I've been in advertising long enough to remember when winning something meant something. I've chased awards. I've won a few. I've lost more. But the thing I think about most isn't on any shelf.
There's a coaching tree concept in pro sports. Great coaches don't just win games, they produce other coaches. The lineage matters. At some point, the wins you help other people get start to mean more than the ones you racked up yourself. Advertising has the same thing. We just don't talk about it because it doesn't come with a trophy and an open bar.
I've sat across from junior creatives who had something real, some weird stubborn instinct about what was true, and watched them not know what to do with it yet. My job wasn't to shape them into mini versions of me. It was to hand them the shovel and say, "Dig there." Here's what nobody tells you when you're coming up: the people who invest in you aren't always the loudest ones in the room. I've had a few of those people in my life. They changed my trajectory. I think about them constantly.
So now I try to be that. Not perfectly. I've given feedback that was more about my ego than their growth. But I keep trying, because the most durable thing you can build in this industry isn't a campaign. It's a person. Mentorship has no ceremony. No submission portal, no jury. You just notice one day that someone you believed in is doing the thing. And some small part of how they got there has your fingerprints on it.
That's the award. I'd take it over a shortlist every single time.
Creativity Is a Failure Sport (And That's the Point)
Baseball players who fail 70% of the time make the Hall of Fame.
Creatives aren't that different. If you're getting 3 out of 10 ideas through the gauntlet of reviews, and "can we make the logo bigger" requests, you're batting .300. In baseball, that's elite. In advertising, that's Tuesday.
The other 7? Those are harder to talk about. The ones where you walk out of a presentation questioning everything, including whether you've just been extremely lucky for the last two decades, AKA the quiet but persistent voice asking, "Wait, are you actually good at this?"
Yes. And no. And it depends on the brief.
Here's what I've learned: the biggest wins in my career grew directly out of the most brutal defeats. Not despite them, because of them. Rejection has a way of forcing you back to the brief, past the obvious ideas, past the safe ones, all the way down to the hidden gems you would have walked right past if you'd gotten the first concept approved.
However, it only works if you're willing to accept two things: you're not perfect, and every loss has something to teach you. Skip either one, and you're just collecting scars instead of experience. So, pick yourself up. Read the brief again. Go deeper.
And as the great philosopher Stuart Smalley once reminded us on SNL's Daily Affirmations: "You're good enough. You're smart enough. And doggonit, people like you." If that reference went over your head, please stop what you're doing and find it on YouTube. You'll thank me.
Then go make something great.
The Audacious & The Empathetic
I've spent 25 years in rooms full of smart people. And I've noticed something: the ones who consistently win aren't necessarily the most talented. They're not always the most experienced. They're not the ones with the longest résumés or the most awards on their shelf.
They're the ones who had the nerve to try the thing and the sense to understand who they were trying it for.
Audacity. Empathy…that's the whole list.
Let's take audacity first, because it gets misrepresented constantly. People hear "audacity" and think loud. They think ego. They think the guy who talks over everyone in the meeting and calls it a brainstorm.
That's not audacity. That's noise.
Real audacity is quieter. It's the willingness to put something forward that you believe in before anyone else does. It's saying the uncomfortable thing in the room, not because you want to blow it up, but because you can see what everyone else is tiptoeing around. It's pitching the idea that makes the room go silent and staying in that silence instead of walking it back.
Audacity without empathy is a wrecking ball. Empathy without audacity is a good intention that never leaves the building.
Now empathy. Also, wildly misunderstood. People treat empathy like it's synonymous with being nice. It's not. Being nice is a tone. Empathy is a skill. A real one. It's the ability to accurately read what another person needs, not what makes you comfortable to give them.
Empathy is what turns a good idea into a great brief. It's what separates a manager from a leader. It's what makes a stranger feel like you've known them for years after a 10-minute conversation. It's why certain doctors walk into a room, and the patient immediately relaxes. It's why certain coaches get more out of their players than the guy with the better playbook.
It has nothing to do with being soft. It has everything to do with being accurate.
Together, audacity and empathy do something unusual: they make you both harder to ignore and easier to trust. At the same time. That combination is rare enough that when you find it in someone, you remember them. When you find it in a piece of work, it sticks around long after the campaign ends.
I work in advertising, so I see this play out on a pretty public stage. But I want to be clear: this isn't a creative-industry thing. The best parents I've ever seen operate this way. The best teacher. The best coach. The best bartender. The best friend.
Every industry, every role, every relationship runs better when someone in it decides to be a little braver about what they believe and a lot more curious about what the other person needs.
Nobody teaches these things. There's no certification. You don't get a LinkedIn badge for "demonstrating appropriate audacity" or "completing the advanced empathy module." You just have to want to get better at them and then actually try.
Sphere of Influence(ers)
Social media/Influencer marketing and Streamers (not exactly sure how or where this fits, but I'm adding it because, well, this is my post:) have been with us for a while now. And I'd be lying if I said there are days when it feels like navigating shark-infested waters wearing a meat suit, but it's here, and if done right, can be an asset for any brand. Here are some of my thoughts/musings/opinions/hot takes...all before coffee. If you know me, that's a Herculean feat.
The Half-Life of Human Brands
There's a moment in every influencer's/streamer's career where the content stops and the content continues anyway. You've seen it. The glow-up-to-breakdown arc. The parasocial relationship that curdles when the audience realizes they were always the product. The "taking a break for my mental health" video that gets more views than anything they made when they were fine. The apology video. The apology for the apology video. The comeback documentary on a platform they swore they'd never use.
It's tempting to call the whole ecosystem disposable. Easy, even. But that's the wrong read.
The creators who last aren't the most talented. They're the most honest about what they're actually selling. When it's a craft, they treat it like a craft. When it's a personality, they know which parts of the personality are theirs and which parts are merch. The ones who collapse are the ones who let the audience write them. They optimize for engagement until the person doing the engaging is gone, replaced by a highlight reel of someone who used to exist.
The influencer economy is tenable. It's just that most people enter it thinking it's a shortcut to something else, and it turns out to be a full-time job pretending it isn't a full-time job.
Done right: genuine expertise, a real point of view, and the discipline to say no to things that would make you more money but less you. Done right, it builds something that compounds. Done wrong: it's a performance review you can never stop passing, in front of an audience that will replace you by Tuesday and feel nothing.
The question was never whether this world is real. It's whether you can stay real inside it. Most can't. And honestly, the ones who can't are also content.
Old Heads...Bring it.
Nine Inch Nails (w/ Boys Noize). Jack White. David Byrne. Iggy Pop. The Strokes. Moby. Interpol. The XX.
All at Coachella.
"Old heads" still bringing it at the highest level.
There's a lesson in that lineup for anyone working in a creative field. The ones who last aren't the ones frozen in their era. They're the ones who respect the canon and stay curious about what's next. That combination doesn't age out. It compounds.
Advertising, fashion, music, art...the fields don't need you to be young. They need you to be alive to the moment.
Some of us still are.
Disaster Artists
Nobody in advertising wants to admit this, but some of our best work started as someone else's disaster. A strategy that flopped. A client presentation where the room went so quiet you could hear the creative director’s career aspirations draining out through the carpet. We call it "experience." What we mean is: we kept paying attention when things went sideways.
Our industry loves wins. Award shows. Case study videos with dramatic music. LinkedIn posts that begin, "Humbled and honored..." You rarely see a case study that says: "We misread the audience completely, blew through the media budget trying to recover, and the client went with their friend's agency." And yet that brief, that decision, that meeting where someone said, "trust me, it's relatable," and nobody pushed back, that's the education.
There's a version of learning that looks like a victory lap. You crack a brief, the work lands, sales move, a Clio arrives in bubble wrap. You absorb what worked: the insight, the honing, the timing. Great. Keep doing that. But there's a richer education that only comes from the brief that humbled you. From the tagline, you were certain about until the focus group looked at it like you'd handed them a ransom note. From the production day where everything that could go wrong did, and you still had to deliver something by Monday.
The people who get hard-to-replicate good are the ones who treat both outcomes the same way. Not with equal enthusiasm, obviously. Losing still feels like losing. But with equal curiosity. What happened? Why did it happen? What would I do differently if this brief came back tomorrow?
Advertising is a particularly unforgiving classroom because the tests are public. The bad ad runs on television. The misguided campaign gets screenshotted. The tone-deaf launch becomes a case study at a conference, just not the kind you wanted. Most industries let you fail quietly. Ours posts it everywhere and lets the comments section grade it.
The truth is, you don't get to decide if you're learning. You only get to decide if you're paying attention. Because the lesson is happening whether you're taking notes or not. The question is whether you walk away with something useful or just walk away.
The best creative leaders I've known all share one habit: they debrief themselves. Not in a let's-schedule-a-meeting way. More like a quiet personal accounting. What did I assume that wasn't true? Where did I trust instinct when I should have relied on data? Where did I chase data when I should have trusted instinct? They don't do this because they enjoy being wrong. They do it because it's cheaper than repeating the mistake.
If you want to achieve some level of greatness, understand that school never lets out. The curriculum just stops being obvious. At some point, there's no syllabus, no professor, no grade. Just what the work teaches you, and whether you're humble enough to let it.
Vision Quest? Plan Accordingly.
Your vision without a plan is just a mood board. Your plan without a vision is just a to-do list.
Early in my career, I worked on a campaign where the brief was essentially: "We want people to feel something. Something big. Something that changes everything." Beautiful. Inspiring. Completely useless. We had the macro. The dream. The north star. The kind of vision that sounds incredible at a kickoff meeting and gets a standing ovation from people who will never have to execute it. What we didn't have was a single concrete next step. No micro. No ladder of actions climbing toward that glorious mountaintop...floating there, cloud-wrapped and majestic, with zero directions on how to actually get there. We delivered something mediocre. Efficiently. The flip side is just as lethal, and honestly more common, because it masquerades as productivity.
I've watched teams execute flawlessly toward destinations nobody wanted to reach. Timelines hit to the day. Budgets respected. Deliverables delivered. Everyone very, very busy going nowhere in particular. The micro without the macro isn't discipline. It's just motion. And motion, is not the same thing as progress, no matter how many status updates you send about it.
Here's the thing nobody tells you: holding both at once is genuinely hard.
The macro is your job to protect. It's the answer to "why." It's the thing you believe is possible that makes the whole endeavor worth doing. It should make you a little uncomfortable when you say it out loud. The micro is your job to build. It's the answer to "what." It's the unsexy, granular, arguable-in-a-spreadsheet sequence of moves that makes the audacious thing not just possible but inevitable.
The macro without the micro is a TED talk. The micro without the macro is a bureaucracy. You need both in the room. Does this step serve the vision? Does the vision hold up to the reality of the step? When the answer to either is no, something needs to change.
The best creatives I've known could do both. Paint the picture that made you want to climb the mountain, then hand you the gear, the route, and a very specific departure time. The best strategists I've worked with could hold a ten-year ambition in one hand and Tuesday's media plan in the other and tell you exactly how one was a consequence of the other.
That's not a talent. It's a discipline. And it's available to anyone willing to sit with the discomfort of moving between altitude and ground level, sometimes in the same meeting, sometimes in the same sentence. So, the next time someone presents you with an inspiring vision and no plan, ask them what happens on Monday. And the next time someone presents you with a meticulous plan and no vision, ask them what it's all for. Because a mood board and a to-do list are not a strategy. Together, they just might be.
The Implied Egg.
I ordered a bacon breakfast sandwich last week. The menu listed bread. It listed bacon. It listed cheese. No egg. So I asked: "Does this come with egg?" The person behind the counter looked at me with the patience of someone who has answered this question four hundred times and said, completely deadpan: "Yes. It's implied."
The egg is implied.
I laughed. I paid. I ate my sandwich (it had egg, obviously). And then I spent the entire walk back to the office thinking about how many implied eggs exist in our industry.
In advertising, we swim in them. The creative brief that "clearly" explained the brand voice (it didn't). The rounds of revisions that were "obviously" included in scope (they weren't). The strategic rationale behind a campaign that the client never actually heard, because we presented the work and assumed they'd feel what we felt.
We craft messaging for a living. We obsess over word choice. We know that the right word in the right place changes everything. And then we send a scope of work that assumes the client knows what "concepting" means. How many things do we assume clients, colleagues, or new hires just know, because to us it's obvious?
The process that lives entirely in one person's head because they've been here for years, and it never occurred to anyone to write it down. The acronym everyone uses in every meeting that nobody has defined since the Obama administration. The "next step" in the client journey that your team knows by heart, and your client has absolutely no idea about. Psychologists call it the curse of knowledge. The more you know, the less you remember what it felt like not to know it. I call it the implied egg. Same thing, worse branding.
The fix is not complicated. It is just humbling.
Read your proposals like someone who has never heard of your company. Walk your onboarding like it is your first day. Send the SOW to the person on your team who asks the "obvious" questions, because they are catching your implied eggs before a client does.
Clarity is not condescending. Clarity is the strategy. And more often than not, it is the difference between a smooth project and a very uncomfortable conversation in month three.
So here is my ask this week: find one implied egg in your business. One thing you have never written down, never explained, never put on the menu because obviously everyone knows. Write it down. Say it out loud. Put it on the menu. Your clients will thank you. Your team will thank you. And your onboarding process will finally make sense to someone other than the four people who built it.
What is your implied egg?
Create for a living? You hit the Lottery.
If you create for a living, you hit the proverbial lottery. I say that fully aware it can be a grind, internally, politically, client-side, but still: congratulations. This is a commerce-based art form, and yes, I have to remind myself of that sometimes. The keyword, though, is ART. Visuals, copy, whatever weapon you reach for to break through and actually connect with an audience.
It will challenge you. Regularly. Do it anyway, and for the love of everything, have fun. The final product may or may not collect hardware, but the real win lives in work that leaves a mark on the zeitgeist. Oh, and the metrics. Can't forget the metrics.
And when you sell in the concept you were convinced would never see the light of day, don't celebrate. Don't do a thing. Stand up, close your laptop, push in your chair, and walk calmly out of the room. Let the silence do the talking. Clean. Deliberate. Earned. Of course, once you're out of sight, do whatever primal scream or dance you do because you f***ing did it, you legend.
*Tip of the hat to Mark Moll for that exit move. "The creative's mic drop" never gets old.