22/06/2026
๐h๐ ๐e๐r I L๐a๐ซn๐d H๐จw t๐จ ๐h๐ขn๐ค - Suresh de Silva
๐๐ฆ ๐๐๐๐ ๐ก ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ฆ ๐ค๐๐ ๐
๐ .700 ๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ก๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ฃ๐๐๐ก๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ฆ ๐๐ ๐กโ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ฆ 2000๐ .
Fresh out of school, having completed my Advanced Levels and waiting on my results, my mother reminded me daily to get off my teenage ass and find a job. I was 19 with zero work experience. I also had little to no interest in doing anything other than making most of the time post A-levels to secure more gigs and continue recording the debut full-length album with Stigmata.
To make matters worse, I hadn't given a corporate career a second thought. Career-wise, law appealed to me to a certain degree justified by my love of Literature and a bit of skill as an English debater, or becoming an architect also made some sense with whatever creative background I had in art and music. Other than those two vocations, I hadnโt given it any thought.
Somewhere in 2002, unable to bear my motherโs chastisements and verbal vitriol any longer, I started looking around for part-time work. A friend of mine Rajiv Raja, from S. Thomas' College, Mount Lavinia reached out to me asking me if Iโd like to join Cameron Pale & Medina, a leading ad agency at the time. He told me he was doing some client servicing part time, and it was a relative of his who ran the firm. They were on the lookout for a junior copywriter. I asked him what exactly that was and what it entailed. Rajiv knew of my penchant to effortlessly pen lyrics, poetry, and prose and sufficed that I ought to give it a go.
What happened next was figuring out how to put together a CV (I had help from a few friends), and lacking a portfolio per se, I took printouts of Stigmata lyrics, lots of poetry, essays, and other stuff Iโd written through the years and slipped them all into a file. I attended the job interview with a spring in my step, trepidation in my heart, and lots of curiosity in my head.
On one hand, I was worried I was walking into a world I knew absolutely nothing about.
On the other, that was precisely what excited me.
The adventure of the unknown.
I shall never forget walking into the lobby at the time; I was early, even before the receptionist had arrived that morning. Rajiv arrived a short while later; we chatted and joked, not feeling the time slip by. At around 9.30am or so, I was called in for the interview, my first, fresh out of school, a little cocky already having cut my teeth and having made my bones performing in clubs and pubs since I was 16 years old with Stigmata. You see, being in a Rock band back then in our country took a lot of balls. To play in a Heavy Metal band that insisted on performing their original music meant you had to have bigger stones and thicker skin than most, or the industry would just swallow you whole and spit you out!
Ah, but those first impressions of an agency have stayed with me like ink on sensory skin. The inside was a bustling, chaotic mix of traditional craftsmanship and early digital tech. Desks were piled high with print proofs, markers, and rotary phones, while spaces were defined by pastel-shaded walls, spiral staircases, and walls plastered with pop-culture posters.
From the hints of to***co smoke, alcohol, pungent designer cologne and body sprays, freshly brewed coffee, undisclosed romantic trysts, and fresh ink to pungent magic markers, the smell of paper, both new and old, aplenty was a ubiquitous part of ad land in the late 90s and early 2000s. These were daily and nightly accompaniments with tension, friction, and a robust resilience to perform despite tight timelines, from desk-side creative brainstorming to late-night editing sessions.
It was a brave new world with people that I could maybe identify a little with. After all, there are just a smattering of folk I have ever met in my two-decade stint in advertising/marketing who could be labelled as โconventionalโ people. In fact, it was always the conventional people who ended up mucking things up and tilting the ship sideways (as any creative is apt to concede).
The interview didnโt go as planned. I went in with teenage fire and came out with smoke blowing from my ears. One of the first and very important lessons you learn when you step out of the confines and comforts of college and your home, and step into corporate society is that no one owes you anything because of your pedigree of school, upbringing or any other feats and achievements. Oh sure, having performed academically, and being sporty, and having a fair deal of extracurriculars to show off is helpful. Having connections or relations to top brass may be useful to some. But that was never my arc. My friend Rajiv just made the initial introduction and roped me in for the interview. I had to pull up my big boy pants and prove to the CEO why he ought to hire me, when I was green all over, and had no experience โ and by the looks of it little interest - in the ad industry.
I suppose he appreciated my candour and honesty. He flipped through some of my writing with a smirk and tossed the file away onto his table nonchalantly. I still remember something inside me sinking and an anger rising at that. He hadnโt bothered to even go through a third of my writing. How was he going to deduce my capability? What he didnโt like was my arrogance and attitude. So, he put me in my place. He handed me a heavy-set annual report of Kelsey Homes and told me I had half an hour to peruse it and come up with a 250โ300-word summary of what the AR was and is about the brand.
Not one to shy away from a challenge I accepted.
I was led to the art departmentโmy first time ever, and I shall never forget that nearly everyone inside smelled of booze and smoke. Bloodshot eyes and knowing smiles.
The gravity of the task only hit me when I started going through what was my debut annual report at 19. I had no idea what I was doing and, like an idiot, actually started reading the whole thing very quickly. The only thing I did that was a little smart was jotting down skeletal notes on A4 sheets as I read instinctivelyโpossibly a habit of having done Arts for A-levels and having to take down a lot of notes and side notes for GRC (Greek and Roman Civilization) and English Lit.
When my 30 minutes were up, I was summoned back into the CEO's room, where I handed over 2 or 3 sheets of A4s. He breezed through it and just dropped them in the trash bin. He then proceeded to tell me that just because I could write song lyrics and some poetry didn't mean I had it in me to be a copywriter. Blunt and straight to the soul.
I demanded to know what was wrong with what I had handed to him. Without looking at the drafts, he tore my efforts asunder. He said any copywriter who can carry his own water would be able to flip through the essence of the AR and pen a summary in less than 10 minutes.
I scoffed and challenged him to prove it.
Looking back, that was probably the moment he should have shown me the door.
Instead, he did something I'll never forget.
He proved it to me. And he showed me how he did it.
He taught me that good writing wasn't about stringing impressive words together. It was about identifying what mattered. Finding the signal buried beneath the noise. Distilling complexity into clarity. And knowing how to communicate that in as few words as possible.
That lesson has followed me for more than two decades.
Then he handed me another AR of another company and told me to take another crack at it.
This continued, and finally he told me point blank that I was too smart for my own shoes, and would need to cut the attitude. But he pointed out that I had potential and a sort of crazy fire to prove a point. That if I learned to utilise that to my advantage, it would be an asset not just at work but for the band and later in life.
Of course, I did not understand what any of that meant at the time.
I landed my first job from my first-ever job interview. I worked for 700 bucks a month as an intern.
Even after my A-level results came and I had acquired a reasonable Z Score and was selected to attend Kelaniya University, I still went to work daily. I would hop on a bus and travel to Kelaniya uni, then finish and head to the ad agency on Borella, then in the evening go straight to band practice in Mount Lavinia, and thereafter visit my girlfriend in Kottawa - at the time. Even then I learned how to navigate and manage my time.
After four months I was given a raise and earned 1500 bucks. After six months I was invited to attend pitches and presentations with seniors in the team. I watched and learned the ins and outs, the dos and donโts, and soon I was accompanying the head of marketing and client servicing for pitches.
I went in to learn how to become a junior copywriter. I was taught with brutal truth and unflinching hardship how to bear rejection, chastisement, and ridicule of clients. I was permitted to glimpse the inner clockwork of the agency, warts and all.
I was shown that a job role is not a singular, linear path of exponential growth filled with praise, glory and reward, but rather that you had to toil away and earn your respect while balancing egos, locking heads with your own team, and negotiating seemingly impossible goals with volatile people from big corporations who rarely knew what they needed but made demands on what they wanted.
My point is this. This was certainly a different time and a different vibe. I was put through the ringer and made to work my glutes off while learning different tricks and tropes of the trade. It was not easy. And when times got tough, there was no shoulder to cry on or no one to lean on. You made the bed that you slept in, and youโd damn well sleep on that bed. There was no victim culture, moral grandstanding, or notions of cancelling or being cancelled.
If the pressure got to you and you burned out โ you either rose back from the ashes or you quit, provided you werenโt fired.
I have had the pleasure and privilege of working in some amazing creative spaces in over two decades. Today, I have my own consultation firm (Aion Strategy) and am director/strategic partner of a couple of companies. I still perform with Stigmata who are 26 years old this year, and we are still touring the world and are completing our 5th full-length with a Grammy-nominated producer, Jed Brewer in the US. I published my 3rd book last year, a gritty anti-memoir titled Stigmatized: Lessons from My Storms. I have a long-form podcast called The Island Renaissance. I still pen lyrics. I still write poetry. And as you can see, I still flesh out articles on and off.
Yet some of the most important lessons of my advertising life were learned in that first agency in Borella, with people as tough as nails, clients whoโd storm into the office bellowing insults while throwing things about, and the daily madness of hustling and bustling, churning out campaigns to crazy deadlines.
Today, the questions are different. Flexibility, work-life balance, mental health, remote work, purpose and compensation occupy much of the conversation. Some of those changes are necessary and long overdue. Yet I sometimes wonder whether something valuable has been lost alongside them: the willingness to spend time learning before worrying about the title, the designation, or the salary.
I started with 700 bucks; that didnโt last me a week in 2002. The value and lessons I got from that one year at Cameron Pale & Medina didnโt make me fall in love with advertising. It made me fall in love with problem-solving, the challenge of taking complex concepts and breaking them down into simple solutions in innovative ways.
The process of creativity, branding, strategy, and marketing still stokes a fire in me today. One that has guided me through every professional and creative endeavour since.
๐๐ก๐๐ง๐ค ๐๐จ๐ ๐๐จ๐ซ ๐ญ๐ก๐๐ญ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ฎ๐๐ค๐ฌ.
Artwork: EvilCat Lab
