The Idea Blog

Among the things you can do at our new and improved (thanks, Eric) burris.com is “Contact us,” and people do. The emails come to me. Yesterday I received one from someone clearly looking for another Burris. Today I received this (my responses shown in italics):

Hi, my name is ________, and I’m a student at Hampton University in Hampton, VA. For my advertising project I have to interview an Advertising professional and give an oral presentation of my interview. I can email you the questions and you can send me back the answers. Here are the questions:

1) Why did you choose a career in advertising? I like being around creative people. I also like business. It seemed to be a good combination of both. But today we don’t call ours an “advertising” company; instead we’re “an idea company.” There’s a difference, and it’s a positive difference for me and for the people with whom I work.

2) What type of training/educational background do you need to perform your job? I don’t know the answer to that. Nothing really trains you to do this; everything does. To be successful, however, I believe you have to be inquisitive and you simply must be able to communicate.

3) How long have you been in your current position? Not a good question. Ambiguous for our situation. We don’t have titles at Burris, and our company is successful largely because each of our six people is to a great extent a generalist, capable of doing a lot of different things. If what you mean is how long have I been the titular head of Burris, the answer is since the company was founded in 1985.

4) What is the most rewarding aspect of your job? The answer to this is easy: see your first question. I am around creative people and a trusted resource for our clients in a range of businesses.

5) What is the most challenging aspect of your job? Also easy. At one time, when we were larger in terms of the number of people working at Burris, my least favorite thing was dealing with employee matters. Some sizable, some petty … it didn’t matter. Dealing with those issues were never creative and rarely rewarding. Today the most challenging is dealing with what I call my dual “-ias.” When we finish a major project, there’s this wonderful sense of euphoria, a mission accomplished, a great catharsis. But simultaneous with euphoria there’s also paranoia … as in, okay, we’re finished … what’s next?