I see a lot of people here talking about getting burned out on advertising. What's the most grating aspect of it for you?

You know how whenever people talk about what they like about advertising or an agency, they often say it’s the people? There’s truth in that. If you haven’t worked in other industries, you can look at the cross-industry bowls to realize this.

But there are some people in the industry who are the worst type of people: insecure yet arrogant. They love themselves yet also hate themselves, creating a tension that they take out on everyone else around them. At every agency there is a team being led by one of these types, and you can tell by how much the spark in the eyes of those who work under them slowly leave.

For me it’s that nothing is ever enough. You just won a Gold Lion? Next year let’s win two. You brought 10 ideas to the first creative check in? How come it wasn’t 20? You worked 65 hours last week? Next time make it 70 so we can push the work a bit further. Oh you pulled like four all-nighters this week and wrapped 10 jobs and your clients are all super happy? Well too bad the other three things you were working on got pushed off by a couple days and now our award season is RUINED. We were runner up for Agency of the Year? Next year let’s win it even though we’ve had four rounds of layoffs this year and no one got promoted and also no bonuses and also our summer and holiday parties suck now.

creatives given just enough time to do the bare minimum with expectations to do something groundbreaking and win awards

Performative everything.
The CCO who spends most of their time posting to LinkedIn and thinks if you’re not stressed, you aren’t doing your job.

The ECD that will warn you against trying to sell something and step up to take credit if you do.

The GCD who micromanages and creates BS work just so they can say they’ve done something.

The CD who befriends their team instead of challenging them because they need to be liked.

And the pressure on young creatives to kiss butt.

The acct director who turns non-issues into issues to prove they’re a good partner.

It’s all performative and all makes the job harder. The industry has been flooded by people who are great at controlling their image, bad at doing the job.

The clients not knowing what they want

The reason people get burned out is because agencies are designed to do business this way. You are paid a salary, and then your time is billed to client work whose RFP was won by pitching an agency capabilities deck full of awards work.

If you show up with anything less than awards work/effort, it’s viewed that you are not doing your job. Every single creative job posting is looking for rockstars even though statistically that would only be a label for the top 1% of performers.

On top of this, as an employee you receive sub par benefits, no equity, and a salary that affords you a life where at best, you can only stop thinking about money on payday.

Unless you are born wealthy, salary is anyone’s biggest motivator. Don’t buy what agencies are selling you.

My biggest burn out factor is when I have to take on so much extra mental load from others not doing their jobs properly. Can’t stand when I have to chase people to get answers they should have already gotten from client when the brief is half baked and missing key info, or they’ve decided that the client asking for 8 different RTBs to be covered in one 30s spot is reasonable. Then once they finally figure it 2 business days later, they sneak additional asks into the brief in without telling resourcing. And the timeline still somehow remains the same regardless of being set up for success or not.

To be completely fair this is not the case when I’m working with the majority of my team. Most of them are great, they ask the right questions, don’t just blindly parrot the client but find a unique way at their business problem, and are very collaborative partners. But it’s just draining in a fast paced environment when there are a few people who just can’t be competent and follow process even if their lives depended on it. The path of least resistance for some, causes a rocky road for the rest of the team.

I worked 80hrs last week and 70 the week before. This of course includes evenings and weekends. All of these additional hours were caused by Account mismanaging the client, setting unrealistic expectations and being a straight order taker. They also didn’t plan ahead for work they knew was coming and sat on the brief for a month. So yeah, others blatant disregard for those “downstream” and general incompetency when we are all so interdependent. One weak link or C/D player on the team and everyone pays the price with their precious time.

My burn out factor is my skin color because it’s held me back from rising up in this industry. I have all the education, the portfolio and the skill but apparently being non yt is not working in my favor.

No one here (yet) has complained about racial bias because they simply haven’t experienced it, a fact which highlights the demographic disproportion within this industry.

1. Treating everything as precious - causing extra hours of work which ruins work/life balance.. then realizing months later it didn't even matter. The time you missed in your personal life DID matter. The industry creates absent parents and spouses. This is why single people, married to their job, excel fast in advertising.
2. Creative fatigue. Rise and grind. The brain requires physical activity and rest to be creative, but chronically understaffed agencies force you to work without either.

The advertising aspect

For me it’s that it’s almost never a reasonable workload. It’s always moving at hurricane speed and you’re physically and emotionally pushed to the edge. And the pay isn’t that great, especially if you have a family. It’s really hard to pour from an empty cup.

My biggest burnout factor is knowing how simple it could be and how good most of the ideas could have been.

Even on the projects where we get great work out into the world, the uphill battle internally it is to sell it through outside of the creative department is exhausting

And the final straw to the burnout is watching whichever coworker fought against the idea the entire time and remained the biggest roadblock to the process take credit on LinkedIn

I think there are a lot more deliverables from every project than they used to be. Unique social assets, social copy for every channel, carousels that get “auto optimized”, i don’t think it’s possible anymore based on the metrics clients choose, but i wish they spent more time CHOOSING one asset that they think would work well vs having us make 4 unique assets out of a shoot that was originally scoped for (budget and timeline-wise) one deliverable

Always the outlier, I will ask and answer the opposite. What's the most gratifying aspect of being a Copywriter?

It's fun. It's challenging. It's rewarding coming up with just the right words. It is an up to see your work in public.

All this doesn't belie how much it sucks today. I am from a different generation that reveled in our work.

I'm still at it but I don't have to deal with having to put up with 60+ hour weeks, the data driven overhang that replaces gut feelings, the pressure and the lack of respect for our craft.

Besides the never ending fake emergencies and ongoing change in direction, without any trust and then being challenged because some ass put something in ChatGPT… I would say it’s kind of like how unless you do your laundry naked, the wash never truly fully done.

There’s been some good wins, but the toll that was paid to get there makes you have more of a “Thank god that’s over (probably isn’t); and before you can celebrate the win, the firehouse siren goes off again and on to the next problem to solve

There’s a way to figure it out. I worked only about 8 months this year and should make 400 without ever really working too hard, getting too stressed or giving up too many nights and weekends if any at all. You gotta step outside the game that’s been set up for you and play your own game. See things for what they are and act accordingly. I won’t win any awards this year. And I won’t produce anything that I’ll put in my book but who cares. Life is so much bigger than advertising. This is a means to an end. Figure out the end goal and work backwards.

Awards are nice if you're into that. Otherwise, most traditional advertising falls far short of acheiving anything other than helping support the advertising industrial complex.

In pharma advertising, as a Black woman, the racist microagressions and the constant layoffs due to instability.

Working.