go travelling for a bit more and then go home. But when I was talking to my friend about it, I realized that I don’t want to just go to places, live in hostels, party with some people and see some pretty buildings. I want to actually experience living and working somewhere. I have done that in Northern Ireland just out of pure necessity as I was broke and that was were my family was. And working in recruitment has been fine but my heart is totally in the advertising world. I couldn’t write about my plans before because I was still trying to figure out what I was going to do and I wanted my work to know my plans first before the interwebs (although I have been dying to write about it!). Also, no offence to Bangor but it is just way too small for me! Other than my family, there is nothing really for me in Northern Ireland. I have been itching to get out for awhile now.

I am going to set out into the world and work my ass off to find something and somewhere that I can grow and learn and use my ad skills. That sounds so cheesy, but it’s true. I would love to stay in Dublin if I could get something but it has been hard living in the North with no time off to go down and knock on agency doors. I am taking a last stab at Dublin before I head off to Berlin. I have an interview for the blog with Executive Creative Director Brendan O’Flaherty at a really cool digital shop called Brando on May 24th. Check out what they do at http://www.brando.ie. I am also going to pop by Boys and Girls (http://www.boysandgirls.ie) to see their Creative Director Rory Hamilton before I head to a sold out Portfolio Night 9 on May 26^th. I looked on the Portfolio Night website and Dublin is the only city with sold out tickets! Get on it Toronto! It’ll be cool to meet all the young creatives and Creative Directors of the city.

I am not expecting this to be easy at all. No matter where I go I am going to have it tough. In Dublin I’m competing with a group of really awesome young Irish creatives. And in Berlin I am doing the same with the Germans and I don’t speak the language! I know what you’re thinking. This girl is absolutely nuts. I have been walking around with a Learn German lesson constantly playing on my iPod while mouthing the words or quietly saying them to myself. I look like a nutter. I have some prospects for internships once I get over there, but I won’t know anything for sure until I start knocking on doors. I also figured that if I can’t find anything, Berlin is at the very least a pretty cheap city to live in and I can at least work on my portfolio in the most creative city I’ve been to for the summer. After the summer it would be great to move on and try and do the internship thing in another city. I was thinking Amsterdam or Barcelona. But even typing that out seems crazy. And what I have noticed is that I can barely plan a week ahead let alone a few months ahead. I will have to update you as I go along as things change all the time.

Next week is my last week at work and after that I will have a lot to post about. So stay tuned! And I promise to post more pictures.

And I will leave you with the new Cadbury Glass and Half Full Productions spot. I love it! And I read on a blog by @andymarkpeel http://bit.ly/lff72q who said that there were no green screens involved. It was made in a giant set with 2 or more people dancing in each article of clothing. You can sometimes notice the feet at the bottom of the jacket. That means that the dresser must be huge! It would be amazing to see the making of it.

Check it:  

http://www.youtube.com/user/glassandahalffull?v=wk4U2uJuFAI&feature=pyv&ad=10659375232&kw=cadbury

As you may have all figured out my ad-ventures are on a brief hiatus. There are so many things I want to tell you about right now but due to my circumstances at the moment I just cannot reveal what I am up to. Oooh so mysterious. Stay tuned! I’ll let you know all my plans into May and trust me there will be a lot to blog about each week after that.

But for now I will chat to you about some random things. Well one not so random thing is that you are all going to this right??

If you haven’t even looked into it well then get on it! You can check if your city is participating at http://portfolionight.com. Speed dating with your portfolio and a load of Creative Directors is my idea of a good night.

I went last year in Toronto and it was a really great night. I was completely wrecked after it though because I spent many late nights leading up to Portfolio Night 8 working on last minute touches to my book. I am not even joking that I slept for 17 hours the next day. I was so tired the next day that I barely had the energy to stop a lovely tranny from giving me a makeover at a local Shoppers Drugmart. My partner Sarah at Anderson DDB just stood by tiredly laughing. But let me tell you, it was worth it. Portfolio night I mean…not the tranny makeover.

I found this on the website from last year:

Candid photo! Look how eager I am with my portfolio in hand. Tired and eager.

Okay a random thing I would like to talk about is that I can’t believe I get the Royal Wedding off work!? I know all you Canadians are super jealous right? The United Kingdom has gone absolutely wild with William and Kate’s wedding! And yes, I have seen so much of them these days that I do feel we are on a first name basis.

I will leave you with a really great video that my dear friend Jordan made at Rethink in Vancouver. It’s for the Rethink Scholarship for Langara College. And if you ask me, it’s even better than last years. Watch and enjoy.

Well I don’t know how to embed videos in this so you are going to have to click a link http://vimeo.com/22894905 - it’s worth the extra finger click.

Today is just a quick blog. I have been recovering from the weekend as I had a party on Saturday (sorry Auntie Heather! The house is now spotless!). I thought since I’m all alone this weekend I might as well have a few people over. I made two batches of sangria and by 9:30pm I was still sitting here all by myself. Man, having parties are stressful. I had visions of me having a 200 cigarettes moment where I was just going to sit here all dressed up drinking sangria by myself all night and then pass out by the time everyone came. Well actually that was kind of true, I fell asleep at 2:30 and woke up at 6am and people were still here! I actually didn’t get the last of my friends out until 4pm (they’re a bit nuts here). It ended up being really good! A lot of friends came who I haven’t seen in awhile, as well as Katie the Australian couchsurfer, and Robert the Dutch couchsurfer - who biked to Bangor all the way from Belfast! If you knew how far that is you would be impressed.

I have spent the last two days cleaning everything, and now I have to pack as I am off to Berlin again on Thursday morning! Tomorrow I am heading to Dublin straight after work and meeting a couple friends, then I’m going to go sleep at the airport because I know how I am and at least if I sleep there hopefully I won’t miss my 7am flight. I am meeting my really good friend Miranda from Toronto or as I lovingly call her Mirdizzle. Yes, yes, I have already been to Berlin but I really can’t get enough of that amazing city. I’ll be back in Ireland on Sunday, so it’s just a brief visit.

I’ll post about my shenanigans next week. And hopefully I’ll get more artsy ad things up here soon. My prof from Humber just send me a bunch of briefs that I’m really excited to look through and start working on. Still working on the life decisions though…will keep you posted. Until next week!