by Nick Sonderup
168 pages, softcover, $42.99
Published by Routledge
routledge.com

Reading How Not to Hate Advertising is like scrolling through your Microsoft Teams chat after a brutal pitch meeting. Venting, inappropriate memes, gallows humor—you know the drill. Author Nick Sonderup is here to tell it straight: this job can grind you down and steal your weekends but still, bafflingly, be the thing you keep coming back to.

As a fellow copywriter, reading this felt like reliving my own blooper reel. The great ideas that flatlined before the client even saw them. The 37th round of feedback that doesn’t just kill your best line but performs a full exorcism on your creative soul. The client meetings that play out like a twisted Black Mirror episode. And yet, there’s still that strange, addictive dopamine hit when a line you hammered out at 2 a.m. ends up on a billboard or makes its way into a TV spot.

Throughout the pages, Sonderup throws in some very useful survival hacks: how to sit through a creative review without questioning your career choices, how to stop treating awards like emotional support animals and how to lead without becoming the very boss you once swore you’d never be. By the end, you’ll be reminded that, despite the circus, the egos and the endless decks—so many decks—it’s all worth it for the moments when we make something that breaks through. Advertising is a madhouse, no doubt, but the chaos is kind of the whole damn point. It drains you. It defines you. —Dave Kuhl ca