Duval Guillaume!

Signing the contract at Niklas' office

It's official now: from the 14th of January I'm going to work at Duval Guillaume Brussels. Today I signed the contract in Niklas' office and send it back to the agency by fax.

Why would I already sign a contract when in 1,5 weeks I have the opportunity to have screenings with all sorts of headhunters and recruiters from German agencies? The main reason is simply that Duval Guillaume competed out all possible competition.

This agency is among the best in the world, although not everybody knows it yet. Which is strange, because this year they won a total of three Cannes Lions and had 12 nominations. They recently won 4 Eurobest awards (I wasn't even nominated for that) and a golden Epica for an excellent print ad.

Now I know by now that awards are overrated. But during my internship I saw that besides winning awards the agency makes consistently good work for their clients. They manage to sell really creative work because the account managers and planners are better than in any agency I've ever worked for. And what's typical for a top agency: they have a no-nonsense mentality. Even thought they proved themselves in award shows, they still have the feeling that they are fighting.

And fighting spirit is what I like. Ever since my internship there they kept on calling me if I wanted to come to work for them. It was difficult, but everytime I had to tell them them I wanted to finish school first. The reason is that I didn't do this school in the first place to get a job. I started the Miami Ad School to develop my creativity to the limit and to have a goal that you're working towards for 2 years. Those were two opportunities that I couldn't get when I worked as a freelancer in Amsterdam.

In the beginning of this last quarter they called me again to say that there's a job opening. So after the negotiations about salary were done, it was pretty clear that this was the agency I'm going to.

Now if you've read the posts about my internship at Duval, you'll know that I hate Brussels, the city that the agency is in. That's why I've decided to live in Antwerp! I never minded travelling by train every day, people speak Dutch there and it's close to Holland so I can easily go back to my place of birth every once in a while.

So what am I still doing in school from early in the morning till the evening? Of course I'm working with the same motivation as ever to make my portfolio perfect. When you start something, you have to finish it. So today I brought the final version of my portfolio to the printer store and I think it will be finished on Monday. And of course I'm still going to the screenings. Only I'll be a little more relaxed.