THE LIFE AHEAD 2.0

I am graduating from MIT in June 2006 and will be back on the job market.

Update [July 25, 2006]: I am defending the thesis on August 8, but am off the market for a full-time employment. More details after the defence.

I am taking freelance projects and will be glad to help as long as there isn't a conflict of interests. Email vedrashko at hotmail (I can't part with my Hotmail address I've been using for 10 years now). Everything written below is still in effect except for the relocation bit.


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If you run an ad agency, a new media company, a branding consultancy or a MarCom department and are looking for extra hands, consider me for the job. Your time won't be wasted.

Below are the answers to some of the questions you would probably ask. By all means, write or call if you need to know more to make a decision. You'll find all contact info in the CV (pdf).

• What do you think about advertising?
• What do you want to do?
• What are you good at?
• What are you doing now?
• What have you done?
• Why should we hire you over others?
• We only consider MBAs.
• When can you start?
• Can you travel?
• What's your dream job?

What do you think about advertising?
- Users and customers follow the path of least resistance.
- Advertising is like engineering in that its goal is to find the best solution to a given problem.
- If you want people to listen, you need to have something interesting to say.
- Creative "concepting" and media planning are two parts of the same engineering process.
- Every advertising activity should ultimately lead to the desired consumer behavior.
- Companies and customers co-create and co-own the brands.
- Radio and in-store have plenty of untapped potential.

What do you want to do?
I will gladly handle anything that falls into the job descriptions of account planners, connection specialists, interactive strategists and futurologists. Have a special passion for toys, games and POP displays. Ideally, I would also have my own pet research project that focuses on emerging technologies that can be put to advertising use.

What are you good at?
- Getting things done on time, on budget and within specifications.
- Managing events, campaigns and production processes.
- Watching people buy and consume stuff and make business sense of it all.
- Collecting precise and complete requirements.
- Explaining client requirements to creatives.
- Explaining creative output back to the client.
- Creating new applications for old things.
- Designing logical and intuitive info architectures.
- Figuring out how to put new technology to advertising use.
- Snooping on competition.

I also make PowerPoint presentations that keep people awake.

What are you doing now?
- Bridging the gap between geekdom and advertising.
- Finishing MIT's graduate program in media studies.
- Writing a thesis on advertising in video games.
- Covering new advertising technologies at MIT AdLab's blog that was recently picked as one of the best advertising blogs by Fast Company.
- Work with the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium that looks into creating fan communities for brands and making product placement more effective, among other things.
- Being involved in few other projects.

What have you done?
- Interactively strategized at Fallon.
- Executed accounts (that's what account executives do) at Grey.
- Brand-interned at P&G.
- Worked as a propaganda chief for a software company.
- Briefly telemarketed (argh!), handed out flyers and proselytized.
- Created a student newspaper to win college elections.

Why should we hire you over others?
If I were on the other side of the HR table, I would hire myself to cut the training and orientation time, to get the reliability, respect for deadlines and positive attitude that come in the package, and to tap into the wealth of the seemingly unrelated tech knowledge.

We only hire MBAs. Are you an MBA?
I am taking all marketing and branding (and even some finance) courses at Sloan School of Management and was an undergrad business major at AUBG. I also have five years of field experience.

When can you start?
I can start full-time after I have graduated from MIT and finished ongoing projects -- some time in July - August. Before that, you could test drive me by assigning freelance or part-time projects.

Can you travel?
I don't mind relocating anywhere, although for various family reasons I am actively looking at the coasts, British Columbia, Toronto or Europe.

What's your dream job?
Doing advertising things that have a measurable effect in the company of enthusiastic people.