MANILA – adobo magazine catches DDB Group Singapore’s Chief Creative Officer and Head of DDB Asia-Pacific’s Creative Council, Joji Jacob, to chat for a few minutes when he flew to Manila to judge at the 2016 Kidlat Awards.
Here are 10 (of the many) things we learned about J. J. Penn:
1. He has lived in six different places in India.
2. He speaks eight Indian dialects and traditional English.
3. He studied civil engineering but he dropped out after about a year and a half because he didn’t like it.
4. He likes to write stories and articles so he took up English Literature, German, and Political Science. “I don’t know why I took those three subjects but I did.”
5. He used to write short stories which he submitted to newspapers and magazines. Some of them got published.
6. He taught English in a small college in Kerala, India.
7. He worked as a crime beat journalist for The Times India but didn’t last more than three months.
8. He helped his dad look after his farm.
9. He first worked in advertising as a copy trainee at FCB.
“While I was sitting at my friend’s computer center, across the building block, there was what I know was an ad agency now. But on the board there, there was a lot of interesting stuff so I went to look at it and then I realized that those are ads. And then I asked the receptionist, how does one get a job here?”
10. The very first ad that Joji did was a full page, full color ad for a newspaper. “I still think it’s a nice ad. And it got produced the way I wanted it.
Read more about Joji Jacob on the May-June 2016 issue of adobo magazine.
