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.
