LEADERS OF THE NEW: Jett Landicho

Leaders of the New is an ongoing series at jettlandicho.com that will focus on the future talents of advertising. Click here to check the archives.



Name: Jett Landicho

Career Path: Creative Strategy for Interactive and Mass Media

Education: Radio Broadcasting at Humber College and Creative Advertising at Seneca

Advertising Experience: On-Air Talent, Promotions Staff and Copywriter for KICX 106, Promotions Staff and Corporate Blogger for Z103.5 and Senior Marketing Associate at Pure Fun Confections

One Thing About You: Before pursuing a career in advertising, I worked almost four years in the radio industry. I did a lot of different types of work in that time, from corporate blogging, to street team work, to being a country radio announcer. If you would like to listen to my old KICX 106 country demo made from live air checks click here.

Contact: jettlandicho@gmail.com

Read the full interview after the jump!

When did you know that advertising was for you?

I took a class in high school called English Media. The final project was to create a product and an advertising campaign around it. My group wanted to come up with the dumbest product to sell, in order to highlight how great our advertising would be. In hindsight, it was pretty bold of us to assume that our advertising was so awesome that we could sell just about anything, but hey, we were young and maybe a bit cocky. We decided to create "Bling", a brand of coloured water.

I had so much fun with that assignment, from building the website to the print ad to producing television and radio commercials that I heavily considered taking advertising in college. But I also hosted a morning radio show at my high school, and when push came to shove, at the time radio won. I was drawn into the whole "celebrity" aspect of it and I'm still just a big music fan in general.

However, what goes around comes around I guess. Through my experience in the radio industry, I've written scripts that went to air, helped out a lot on the promotions side and even worked in corporate blogging. It brought back all the memories of that one high school assignment and how much fun I had doing it that I decided to pursue advertising for real.


How has your previous experience in the radio broadcasting industry helped you?

My experience in the radio industry has helped me grow, both as a professional and as a person. As a professional, the radio industry has taught me a number of things, including the power of opportunity. In an industry that's so small and insular, you need to work so hard for those opportunities. Even when it seems like opportunities fall into your lap because you know someone that knows someone, you helped make that opportunity by knowing that someone in the first place.

As a person, working in the radio industry has been a huge factor in my maturing process. Not to neglect my Z103.5 experience, but in particular, my time at the country radio station was a real coming of age moment for me. I was very hesitant at first to accept the internship at KICX 106 in Waterloo, because country music wasn't my scene and the station was in a city over 100km away from home. But I took the chance because I knew it would be a great career experience.

What I didn't know was that it would also be an amazing personal experience too. Coming out of college, I sort of felt like I had learned everything I needed to know. However, being so far away from home, meeting new people and trying new things made me realize that I still had a lot to learn and it opened my mind up to the bigger picture of the world. During that time, I had to learn about country music, the Kitchener-Waterloo area, and everything about the people that listen to our station. I had a lot of fun doing it, and wouldn't trade that experience in for the world.

Ever since then, I've tried to keep myself open to new knowledge and experiences. If I could learn to appreciate country music and the country lifestyle, what other awesome things am I missing out on that I just don't know about yet? Even though it's been years since I worked there, I still have a little bit of country on my iPod that I like cause I think it's good music.

My KICX 106 t-shirt autographed by the best country artist of all-time, GM Paterson ;)

What interests you most about interactive and social media?

I admit, I'm a bit of a geek. So I already have a bit of a technology slant to me. However, I love interactive and social media, and would be working with them whether I was in advertising or not.

I was one of those kids that made websites on Geocities that grew up into a teenager who wrote in a blog into a young adult that made a podcast when I decided to take my announcing career into my own hands. It's a shame that the podcast had to end the way it did, because we were at 1,000 subscribers! And that was achieved by promoting the show through Facebook, iTunes, YouTube and a blog. I had just as much fun plotting out the strategy to advertise the show as I did recording and editing the show. When we find the time and the right concept, for sure we'll get back into podcasting again. In the world of online, I love the fact that the average person can have a very large impact on the world.

As advertising vehicles, I love the engagement factor that interactive and social media offers. There are so many different ways that advertisers can reach consumers in a way where they feel like you're giving them a valuable experience in return. And the ways to engage consumers grows every day with new technology and techniques.

When I realized that there were opportunities for me to combine my love of advertising with my love of online and social media, it was almost like an epiphany for me. I hope that I can make both aspects connect to make a fun and exciting career path for myself.


How does this blog fit into your career plan?

My initial goal for this blog was to be a place where I could bring my best foot forward to anyone wanting to learn about me, from teachers, to friends, to potential employers. Sort of like a portfolio, but showing a different and wider scope of who I am. But through the "Leaders of the New" initiative, this could prove far bigger than just me. By showcasing a lot of my peers starting out in this business, this blog also becomes a way for them to sell themselves.

I want every person featured on "Leaders of the New" to be proud enough to show their interviews to potential employers as another resource in their arsenal. Even better, I want potential employers to find these interviews and go, "Hey, this person is really good! I think I need to talk to them!" With the power of Google and the power of blog tags, that second scenario doesn't seem too out of reach to me.


How did you go from being a student to working at Pure Fun Confections?

It's a crazy story in hindsight. At the time, I was working really hard to get an agency internship. I'd been in talks with a few agencies and even did a few interviews. During school though, I was working on a group assignment where we were asked to put together a pitch to present to a small company. We were never actually assigned to present it to a company for real.

Our group had chosen Pure Fun after finding an article about the company on the Toronto Star's website. We really liked the company's vision and the idea of working on organic candy, something new and different in the marketplace. While in the process of working on that assignment, Stephanie and I found the President of the company on Facebook. Thinking nothing of it, we decided to contact her, let her know what we were doing and sent her a rough brief we had put together so that she could check the validity of our information. She was really impressed with what we had done, and told us she was willing to meet with us when we were ready.

From there, it really got us thinking that this could be a lot more than just an assignment. We kept in regular contact with the President of Pure Fun, asked for a lot of advice from our teachers and industry contacts on how to approach this pitch, and tweaked our plan to make it just right for the presentation. On the big day, the President of the company came down to the school and we had booked a school boardroom to present to her. Chris De Corneille, one of our teachers, was on hand for support. I was unbelievably nervous throughout the whole thing, but Stephanie and I both proved our worth and were brought in to intern for the company. After two months of interning, I was offered a job.

That was another eye-opening experience in my life. While advertising students tend to focus on working for just advertising agencies, there are a lot of other opportunities out there to do similar work for other types of companies. Despite the tough economic times, Stephanie and I were able to create opportunities for ourselves within a company that didn't have opportunities before. I'm sure that others can find success with an advertising education in a variety of places if they're willing to look outside the box and work hard to make those opportunities happen.

If you want to think bigger, Stephanie and I have already in a way won a client pitch before even graduating and have done the work to prove our worth. Who says we couldn't do it again? Who says we couldn't go as far as starting our own agency should we so choose? Who says you couldn't do the same or better?


What has the transition been like from advertising to marketing?

All of the skills I've learned from Seneca's Creative Advertising have proven relevant to me here. I've had to dabble in account services work, media consulting, public relations, direct marketing, online and even some copywriting and art direction where necessary. I feel like thanks to the education I got at Seneca, I have the tools to get to where I need to go.

What I've learned sort of the hard way is the differences in advertising and marketing. Advertising is primarily marketing communications, but on this side of the fence that's just one aspect of a bigger picture I need to look at. I need to look at everything happening above that, from the distribution channel to product development to retailer relations and more.

One of the aspects of Pure Fun's business I'm going to have to learn more about is the entire organic scene. Just as an example: do you know why high fructose corn syrup is an issue? As an advertiser, I would just think of a way to tell that to generally one target audience. But what I have to do on the marketing side, is communicate that to everybody that makes the company work, from the people in product development, to retailers to consumers and more. It's daunting have to tackle the entire marketing mix and make every element of that mix work together, but I'm up for the challenge.

For those who have an advertising background and are considering making the jump, I'd say go for it. It opens up your scope of potential work opportunities and if you're willing to learn some additional stuff on top of your advertising background you'll do fine.


If you could offer one piece of advice to future advertisers, what would it be?

My one piece of advice isn't so much an advertising-specific piece of advice as it is life advice: always continue to learn. Back to my story about how much of an impact my country radio stint had on my life for a second. It made me realize that I was living life in a small bubble and the world was just so much more than my little slice of reality had grasped up to that point. My personal quest for knowledge from that point on wasn't even driven by a desire to be "smarter". My motivation for learning more about everything was just to be more aware of the world around me.

It's not hard to be more aware, either. You can learn a lot from just reading the headlines in the newspaper or taking off your headphones while you're out in public and paying closer attention to the world around you. Try out new kinds of food. Read any random message board on the Internet and see what people are talking about. You never know when a nugget of knowledge can prove valuable to you in the future.

And if you keep your mind open to new opportunities, who knows what success you could have? I never could have predicted that I would have worked for both a country radio station and an organic candy company, but I was open enough to give it a chance and it worked. I still have a ways to go on my quest for success, but I'll always be on the lookout for the next big thing for me, wherever it may come from.


What do you do for fun?

I love spending time with friends and family. It's been tough trying to make time for the people I love due to school, career ambitions and multiple jobs, but it's important to make time for them too.

I am a life-long gamer. Some of my gaming triumphs/shames include owning E.T. on the Atari 2600, winning over 5000 Tetris DS online matches and being able to play expert plastic guitar behind my head. Like friends and family, finding time to play video games has been hard too. I read about them and listen to podcasts about video games a lot more nowadays than I actually play them.

Speaking of podcasts, I'm a huge fan of the medium. It's not for everybody, but a lot of my day revolves around podcast consuming. Currently, I subscribe to 35 different podcasts, ranging from a variety of subjects from video games, to the How Stuff Works series of podcasts, to news. I don't have time for all of them every week, but I have content that interests me to consume basically anytime, anywhere.

I love to play and watch basketball. Also, I love making music. I've produced over 150 hip-hop instrumentals since I started that in 2003, and have been playing the drums now for 8 months now. I'm not formally trained in either discipline. I was self-taught on the hip-hop side, just struggling to play the instruments, handle the technology and develop the "ear" till I got to a point where I was happy with the music I was making. As for drumming, I learned how to play real drums by playing the video game Rock Band. Sounds crazy, but it's true. You can listen to one of my beats by clicking here, or watch me play the drums below.





E-Elevator Pitch: Sell yourself in 140 characters or less.

I still can't top the original.



If you're an advertising student or are just starting out in the business and would like to be featured on Leaders of the New, send me an email at jettlandicho@gmail.com