leena

Creative companies run on joy as much as talent & effort. When you notice the laughter fading for a few days, it’s usually a sign something deeper has gone missing.

On personal brand, cringe barriers & taste gaps. There's this moment of hesitation before I share any work publicly. Like there exists this unnecessary tension between my work and personal authenticity. Why do they feel like they stand in opposition? I'm frequently doing invisible mental tallies, second guessing if I’m tipping too far into becoming the person who only talks about work. Is it getting too spammy? I know we’re building this company, but how much of Talented is too much Talented? For anyone who observes @TalentedAgency's work, there's an unmissable phenomena you’ll have to deal with as part of following us or anyone who works here. The moment we’ve created anything we believe to be worthy, it’ll be rammed down your feed by dozens & dozens of us who work here. Every piece of work shamelessly reshared and reposted in bulk by the majority, even by those whose hands didn't directly shape the work. I think we broke the linkedin algo with that last Britannia piece. It's one of my favourite things about the group dynamic here. I love that we manage to navigate the ‘work-crossing-into-personal-social’ cringe barrier fairly well and with relative effortlessness. We're a comparably leaner agency to our competitors, punching above our weight in getting more distribution for our work because of this. A nice side effect is that we have more luck than most escaping usual self-congratulatory marketing bubbles. There's a deeper dialogue to be had about how us agencies often create work primarily to the taste of other marketers, but we'll let that be for another time. I guess the thing about self or work-promotion is that it tends to lose its traditional discomfort when that ‘work update’ is so aligned with your own taste that you'd be obsessed with it even if someone else had made it. When you feel that you or the group around you have made something so fundamentally resonant with your own sensibilities that discovering it organically would also ignite a similar genuine enthusiasm. When you perceive those subtle nuances that make you love it, and intuitively know it will ignite a similar feeling in others who have nothing to do with your work - that is the sweet spot. Cringe barrier: crossed. It feels like that's when sharing stops feeling like promotion and starts feeling like showing your friends & feed this amazing thing you discovered. The shift in energy signature turns to pure excitement from the otherwise weird feeling of coming across as spammy or self-indulgent. You move from "please look at what we made and hit like" to "holy shit, this thing needs to exist in the world and I happen to be part of the group of people who made it!" When instead of having to navigate the delicately weird balance of personal branding, you find yourself in the position of publicly loving something whose value you understand intimately - not just because it may have your fingerprints on it, but because it genuinely matches with your own understanding of what excellence looks like in your field. When there’s an intrinsic alignment between creator and creation - a reduced taste gap in a sense. Guess the trick is to continue to make more things we personally love. And becoming shameless resharers & reposters right after.

Rooting hard for a company that has given @TalentedAgency and Webchutney some of our funnest opportunities over the last decade. 🧵