Cătălin Rusu in IQads – about his experience in advertising

How did you start teaching?

It was around 2007, I was a senior at Cohn&Jansen, and the agency had signed up for a mentorship program for young creatives. Well, I was young too, but I had started working at a very young age, and that’s how it came about. I was shooting a lot of telecom commercials, I was the oldest employee at the agency, and it was also an opportunity for me to learn.

I’ve never been a fan of authority. I grew up in a generation of creatives who inherited an oppositional behavior. One of my favorite lyrics from the early 90s was “we’re learning to say NO,” as a reply to the wooden “YES” of the communist era.

When you’re put in a position to teach, you have to put “no” aside. I know I liked it, and I even wrote an article about 10 mistakes not to make in advertising, mistakes I had made myself. In the end, teaching others is about empathy. Yours, if you can squeeze it out, and the one students should acquire in order to do our job.

Your vision

My role is to be a masseur. To identify tense areas, to relieve them, it hurts a little, but then the person can run again. Look, I believe that what matters is what the person wants to do after they interact with you. Not just how much useful information you feed them.

I was lucky to be in the first generation of Berlin School of Creative Leadership, the Romanian version done by IAA. The big result wasn’t the information, although it was very useful, but our desire, from the twenty-something managers or agency owners, to diversify our creativity. To move toward entrepreneurship, to take risks, to step off the beaten path. Learning is not Cartesian; it’s a flow.

Your teaching style

For many years now, I’ve been teaching at the ADC School, and I always try to combine an essentialized theoretical structure with many examples, stories, and spontaneous reactions. You can’t teach young people real-time marketing with a caliper. Your duty is to share a way of thinking with them, not just best practices.

The challenges in the mission of teaching others

To be somewhat useful. I don’t see myself as a teacher but as a former student, an alumni of their passion. I try to balance the effort needed to know and become better with the focus in key moments. Dissecting the present. The key moment in communication or business.

How do you start a course?

I’m Cătălin, born in 1980, under the Scorpio sign… I don’t know, I usually make a joke. I pick a few heads in the room and ask something with an open answer. I take the room’s pulse. And I shape my speech based on their reactions. It’s a dance, and they are allowed to be offbeat, but you’re not.

Most of the time, I do a presentation. I bring as many different examples as possible. From grand prix awards to promotions photographed in the parking lot of the place where the course is being held.

Where do you teach now?

At the ADC School. Dan Petre also invites me to speak to the Communication and PR students at SNSPA. I refused to hold a course because routine teaching doesn’t motivate me enough. I prefer islands.

Before the pandemic, I held a series of workshops on branding and personal branding for banks and pharmaceutical companies. I tried it on Zoom, and it’s completely different. Functional, mediated, but I had some memorable discussions.

How important is theory?

You can’t be good in a field without being somewhat cultured in that field. It’s useful to master concepts, understand them, and think abstractly before jumping into practice. Let’s imagine building a house as a jam session. Which little pig’s house would come out? The plan and theory don’t guarantee success, but they increase your chances of not causing unnecessary harm.

A memorable course

I had the Outdoor course at the ADC School. I didn’t get a chance to do a new presentation; I inherited the one from the previous year from Predu, and I felt a bit guilty. So I photographed all the billboards at Rusu+Borțun, from Corbeni 3 to The Institute, and put them in the presentation. Then I asked them to comment on each piece.

I was happy that I didn’t have to tell them the rules but let them discover them on their own. I think they retained more. And I also believe that for young people, it’s motivating to show them that you can change something, that there’s room for improvement, and they are part of that improvement.

How do your students see you?

As a factor, not a preacher. Passionate and speculative. It’s clear that I care about this profession. That I talk about advertising with enthusiasm. And that I always weave a business perspective when I talk about creation and advertising. And vice versa. Lately, for about two years, I’ve been like them—junior.

I’ve gotten back into basketball seriously after 15 years off. I play in League 1 on a professional team at 41, and I have so much to learn. I know how it feels to be the last one in a group, to have time pressure, the disadvantages of a lack of experience, or the fact that you started something later than others who already know it. It’s the same in the agency. I look at juniors differently now that I’ve become one again. The creative instinct should help us turn apparent obstacles into apparent advantages.

The new generations of students

A more robust value structure. A focus on social responsibility. A trend to express themselves more diversely. I’d like them to be a bit more ambitious, less by the book, with more critical thinking paired with effort. Creativity is trained.

What kind of student were you?

The opposite of the high school student. I did my homework on Monday mornings all throughout childhood. I was a mediocre student until the 12th grade. I started studying in April for university, and in August, I got in, even though there were 20 people per spot. After that, after a few months of effort with 8-10 hours of studying per day, university seemed like a breeze. I almost got all tens in the first session. From the second semester, I started working at the agency, and everything became hybrid.

I was no longer just a student. I was a young advertiser who also attended university. The ones who motivated me and gave me confidence were the professors who marked my development. Codruța Missbach, my philosophy professor from Spiru, and the terror of high school, was there at the most important moment.

In the 12th grade, I didn’t know what to do. I knew geography because my dad was a geographer, I played basketball, and I was preparing for French. One day, after studying for philosophy for the BAC exam, I walked her to the trolleybus and asked her if I had any chance of getting into SNSPA. She looked at me for a long time and said that if I worked the way she asked, I’d get in. And that’s how it was.

Each of us has a tipping point from which progress becomes visible. The key is having the tenacity to reach it. At university, I admired Frigioiu for his passion for studying, his encyclopedic compass, and for encouraging critical thinking. Macoviciuc for how he constructively stimulated students’ pride. I hadn’t prepared for the philosophy exam; he said he didn’t give grades below 7, and he gave me 7. The next one, I got 10. Halic for working with data before interpreting speculatively. Mr. Chelcea for method. Mr. Borțun for how he inspired us, especially in semiotics.

Where and how did you learn advertising?

From every creative director and colleague I worked with. I learned a lot of copywriting theory from Mihai Grecea, film structure, and style. One thing is to write body copy by ear, and another is to structure it.

I learned the most from Andrei Cohn by working with him every day for 5 years. I believe it’s a great opportunity for an ambitious junior to work with a senior who’s passionate about ideas and professionally mature. I learned how to think creatively, not just come up with ideas. It would have helped me to know English; I learned it in advertising. The psychological polishing of talent is like in sports—you build more easily on a solid foundation. What you turn your ego into—effort or excuses—this is where results are filtered.

Access for graduates into the industry

The digital transformation over the past two decades has changed the industry and democratized access to performance. In my time, haha, there was one advertising website and a monthly magazine. The luck of that generation was the vocational universities that provided most of the creatives from the 2000s. Now there’s the ADC School, advertising is studied in several places, and the professors are usually practitioners. It’s different. Win-win partnerships between agencies and universities, the practical study model of advertising must simulate the reality of the job.

What’s needed in communication schools?

Trust. Being able to transmit to the student the confidence that they can succeed and that the academic process is a milestone on this journey. Not an end in itself. Without broadening the student’s perspective, you won’t be able to engage them. You’ll do your course, and they’ll get their grade. And they’ll get it with zero experience in the agency, because, fortunately for students, there’s demand for juniors.

Takeaways from the pandemic

Time is what you make of it. Adapt or die. Impossible is nothing. Just do it. Good things come to those who wait.