After teaching myself all of the Adobe software products and Flash Animation, I was armed with an entry-level student portfolio of Giorgio Armani animated banners and interstitial ads.
My first stop was the largest national ad agency in town, McKinney. Their clients included Audi of America, NASDAQ and Lands End. While I still believe I had the better portfolio at the time, I interviewed and didn’t get the job.
Definitely down but not beaten, I took my first job at a digital agency doing websites and banner ads. As fate would have it, a year into the job, that small digital agency landed a new client. It was McKinney, the national ad agency that had turned me down the year before.
Since McKinney didn’t have digital advertising capabilities, they set up a competition between two local digital shops to get the contract to make the animated banner ads for Audi. I was the only digital employee of the firm so the competition project landed on my desk.
Working around the clock for 2 weeks, we won that competition and landed 2 years of campaign work for Audi.