Interview with Tomas Barthe

At what point in your life did you know you wanted to dedicate yourself to advertising and why?

After finishing early education I still hadn't decided which career to follow, I'm not the typical man who was born knowing what he wants, I always admired those people with a little "healthy" envy, perhaps. But well, I found myself at the end of the road at a crossroads and I had to decide on the next practical step. Advertising turned out to be a good option… who doesn't like advertising? Besides, I knew how to draw, the degree was four years long and if I didn't like it I could switch to another similar degree, Design or Public Relations. Advertising was far ahead of my other degree option at that time, which was Economics. It's important to say that no matter the direction my life took afterwards, if I had to choose today between Economics and Advertising, I would choose Advertising again… nothing personal against economists, just to clarify.

Is it necessary to have a high dose of creativity to study advertising? Or is lack of creativity made up for with effort and study?

From my point of view I understand that creativity is not a gift of divine inspiration, I never saw it that way, we are all creative, to a greater or lesser extent, but what determines how creative we are is, in my understanding, the experiences and knowledge that each one accumulates over time, that is the raw material of a creative person, if there is no general knowledge the creative person ends up being very poor, no matter how much "divine inspiration" he is lucky to have. You may not feel like a creative person, but it is important to demystify it a little, creativity is a mental process and it can be developed, even more in young people who are starting their studies. The apparent lack of creativity cannot be an obstacle when choosing the Advertising degree. With good teachers and personal effort I am sure that illusion will fall like a curtain to reveal the creative being. And in any case, if one as a human being has the intuition that he lacks creativity the best thing he can do is study Advertising, with the hope of finding it during the learning process. A life without creativity, personally, scares me a lot.

What other qualities should a student who wants to study advertising have, besides creativity?

Just like in any degree, you must be methodical and diligent if you want to succeed in your studies, but I want to focus on a quality that I believe is as important and distinctive to advertising as creativity: empathy. An advertiser must constantly develop empathy; the ability to feel what others feel is essential, you must constantly put yourself in someone else's place. Empathy and creativity constantly feed off each other. This quality is not so closely associated with advertising; I don't remember an empathy workshop, but many creativity ones, perhaps this is a shortcoming of many schools as well. For anyone interested, I think interesting paths to develop empathy, besides some practical exercises, are psychology and acting, which basically help you understand human beings and put yourself in the place of the "other," even if it is a fictional character.

What is an advertiser's daily work like?

Today an advertiser's work is as varied as the agencies that exist, if we talk about agencies, but they are also in production, within companies' communication departments, working on their own as freelancers, true hired guns in the trade, or in very informal associations organized among peers or like-minded people. Fortunately, the development of communication tools works in our favor. The Internet with its social networks is a phenomenon that forced us to redefine ourselves; personally, I believe most schools are still readjusting to offer the undergraduate education that reality demands, a task that is certainly not easy.

If you could choose your career again, would you choose the same one again? Why?

I already mentioned something, but the answer was incomplete. Incomplete because today I am studying for a degree in Law, so it might seem inconsistent with myself if I answer that I would choose advertising again. At the risk of being inconsistent, my answer is yes. At that time, even knowing what I know today and what paths I have taken in life, I chose the degree in Advertising, just as today I choose the one in Law.

Tell us about the jobs you have done as an advertiser

I cannot consider myself a successful advertiser. I worked for a few years in production and post-production, generally providing filming services for foreign production companies. I want to highlight producer Alejandro Nigri, to whom I owe so much of my professional training, and whom I do not want to fail to mention. Then I did several jobs on my own, which I continue to do to this day almost as a game, and with the intention of keeping the craft of the career alive.

How do you get from Advertising to politics? What added value can an advertiser bring to this field?

I had started studying Advertising in a time, if you will, of economic opulence and political stability, where there was plenty of money, products and people consumed carefree. The reality of the country changed abruptly, the economic and political crisis shook everything, so I found myself working in a world that seemed very superficial to me. I didn't feel comfortable trying to sell a blender to a lady in that context… and it was a time of great civic fervor, as I remember it, people were in the streets and many people turned to politics in new parties, without experience and with enthusiasm. The vast majority eventually returned to their former careers, but I had found politics as a late vocation.
I specialized in drafting Bills within the range of opportunities politics offers, and this will not seem strange to you if you understand the mind of an advertiser. In Advertising we take a product, we study it, we use it, we feel it and the world around it (empathy), we seek the opinion of experts, we carry out all kinds of research, we must end up knowing more about it than its own creator, any small detail can trigger the creative idea. Then, when everything is over, I put everything away in a drawer and start with the next client's product, which surely has nothing to do with the previous one. The same happens with laws, the fields of action are of varied universes dissimilar to the versatility of the advertiser's training. The work ethic I learned, the way of tackling projects and organizing myself at work, the ability to look for creative ideas for problems, all of that was enormously useful to me, and as I take on the logic of laws everything feels natural to me.

What advice would you give to a student who is about to start the degree?

I think you will have heard this advice a thousand times, but here it goes once more: don't stop studying, don't stop learning, expanding yourselves, take technical courses in the areas of production, post-production that interest you, languages, read the classics, consume art… enjoy it.

* Tomas Barthe
Advertising graduate from Universidad Argentina John F. Kennedy,
He worked with producer Alejandro Nigri in two of his production companies until 2002, taught a brief Marketing agreement in Extensión Universidad de Buenos Aires.
He then went into politics, first serving as an advisor to Deputy Gerardo Ingaramo in the Legislatura de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. He currently works in the Municipality of Vicente López as a parliamentary advisor for the Bloc of Partido Propuesta Republicana (PRO).