Emily Berger Started in Accounting. Now She’s an Award-Winning Creative Leader.
Interview by Trey Alston / Working Not Working Member
A website featuring an agency’s staff, with their smiling headshots replaced with pictures of Beyoncé. Emily Berger did that back in 2015 when she was applying to work at Droga5. She got the job.
Berger’s creativity is summed up across those three sentences, and it’s clear why the One Club for Creativity named her one of its Next Creative Leaders last year. Coming from a family that spoke about ads at the dinner table with the same air of normalcy as sports, Berger was always destined to become a creative titan. First, she interned in an accounting department at an advertising agency and hated every second of it. But the time proved to be valuable because she realized that she loved what the creatives were doing and made it a mission to be like them.
After studying poetry in college, Berger thrust herself into the world of advertising. After a couple of internships, she spent a year as a Junior Copywriter for Martha Stewart’s Living Omnimedia, studied Copywriting at Miami Ad School, and then made her way to Droga5. During her nearly four-and-a-half year tenure at Droga, she refined her creative approach and won hardware like the D&AD New Blood Pencil in 2015 and The One Show: Young Ones Merit Award that same year.
Now, Berger’s a year and a half into her position as Creative Lead at Mojo Supermarket. There since the start, Berger’s putting her imprint across its array of projects, elevating it to the level of excellence that she’s exhibited in past work for brands like Hennessy, Sprint, COVERGIRL, Air Wick, and more. One of Mojo’s projects Berger was particularly hands-on with was Give Her A Break, a platform created to give female directors a much-needed spotlight at the 92nd Academy Awards. The agency spent nothing and gave female directors more than $1 million in free media.
As far as she’s come, Berger’s just getting started. Here’s our conversation about it all—from getting into advertising to being named a Next Creative Leader to getting better as a creative, and more.
What drew you to advertising initially?
My dad is in sales. My mom was in public relations. At the dinner table where other families would talk about the government and what’s going on in the world, we’d talk about the Boston Celtics (whom my dad used to work with), marketing shit, and advertising. I grew up appreciating good advertising.
I knew I wanted to go do something in the field. I liked that it felt like it had a cool atmosphere, but I didn't know that there was a creative department until I interned in the accounting department at an ad agency and absolutely hated it. I realized that I wanted to be one of the people that makes the work and comes up with the concepts instead of crunching numbers.
Before the Miami Ad School, you studied poetry and English literature. How do you think that background helps you as a creative?
Originally, I started off in a communications program in college. I thought that I wanted to learn advertising. But I also knew I’d end up in the field so I decided to start off in branding and did some freelancing for a while, helping brands with naming; poetry really helped with that.
You’ve won some very important awards. How do you think they’ve helped out your career?
As a student, trying to get into the creative side of advertising is so tough. Everybody's doing it. You've obviously never done the job before, so your work isn't that good but it's got to be competitive. You have to make these fake advertisements and have to already be thinking you have the job that you're going to have when you haven't learned to do the job that you've had. It’s extremely hard to get a job when you get out. I think awards helped me to find one.
It was like someone saying, "I vouch for this person. They could have potential." So that helped me stand out and encouraged agencies to take a chance on me that they wouldn't necessarily have otherwise. And I felt that pressure to win awards when I was in ad school. Now, I just want to make good work. I don’t get hung up on getting them anymore. I want to be proud of the work. More people should think like that.
“As a student, trying to get into the creative side of advertising is so tough. You’ve obviously never done the job before, so your work isn’t that good but it’s got to be competitive. You have to make these fake advertisements and already be thinking you have the job that you’re going to have when you haven’t learned to do the job that you’ve had.”
How do you think your approach to being creative has evolved since you came into the industry?
There’s an Ira Glass quote that resonated with me:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit…It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
As long as you recognize the gap in your work and what you want to be doing, you'll slowly get there. I was at the beginning of my career when I heard that but I think about it all the time. Back then, I didn't even know how to make a deck. All of this is such a learning curve. My work wasn't that great, but I've worked to slowly close the gap. And I still feel like I'm working to close that gap.
For about two years at the beginning, I was also stuck on a brand which wasn't that great to work on. I don't even know if they made one thing in the two years while I was working with them, but I was able to find value in that. I wasn't that good in those first two years anyway. So having to pitch ideas over and over and over again and come up with the decks over and over and over again was actually really useful for me because I had this safe space to figure things out. And even though I wasn't making much work yet, I was coming up with ideas and I was refining that part of the process.
Now, you’ve been crowned an official Next Creative Leader. What does that mean to you?
That was awesome. There are so many people that I respect on that list, and have respected on that list over the years. When I won the award, what was so cool was seeing so many of my peers there that I think are so talented and I admire and love to work with. Actually, a lot of my coworkers, my old coworkers from over the years, were there and it was so awesome to be on it with them. It was validating, but I was also just proud to see us all there. It was cool too because I’d just moved over to Mojo.
What’s your favorite project that you’ve been involved with since coming to Mojo Supermarket?
That's a tough one. I'll say a few things. I think when I first got to Mojo, “Give Her a Break” was really exciting to work on because there were four of us working on it, all hands on deck. It was really quick and we just sort of had this idea and did it. And we did everything on the project, from the PR and reach out to the platform itself to the films too. We did everything on that. And as the first thing that we all did together, when I was a part of the agency, that was really cool.
But also, I'm genuinely excited about everything we're working on at Mojo. I never put all of my excitement eggs in one basket, just because I feel like in this industry, you never know. So it's a really cool place to be in, to be excited about everything that you're working on.
“I’m genuinely excited about everything we’re working on at Mojo. I never put all of my excitement eggs in one basket, just because I feel like in this industry, you never know. So it’s a really cool place to be in, to be excited about everything that you’re working on.”
What are you looking to still accomplish as a creative in the future?
I've been very fortunate in my career to have had a lot of creative directors and creative leaders that have mentored me, pushed me, and have inspired me. I'm excited to be that for other people. I also think the industry is changing so much. I mean, it's always changing, but I feel like being at a small agency like Mojo, we are able to react to the changes or take part in them to challenge what's going on and really act on the new ideas that we have. I'm excited to keep questioning what advertising is and what a creative approach to creative work actually is.