That’s true, especially in the creative side of the industry, giving people rejection, multiple times, is a known tenet. “Or you have to put hours and ideation in and throwing things up on a wall,” he added. “It’s even part of the mystique of the profession: work hard, and play hard.”Īgencies also have their own flavor of hustle because traditionally, as a creative, you’re taught that you need to run 100 lines through before you get to anything interesting. “The push from advertising is saying it’s OK,” he said. Malefyt, a clinical associate professor at Fordham University who specializes in marketing, said that he’s found his students in the advertising industry expressing that “hustle” is what you have to do. (For his part, Vaynerchuk responded with a Medium post as well as a video about how he does agree about “struggle porn” and how it’s important to be self-aware and balanced.) So tough to say there is a clear distinction to be made.” Gary evangelizes the hustle, and he’s got young pups doing the hard work. “GaryVee portrays a hustle and ‘get at ’em’ like a marketing Tony Robbins,” said one agency executive. Hustle denotes something more - for Clark and Eliason both, it’s that outward masochism at play, something about showing people how hard you’re working while not necessarily working hard at all.

Still, there’s a difference between hustle and hard work. “But hustle and work ethic is in your control.” And I think what’s appealing about it is that in a world where so much in business is out of your control, you really don’t know what’s gonna take off,” he said. There’s nothing to hustle over that.”Ĭhapin Clark, evp and managing director of copywriting at R/GA, said that it’s a big phenomenon because the language of “hustle” has become more familiar. After all, there isn’t any glamour over improving a conversion rate. It also has drawbacks: “People ar e too distracted by the gimmick and the new thing and the hustle they forget the basics. In some ways, hustle culture is an outward manifestation of advertising’s incredible pressure - constantly under change, constantly asked to be innovative and prove new things. The advent of digital media and its constant changes also meant that people had to be more “on it.” “People got accused of being dinosaurs when money was flipped into digital,” said Rzysko. This is a job, and you can quit any time.”įor Rzysko, what this says about the industry is how much pressure it is under.

“There’s this whole thing about how being an entrepreneur, or even just a person working, has to be like falling on your face while eating glass,” said Eliason. It also smacks a little bit of “work at all costs.” And if you’re not struggling, you’re probably not working hard enough. It’s Instagram posts about how much you have to travel for work, it’s LinkedIn and Medium memos about how if you’re not working yourself to the bone you’re not doing enough. To be clear, hustle isn’t just hard work - it’s showing that you’re working hard. To be clear, it wasn’t just working hard - it was “maximizing every last bit of energy you have in order to produce.” “A hustler’s mentality” was a blog post he wrote four years ago about what it meant to hustle. In some ways, the original “hustler” of the industry is probably GaryVee, the anywhere-and-everywhere persona of agency executive and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, who managed to transform “hustle” into a way of life. “I’ve seen people apologize for not posting on LinkedIn often, I’ve seen basically KPIs put against tweets and hustle.” “It’s this underlying tone at work that hustle is good and struggle is good,” said Olly Rzysko, a consultant who recently quit the industry after 13 years, most recently heading digital at Primark. Two agency recruiters said that they’ve seen more mentions of “hustle” as one of the qualities agencies are looking for, especially in more junior employees.

Regularly, agency employees are asked to make sure they have a “side hustle” on their resumes they can point to as proof that they can go above and beyond. On stage at the Cannes Lions, a group of panelists including Alain de Botton and Arianna Huffington said creative lives “require suffering.” At the same event, Michael Kassan, CEO of Medialink, spoke on the main stage about “The Art of the Hustle” this year.

Hustle town