Advertiser and artist Sami Lill is one of those people who doesn't follow his own advice.

"Don't go into advertising if you are really creative," he warned young people during an interview with the Royal Gazette.

And yet, he is creative, has a career in advertising and apparently loves it.

Swedish-born Mr. Lill is an art director and copywriter at AdVantage Limited, and also a successful artist in his own right. He moved to Bermuda in August to be closer to his girlfriend, Royal Gazette photographer Meredith Andrews.

Go to his website, www.samilill.com and an innocent blond boy looks out at the viewer, presumably Sami at a younger age. Drag your cursor over his face and a wolfish grin erupts destroying the butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth image.

This is Sami Lill in a nutshell: He looks fairly mild mannered, talks earnestly about advertising trends, but his darkly comic artwork tells a different story.

"My work is an eclectic mix," Mr. Lill said. "I use vector drawings, line drawings on the computer and then I use Photoshop and other computer programmes to colour them in. Sometimes I use pen & paper."

An example of his artwork would be a drawing of a grotesque scooter rider in the throes of road rage.

"This was inspired the last time I visited Bermuda," he said. "I like faces. You could draw faces for 100 years and never get bored. It is interesting to keep yourself challenged."

He said he is most productive when he gets into "the zone".

"My style is very loose and very fluid," he said. "When I get into my zone then it kind of pours out of me. I just go with it. I am not incredibly structured, but I have done a few solo shows in Sweden and in the United Kingdom."

He was born in Sweden to an Estonian father and a Swedish mother who was also an artist.

"She was a sculptor and a teacher," he said of his mother. "She taught me and my three brothers and my sister. We are all artistic. One is autistic and the others are artistic. My autistic sibling is also artistic, strangely so.

"He is more structured and disciplined and has more of a right brain approach to things. He studied seven languages. So I have had a lot of different influences for artistic talent."

Frenetic might be the best way to describe Mr. Lill's creativity. He does a little sculpture, dabbles in film, writes, paints, works with computer animation and on and on. Lately, he's been interested in claymation.

"I have been doing a little sculpture," he said. "I like animation as well. Through that I started working with soft clays. They don't always lend themselves to being permanent pieces.

"After a week I drop it on the floor, it changes shape and I start from scratch. I have a website, www.samilill.com, and on there I have started experimenting with a few little animations. Lately, I have been doing more filming as well. I have a good broadcast quality camera and I am shooting a couple of adverts."

He said he draws inspiration from anywhere, everywhere and everything. At his art shows, he likes to see a smile break over a viewer's face.

"At art shows, it is a pretty instinctive response to my art work, which I like," he said. "Most people laugh or smile or get entertained by it. It is not a very hard, deep or emotional kind of art.

"It does have a dark side somewhere. I have a dark sense of humour and sometimes it comes out into my drawings."

If his artwork is a little off the wall, he is focused and serious about his advertising, although some of the quirkiness creeps in even then.

He won an art directing award for a picture of a woman's armpit. In a television advertisement for Weetabix, a female runner is so energised by her breakfast cereal she accidentally pushes over a large tree on her morning jog.

"I always try to do things slightly differently," he said. "If you want to get noticed you have to do something that everyone else isn't doing.

"For advertising I try to find the truth of the product and give the truth to people. If people synthesise with a brand or product then they are much more likely to buy it."

He worked on the armpit advertisement for Sure deodorant when he worked for a large advertising agency in the United Kingdom called Lowe.

"That is mainly what I have been doing for the last ten years, advertising, art directing and copywriting," he said. "That is about coming up with ideas and adverts in any media. It can be television, radio, posters, press or whatever."

With the constant bombardment of advertising from the media, the press and the Internet, more and more consumers are becoming jaded toward advertising and resistant to its influence.

"The concept or idea behind things is becoming more and more important," he said. "When you get exposed to 5,000 advertising messages a day, you are only going to remember the advertisements you can relate to. You can't effectively blanket people with advertising anymore. The advertiser has to be cleverer than that."

Therefore, he is interested in new forms of advertising such as viral advertising that has absolutely nothing to do with computer viruses.

"Viral advertising emulates the way a virus spreads," he said. "It is a grass-roots kind of campaign that goes from person to person. It uses the relationship the consumers have with their friends rather than a big company buying a full page in the magazine."

Viral advertising is essentially "word of mouth". It depends on the idea that a customer will tell ten of his friends about the product and they will tell ten of their friends and so on.

"That is a thousand people already," he said. "The message can go around the world in very few hours."

Mr. Lill said when he started at AdVantage, the company used viral advertising to announce his arrival at the firm and it worked pretty well.

"If there is no news you have to make the news," he said with a laugh. "I have worked there for four months now, but I feel very much at home.

"I arrived in August. Bermuda is a great country because it has so much potential. It seems like there is a generation of people who are initiating change in lots of different ways."

Before coming to Bermuda, Mr. Lill worked on campaigns for companies like Coca-Cola, HSBC, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Weetabix, Lever Bros., and Nestl? to name a few. He has won an impressive number of advertising awards including the prestigious Cannes Lion, a D&AD, a BTA (British Television awards), a Gramia, a Media excellence award and a Lever International Award.

With all this success, one might expect Mr. Lill to be pursuing his career in a large metropolis with plenty of room for growth but instead he is thrilled to be working in Bermuda.

"This is a great place to be," he said. "AdVantage Limited is a perfect size; it is small enough to be personal, but big enough to be able to handle anyone's project.

"It has a great team of people from all over the place.

?There are two Bermudians and five foreigners so it is quite an exciting agency. I get an opportunity to do art direction, copywriting, a little bit of illustration, a lot of web work, print, and posters. They give me quite a lot of freedom to come up with new ideas.?

For those considering a career in advertising, he talked a little about the structure of an advertising agency.

?There are three sections to any agency in the world, more depending on how complicated they get,? he said. ?One section is account handling. In this department are the people who face the client. The second area is planning. These are the people who do the business backend of it. Thirdly, and most importantly, there is the creative department. That is always the heart of the agency. Without that they only have relationships.?

To get into advertising, Mr. Lill attended the United World College in Wales. Then he went to art college at the Falmouth College of Arts in Cornwall, England. There he studied art direction and copywriting. After graduation he worked for a number of advertising agencies in London honing his skills.

?It is a very exciting time to be in advertising,? he said. ?Advertising has grown up in the sense that it has realised you have to distinguish between the consumer and somebody who truly likes the brand.

?If people fall in ?like?, they buy occasionally, but if they fall in love they keep buying all the time.?

He said kids who are told there is ?no way to make a living? with art, shouldn?t get discouraged.

?There is definitely an everyday use for a talent for visual communications,? he said. ?It helps a lot if you can draw, write and more importantly think.

?Perhaps I don?t see myself in 20 years time doing advertising,? he admitted.

His advice to students coming up now was, ?If they want to go into advertising for the sake of art, they should go into art instead. If they want to go into advertising for the sake of business, it is a valid business. If people are truly creative, then there are probably better ways of using their talents.?

However, he said that advertising can be great, and has been a gateway for many famous people such as Salman Rushdie, David Putnam, and the Saatchi brothers, among others.

?A lot of famous people started in advertising and then ended up in related industries,? he said.

To see some of Mr. Lill?s work, check it out at Rock Island Coffee from January 29 onward. The special art show of his work is being organised in honour of Rock Island Coffee?s tenth anniversary.

?It is a good place, it is creative and open minded,? he said. ?It is very friendly. Everyone is welcome. It runs for about a month.?