a tale of two stories
A tale of two stories
The phrase “act on your value” sounds great, but actually that phrase is very hard to implement because we often have to take the risk of losing something. For fear of losing, sometimes we just shrink back. I want to share my two stories. In one story I didn’t act on my value and felt awful and in the other story I gave my voice to my value and felt proud.
Several years ago, I got an internship opportunity to work in an advertising company, which is the biggest advertising agency in one of provinces in China. As soon as I started to work, our company obtained a project from film producer, a project that we can put 5 different companies’ advertisements in the film to raise as much money as possible for the movie from the advertisements. As a return, our company can get a commission as a percent of the advertisement income. Meanwhile our company needed to coordinate with the director for the advertisement forms in the film. A new team was set up direct at the project, and I was responsible for the paperwork and other trivial matters.
Everything worked great, until a tobacco company joined. The tobacco company offered a lucrative deal that our company cannot refuse, because only with that deal, we can meet the project’s financial requirement and got a high return. However, a problem had arisen since Chinese government laws forbid any tobacco advertisement on mass media, not to mention that the movie was aimed at teen – agers. Everyone in our project team stuck in that problem, and I thought we could just give up the deal because it was not only illegal but also unethical. I didn’t take these words out of my month in that I held the opinion that as an intern, I just needed to finish the job arranged by others and didn’t have a say.
Our team hovered around the illegal problem for a week, and then our team director came up with an idea that let the main characters in the movie smoke whenever they were in cool scenes and put a pack of
The phrase “act on your value” sounds great, but actually that phrase is very hard to implement because we often have to take the risk of losing something. For fear of losing, sometimes we just shrink back. I want to share my two stories. In one story I didn’t act on my value and felt awful and in the other story I gave my voice to my value and felt proud.
Several years ago, I got an internship opportunity to work in an advertising company, which is the biggest advertising agency in one of provinces in China. As soon as I started to work, our company obtained a project from film producer, a project that we can put 5 different companies’ advertisements in the film to raise as much money as possible for the movie from the advertisements. As a return, our company can get a commission as a percent of the advertisement income. Meanwhile our company needed to coordinate with the director for the advertisement forms in the film. A new team was set up direct at the project, and I was responsible for the paperwork and other trivial matters.
Everything worked great, until a tobacco company joined. The tobacco company offered a lucrative deal that our company cannot refuse, because only with that deal, we can meet the project’s financial requirement and got a high return. However, a problem had arisen since Chinese government laws forbid any tobacco advertisement on mass media, not to mention that the movie was aimed at teen – agers. Everyone in our project team stuck in that problem, and I thought we could just give up the deal because it was not only illegal but also unethical. I didn’t take these words out of my month in that I held the opinion that as an intern, I just needed to finish the job arranged by others and didn’t have a say.
Our team hovered around the illegal problem for a week, and then our team director came up with an idea that let the main characters in the movie smoke whenever they were in cool scenes and put a pack of