2010 Young Gun Douglas Goh on being the champion of smiles

Having recently moved to BBDO Singapore from McCann Erickson Malaysia, Douglas Goh is excited to be part of the team tasked to up the agency's creative firepower.

The recipient of the 2010 Professional Young Gun of the Year Award, Goh says he is a champion for campaigns that draw smiles. Goh struck gold with his first submission to the award show. Fearing that he may miss the chance again as he turns 30 this year, he persuaded the ECD at McCann Erickson Malaysia to allow him to submit for the award.

Indeed, his Young Guns International Award was won by a campaign that drew plenty of smiles and goodwill towards Book Xcess in KL, a bookshop he calls a "treasure".

His campaign for the remainder bookstore, titled 'Receipt stories', aimed to encourage reading among Malaysians. The concept was to run short stories written by the public on Book Xcess receipts.

He attributes his win to the simplicity of the idea, and banks on people's love of reading and writing, and putting their personal opinions in the public space. "I personally don't like to read, which is why I'm an art director," he laughs. "But with this project, I started reading more."

Goh found advertising after contemplating careers in law, architecture and interior design, and was initially primed to take over his father's printing business in Malaysia. "But I wasn't interested in printing," he says, although he concedes it gave him a first look into the back-end of advertising.

After graduating from The One Academy, Goh took on a six-month stint at a small ad firm that comprised of just him and the boss. He then found a job at Sil Ad, and that was when he says his career began. "My boss taught me everything I know,  I still think of him as my Sifu," he says, adding that Sil Ad in those days was known as the "Giant Killer". "We'd pitch against the big agencies but we must have been doing something right because we would win the pitch," he recalls.

From Sil Ad, Goh moved to O&M. Two years later he rejoined Sil Ad where he built up a team which became part of Creative Juice's first office outside Thailand, known as Creative Juice-Sil. It was then that Goh conceptualised one of the most memorable campaigns in Malaysia called ‘Sudah Potong?' or 'Cut Already?' for P1 W1Max which won the gold at the Malaysian Effies 2010.

Still, when he was invited by one of his ex-lecturers to give a talk about advertising and art direction to an audience of students, Goh struggled to explain what exactly was the job he was doing, and why he liked doing it. "To the majority of Malaysia, advertising isn't perceived as glamourous," he says. "Advertising just means signage to most people."

So he describes his job as being the bearer of good news. "If you look in a newspaper, everything that's bad news is not my doing. But that's everything that's good news -  sales, new products, promotions - is possibly my doing," he says.

And ideas are at the heart of everything, Goh says. "People are talking about digital and viral and everything else in between, but if you don't have an idea, you don't have anything to bank it all on."