I’m Furkan, a copywriter, creative, 2026 AWARD School SA winner and national finalist.

I’ve always been fascinated by people and media. I love people-watching, figuring out why someone bought something, believed something, or did something completely irrational. For a while I thought that meant psychology, but the smell of a clinic, beige walls and Freud scared me off.

Community work fed that curiosity too. There’s something fascinating about watching completely different people end up in the same room because they care about the same thing.

Then there was the internet. I grew up in that weird era where people posted things for fun, I’ve seen pretty much every major social platform arrive, and my first ever pay cheque actually came from YouTube (a whopping $173.42).

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise there was a job where all of that somehow came together. Where people actually pay you for those dumb little ideas.

Advertising.

Teenage Furks would’ve appreciated the memo.

Instead, I took the scenic route through content, marketing, community work, education, business, coffee and eventually IT account management.

I moved into account management because I figured learning how to sell would be useful in pretty much any career. Turns out it was. I learnt how to present, sell an idea, get things over the line and stay composed around unhappy clients.

No one calls their IT account manager because they’re having a lovely day.

Now I’m doing the mildly irresponsible thing and swapping a perfectly respectable corporate career for a fresh start in creative, mostly so I can spend more time obsessing over people, strange behaviours, questionable ideas and occasionally point at something with a smug face and say, “Yep, I made that.”

Took me a while, but I found the right intersection.

Always up for a coffee, always down for a bad idea