"I “wanted in” before I even had the words for wanting. As a baby, I was a hopelessly picky eater, and my parents discovered the only cure was to play a VHS tape of old Vietnamese commercials while they fed me. So I grew up half-raised on jingles: Biti's ""Bước chân Tây Sơn thần tốc,"" Dutch Lady's flickering fireflies, Vinamilk's “trăm phần trăm” cows dancing across the fields like they owned it. Every kindergarten class has that one teacher who asks what you want to be when you grow up. I remember announcing, with total sincerity, that I wanted to be a CEO. I had watched my father direct a commercial for Zon Zon snacks, stood at the edge of the set beside my favorite comedian Quang Thắng, and quietly decided nothing on earth could be cooler.
But “rose-colored glass” ideals didn’t last. The deeper I went into the family business, the louder the doubting voice in my mind grew. Vietnam holds roughly three hundred agencies doing the exact same services, and I couldn't tell you why I deserved a place at the front. I interned in my family business during my RMIT years and mostly felt like a guest in my own house, so I left for a junior copywriting job at a global agency instead. I remember my first meeting when my direct supervisor was presenting a script idea. One sentence she said, that one gloriously, genuinely dumb sentence that changed my career trajectory: “…a swirl of milk emerges from the ground, wraps around the main character like a white liquid tornado!” I had stumbled into the one profession where a sentence that was gloriously absurd could be pitched with a straight face and taken as seriously as a business plan. I stayed for years, not chasing a title, but hungrily studying how a real creative team thinks, fights, and breathes.
I only came home once I had something worth carrying back. Alongside a creative director we later hired, I helped build the creative team our family agency never had, reshaping us from a modest PR and events outfit into a proper full-stack agency, producing work good enough for a portfolio and honest enough for a case study. My staff still teach me more than I can count. But in concepts and copywriting, they look to me now, and that, quietly, is the trust I had been chasing.
What makes it worthwhile is that I helped my agency concoct creative concepts that land somewhere real: the phone brand Xiaomi honouring a fading art form of “Tuồng”, the beer brand Bia Saigon carrying two thousand tired workers home for Tết, a campaign with UNICEF daring to speak the name of a struggle many teenagers carry in silence: teenage depression. Advertising, at its best, is not only the cleverest way to sell something. Sometimes it is simply the gentlest way to make someone feel heard."
But “rose-colored glass” ideals didn’t last. The deeper I went into the family business, the louder the doubting voice in my mind grew. Vietnam holds roughly three hundred agencies doing the exact same services, and I couldn't tell you why I deserved a place at the front. I interned in my family business during my RMIT years and mostly felt like a guest in my own house, so I left for a junior copywriting job at a global agency instead. I remember my first meeting when my direct supervisor was presenting a script idea. One sentence she said, that one gloriously, genuinely dumb sentence that changed my career trajectory: “…a swirl of milk emerges from the ground, wraps around the main character like a white liquid tornado!” I had stumbled into the one profession where a sentence that was gloriously absurd could be pitched with a straight face and taken as seriously as a business plan. I stayed for years, not chasing a title, but hungrily studying how a real creative team thinks, fights, and breathes.
I only came home once I had something worth carrying back. Alongside a creative director we later hired, I helped build the creative team our family agency never had, reshaping us from a modest PR and events outfit into a proper full-stack agency, producing work good enough for a portfolio and honest enough for a case study. My staff still teach me more than I can count. But in concepts and copywriting, they look to me now, and that, quietly, is the trust I had been chasing.
What makes it worthwhile is that I helped my agency concoct creative concepts that land somewhere real: the phone brand Xiaomi honouring a fading art form of “Tuồng”, the beer brand Bia Saigon carrying two thousand tired workers home for Tết, a campaign with UNICEF daring to speak the name of a struggle many teenagers carry in silence: teenage depression. Advertising, at its best, is not only the cleverest way to sell something. Sometimes it is simply the gentlest way to make someone feel heard."
