Avoiding the ick in a creative’s unavoidable side-hustle: self-promotion.

Words by Lizzie Wood, Creative at The Monkeys. Illustrations by Katie Kidd, Creative at the Monkeys.

In my first year of advertising I was made a finalist in a film competition. When it was announced, Joe, my colleague and competition partner, asked why I hadn’t shared it on the corporate hellscape that is LinkedIn yet.

“Because that’s lame”, I said.
“You won’t succeed if you’re good in secret” he enlightened me.

Stef Sword-Williams, the author of F*ck Being Humble, worked in advertising before launching her book and business that explains, among other things, that women are less likely to promote themselves and this is holding them back. Joe agreed that alongside underlying prejudices, inflexibility for working parents and the harassment driving women out, it might be yet another reason why we don’t see as many women at the top. Having watched female creative partners and friends be all but apologetic about good ideas, I had to agree. Women are less likely to promote themselves. And being Australian only complicates things further.

Like many Aussies, I’ve been brought up understanding that the best way to conduct yourself is to sit down and be humble.

And I’m still not entirely convinced that instruction is wrong. In many ways, I relish in tall poppy syndrome; our weird guerrilla enforcement of egalitarianism. It ensures not all our heroes are the wealthy and powerful.

However it also ensures that, as an Aussie, you’re allowed to be successful and talented, but only if it’s by accident.

Throughout my teens, ‘are you smart?’ was a question that plagued my friends and me as a result of attending a selective high school. We never found the right answer. ‘No’ was an obvious lie. ‘Yes’ was so overconfident, you could be lying. ‘I was once’ suggested a failure in the institution, and shrugging it off with jokes was an arrogant show of quick wittedness that confirmed you were not only smart, you were also a dickhead.

The advertising industry doesn’t appear to share the same anxiety. Rather, we share everything. LinkedIn has become an unlikely host of creative inspiration, where we judge what agencies are doing well, where you want to work next, or who you want to work for. It makes good work visible and makes us all aim higher.

But it’s not enough to simply show our work, we must also rank it.

We must gather, vote, and immortalize which is THE BEST on little stainless steel trophies, every year, for every impossibly specific category. Rather than just a show of ego, award shows do have a function; they serve to show clients what’s possible, what’s successful, what has made money. Awards become a sort of corporate currency that proves an agency’s, and a creative’s, worth.

So I gave in. I shared our finalist film with a two sentence caption that took more than an hour to craft: ‘Good news for Joe and me. Our reluctant star, Dad, who saw our film on B+T after being assured nobody would, isn’t so thrilled.’

In two meticulously aloof sentences, I’d admitted that we had achieved on purpose. It was no accident. We had tried. I had removed the distance between myself and my work.

And if people didn’t like this thing that I’d formed inside my brain, that would mean they didn’t like ME.

I couldn’t have that. So when Joe and I won silver, I didn’t share the film. When my partner Katie and I won gold the following year, I didn’t share it either. I shared nothing good that ever happened.

Now, nobody would think I was a dickhead. They wouldn’t think of me at all.

My plan was flawed, so I started looking around to see how everyone else was solving this impossible problem.

One of my CDs evades the LinkedIn boast by making it news.
‘New work out’; ‘That work is up for awards’; ‘That work won all of them’. Cool, aloof, helpful. Just a journalist reporting the facts. It was brilliant. But he’s an art director – the perfect excuse for plain speak. There was no way I could pull it off. I’m a writer, they’ll know.

An acquaintance I admire promotes herself with elite levels of subtlety.
She doesn’t talk about her work, she talks about work in general. She creates side projects and then thanks others for getting involved. She writes articles. She speaks at events. She knows stuff. All I knew well was the feeling of not knowing if I knew about anything.

A mentor of mine chooses to sing the praises of her colleagues and friends instead of her own work.
It’s an admirable approach that seems to be catching on. I wondered if that could solve it; if we all just promoted each other, shouted loudly about our talented friends and colleagues and creativity broadly, maybe none of us would feel like dickheads. It does promote her, but only for who she is; a selfless champion of good people and good ideas. Her work then speaks for itself.

Many men I studied with post about every print and social ad they ever make.
Pithy, excited commentary on a nice little line or clever art direction. Their joint websites brag politely in the 3rd person, boasting big clients and every award they’ve ever come close to winning. They came across as eager, ambitious and hardworking. Somehow, not nearly as annoying as I found my silent self.

There I was, damned every which way, while everyone else seemed to be getting by just fine. Clearly there was another truth to self promotion: people worry more about themselves than they will about you.

Being creative often means your self worth is balanced on a knife’s edge between unapologetic self assuredness, and complete, ashamed inadequacy. So, no matter how happy you are with your own work, the fear of what others think of it, and what they think of your pride in it, is what many of us act on. But what we all want is the same – the opportunities that only come from being known and seen.

Besides, plenty of dickheads get good jobs.

Lizzie is a copywriter at The Monkeys and co-Chair of Youngbloods NSW. Lizzie realises that writing an article about avoiding self-promotion is inherently a kind of self-promotion. Lizzie loves irony. She wishes all young people in the industry good luck navigating the ick. Mocking illustrations are the work of Lizzie’s talented creative partner Katie Kidd.