The Balance
Or: self-respect as a pre-requisite for respect in general.
When I was in high school, I was bad at math, but great at physics. Literally, I was getting ~30% in OAC calculus, and ~90% in OAC physics1 at the same time, despite physics being, well, math. But, it’s *applied* math - the numbers represent something specific, and there’s an actual thing in the world you’re trying to decipher. That, I could wrap my head around.
But being bad at math was a source of shame for me. My parents were (being good parents) concerned that my lack of affinity for the subject was going to cause me problems in the future, I went to tutoring, and generally felt like I couldn’t be that smart, if I wasn’t going to be good at “pure” math. Unless the math was ABOUT something, all the formulas looked the same to me. I could do math in the service of science, or problem solving. I couldn’t do math in the service of math.
In retrospect, this is an idiotic thing to have beaten myself up about. But I see a similar pattern in a huge majority of the people who work in advertising. We’re ashamed that we use our skills and talents to solve problems, rather than using them solely for their own merit.
There’s nothing wrong with applied creativity. No one walks up to an architect and criticizes them for not working in sculpture. We seemingly only do this to advertising.
Developing a campaign or a platform that gets people to feel genuine connection and association with a CPG brand is impressive. (Frankly it’s more impressive than some recent Oscar winners.)
Writing a tagline that endures for a decade, in ten thousand variations, is impressive. (It’s at least on par with writing a respectably-selling airport novel that will be forgotten in 2 years.)
Convincing a team of C-level executives that when they talk/think/make decisions about their brand, this one sentence needs to be the North Star, is impressive. (At minimum, on par with delivering a catch phrase on a sitcom for 12 episodes, before Netflix cancels it.)
The idea that working in film or TV or publishing is somehow more creatively pure and less capitalist than working in advertising, completely disregards everything I know, from everyone I know, in any of those fields. We’re all trying to find the balance point between creativity and capitalism, under different constraints. Pretending otherwise makes explaining the current state of visual art, film, literature and public intellectual-ism, impossible.
This is the annoying thing about this discourse; it’s rooted in the idea that anything done for a purpose beyond furthering human understanding & expression, is inherently dirty. It’s not just elitist in the academic sense of “people outside the academy are lesser”. It’s elitist in the sense that actively participating in the economy beyond being an intellectual curiosity or academic researcher, makes your ideas less valuable.
It’d be one thing if the anti-advertising sentiment was coming solely from an external audience that dislikes the things we produce, but honestly most complaining I see from outside the industry has more to do with excessive retargeting, too much email marketing and privacy issues, than it does with actual campaigns or ideas.
No, the call is coming from inside the house.
As we’ve collectively gotten a little more disillusioned with capitalism, too many people in advertising have decided to adopt a bit of ironic distance from their craft. Maybe it’s a self defence mechanism, maybe it’s a desire to avoid needing to think to deeply about one’s role in an imperfect system, maybe it’s as simple as putting others down to make themselves feel big. After all, if you’re the one insisting that no one in advertising is smart enough, you’re trying very hard to position yourself as somehow separate from the rest of us.
The self-loathing in ad people seeps into how our industry works. It shows up in the insistence that everything is really about data or targeting, and not about creative thinking and nuanced understanding. It shows up when someone phones in a brief or an idea. It shows up in making work that people not only ignore, but dismiss.
I see genuinely brilliant people working in ad agencies every damn day. If you don’t, you’re either not working in the right places, or not looking with the right eyes.
I’ve described strategy work at living in the balance between arrogance and insecurity.
Arrogance, in terms of walking into a room with people who think and work only on a specific brand or category, sometimes for decades, and bringing them strategic solutions that you’ve only had days or weeks to arrive at. Insecurity, in terms of hunting for rationale and evidence for every major decision or assumption, needing to prove yourself and your strategy to many people, inside and outside of your agency. Or: arrogant enough to present a full solution in ten slides, insecure enough to have a 50 pages of referenced notes to back it up.
But now I’m thinking in general, we need an active movement to push us away from our insecurity. It’s really not helping us, our clients, or our industry. If we do not treat our work with respect, expecting anyone else to is unreasonable.
It’s okay to admit making great advertising is truly challenging, and requires exceptional people. You don’t need to be embarrassed that you apply your strategic or creative skills to solve problems, beyond your own self expression.
And if you see someone shitting on advertising and advertising people, you should probably push back on it.
OAC (Ontario Academic Credit) was the 13th grade when I was in high school. Effectively a public school year, where you’d study more advanced concepts before heading to university. It was eliminated for students the year below me. You now know too much about 2000s era education in Ontario.
There’s so much truth in how self-loathing creeps into our industry. Advertising takes real creative and strategic skill, and it’s frustrating to see people dismiss their own work or feel ashamed of it. But I wonder if this isn’t just about mindset.
I believe that there’s a deeper disillusionment tied to how creative labor is structured and organized. When the industry prioritizes speed, optimization, and efficiency over depth, it isn't always easy to put pride in some of that work. Importantly, it hasn’t always felt that way, even as "industry complainers" have been around since the birth of the industry haha.
One book I read last year, Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society really crystallized this for me. In a system designed around relentless productivity, failure isn’t framed as structural. It is internalized.
You weren’t optimized enough. You should have worked harder, slept less, “hacked” your way to success. If you take Han’s argument seriously, self-loathing in advertising is an unavoidable byproduct of a system that sometimes exploits creative labour while making workers believe they have agency.
The solution isn’t just to tell ad professionals to “take pride in their work”—it’s to question the conditions under which creative work happens in the first place, and I think agency owners and department heads have so much they are leaving on the table here—simply celebrating wins, sharing work widely and giving people credit goes a long way.