Meet Joe Bui

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Joe Bui. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Joe below.

Joe, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?

Hmm, I’d have to say simply doing your homework: being prepared for the task at hand. If you walk into a meeting, learn who you’re meeting with, study their corporate philosophy, anticipate the types of questions you’ll be asked and do as much prep work as you can. So that when the moment comes, you’ll have that little extra boost of knowing you’re as ready as you can be. And with that tiny sliver of confidence, the rest should fall into place naturally! I know this because by nature, I’m not a very confident person. And it’s BECAUSE of that, that I focused so much of my attention on ways to present myself in a more self confident way. Remember, humility can be an admirable trait. It makes us human. And being OVERLY confident can work against you. So you just need to strike a balance that works for whatever it is that you are trying to achieve.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

If I had to sum up what I do in a single sentence, I’d say I solve real-world problems using creativity, innovation and imagination. I guess this makes me a “creative” person. And these traits have led me to a long and fulfilling career as a Creative Director/Art Director/Graphic Designer in the Los Angeles advertising and design industries. I’ve created award-winning work for a plethora of local, regional, national and international brands, like GM, Honda, Arco, Blue Cross, Kenwood, HBO, DIRECTV, the Australian Tourist Commission and the Central California Blood Center. Every project is unique. Every agency or client represents a fresh opportunity to prove yourself and test your creative skills. Additionally, I find that these same creative skills apply to a number of other aspects of my life, whether it’s helping my wife design the interior space of our home in Ojai, CA or how I approach even the simplest gardening challenges in the backyard. Currently, I’m also enjoying a new side-hustle as an up-and-coming YouTube sensation. (lol) I found the medium by accident while traveling back and forth between LA and Vegas on one of my frequent trips to visit my son, Joey. As anyone who’s ever driven the 270-mile stretch of highway along I-15 knows, that expanse of road can be beautiful but deadly boring. So to amuse myself, I started taking little detours to see what was down the different backroads and that opened the door to a whole world of strange, beautiful and sometimes scary stuff. I started bringing my camera with me and that evolved into shooting short video clips. And then that evolved further into shooting and editing a bunch of mini-documentaries and travelogues to share on my YouTube channel. (See link below.) For me, creating these videos was a way for me to see a side of the desert that most people rarely get a chance to see while meeting some fascinating people. As a happy side-effect, this process has helped me expand my creative skills into entirely new areas of the creative process, and I believe all of that will ultimately make me a more effective story-teller in my primary career as an Art Director/Creative Director.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Okay, I’m gonna give you three answers that you probably didn’t expect: stubbornness, sensitivity and salesmanship. Let me explain. I’m assuming that if you’re in the creative (advertising, publishing, entertainment) industry, you probably already have a baseline amount of creativity and determination. That’s not the question. But what you will need to develop if you want to progress further along your journey in any creative industry is a sense of stubbornness. No, not being an asshole or primadonna. That might get you kicked out, cancelled or ostracized. I mean stubbornness in the sense of never giving up on your ideals, your dreams and your aspirations. Trust me. The world will try to beat you down, chew you up and spit you out. Advertising, at least when I was coming up the ranks, is a full-contact sport. You need to defend your ideas passionately, but you also need to know when you’re wrong. And you need to be someone that other people will want to work with. That’s where sensitivity comes into play. You need to “read the room.” Listen to people. Don’t stand there waiting for an opening so you can hear yourself talk. If you truly learn how to listen to people, they will tell you the answers to all the questions you are trying to solve. The client will tell you what solution they are looking for by the way they explain their problem. Your creative director will give you all the clues you need to figure out what directions he or she will approve for presentation to the clients. Your creative colleagues will give you their true assessment of your work, sometimes not in WHAT they say but rather in HOW they say it. (And sometimes, the insights can be found in what people DON’T say!) Which brings us to the last quality that will separate you from your competition: salesmanship. Simply put, this is your ability to sell your ideas to others. You have to work on this your entire career. And you have to spend just as much time and energy figuring out how to sell your idea as you did coming up with it in the first place! Every concept starts with a simple insight and then you need to recognize it and nurture it along it’s way past the Creative Lead, the Business Manager and ultimately the client. You need to be able to express this idea in a way to your audience that is compelling, convincing and memorable, just as a car salesman has to understand his target and then make them an offer they can’t refuse. So there we have it: stubbornness, sensitivity and salesmanship. If you can master these three traits, on top of your basic business and/or creative skills, then you will have a much better shot at success in pretty much any industry you choose.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

In a word: Ageism. In the creative industry today, it seems that the traditional skills of concept, design, craftsmanship and attention-to-detail are now being seen as negative traits. (Because it takes more time and effort to create new, original solutions and it’s so much faster and cheaper to simply copy something from the past that worked and put a new spin on it.) And it goes farther. Because today, having years of experience solving myriad creative challenges can actually work against you. You can be perceived as “old school” or “too set in your ways.” To be fair, many “senior” creatives have not kept up with the technology or the skills necessary for today’s fast-paced business environment. But it does seem that there is a tendency to simply lump all people over a certain age into the same category of unhireability. To me, this is a sad travesty, because logically if you can keep the best ingredients of an established creative process and then amplify it by infusing amazing new technology and data into the mix, you could create previously unattainable business outcomes. But no, it seems that data and technology are fast becoming a replacement for human ingenuity and imagination. And the sad reality is that society seems to be accepting the trade-off. Nevertheless, I will continue to keep my mind open to the possibility that the pendulum may swing back eventually to once again favor craftsmanship and human creativity over data-driven machine learning. And until that day happens, I’ll just keep my head down and continue making solid creative work for my clients. Hopefully no one figures out I’m over 50 years old.

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All images are the intellectual property of Joe Bui

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