After a very successful year one for The Message, one of our goals for year two is to start rolling out some new kinds of content that go beyond reporting industry news to better understanding the people that work within it.

Today we’re introducing one of those new features, AdVice, in which we sit down for a wide-ranging chat with successful people from across the industry. We have two goals with AdVice. One is learn more about who they are as people and how that personality shaped their professional career. The second is to have some fun, by finding what guilty pleasures they enjoy and by asking questions that have absolutely nothing to do with their professional life.

“We started talking about AdVice months ago, long before the pandemic, with plans to sit down face-to-face with our AdVice participants,” said The Message publisher Libby Begg. “We obviously can’t do that right now, but we also know that a lot of us need an extra reason to smile a little. That’s why we’ve launched a virtual version of AdVice now.”

Our first volunteer was Bensimon Byrne’s executive creative director Joseph Bonnici. We started by learning about his vice of choice—a very specific kind of gin martini—before asking about what he was like as a boy, how he cracks creative challenges, how he thinks the pandemic could change advertising, and which superpower he’d prefer, invisibility or flight.

Our second episode with Edelman’s Andrew Simon has already been shot and will appear soon. Anyone interested in sharing their AdVice with us can contact David Brown or Chris Powell.