Worry about your brand, not your employer’s
It’s not just pretty young things aspiring to Instagram influencer glory and a career in reality TV who need to obsess about their personal brand
As a cynical Gen Xer, I always die a little inside when I hear people – usually Gen Y and Gen Z people – pontificate at length about their ‘personal brand’. But whatever qualms I have about the young people’s penchant for self-commodification, I have to concede that for anyone living during the debauched End Times of late capitalism it makes sense to create and relentlessly promote a (ugh) personal brand.
Indeed, in an age where social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram have become part of the firmament, it’s near impossible not to spend significant time thinking about your brand. (‘If I post this picture of me drinking a cocktail at 11am at a five-star resort on Facebook, will people believe I’m a high-flyer who is constantly jetting to glamorous destinations, or might they conclude I’m a pisshead?”; ‘If I write about winning an industry award on LinkedIn, will potential future clients believe I’m engaging in self-pleasuring humblebragging or assume I’m at the top of my field?’; ‘If I post a black square on Instagram will my industry peers decide I’m a tiresome virtue signaller? If I don’t, will they judge me to be a white supremacist?’)
The money or the brand?
Even if you’re not a comedy fan or interested in American politics, you may know who John Oliver is. (If you don’t, he’s an Anglo-American comedian who found fame as a correspondent on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show before launching his own show, Last Week Tonight, in 2014.)
You almost certainly don’t know who Jeff Maurer is. I wouldn’t either if I hadn’t, for lack of any better entertainment options, recently decided to listen to a podcast he did with Coleman Hughes. Briefly, Maurer is a stand-up comedian who was ‘discovered’ by John Oliver shortly before he launched Last Week Tonight and invited to join the show’s writing team. Maurer stayed with the show for six years and, as a result, has a lot of interesting insights about issues such as the Left’s near-total stranglehold on comedy. As is my wont, I went down the Internet rabbit hole after becoming aware of Maurer and listened to another podcast he did with Michael Shermer and signed up to his Substack.
Though he doesn’t seem to use the term, Maurer has a lot to say about the personal brands of on-camera hosts as opposed to those of the writers who make them look good. To summarise, those who write jokes for the likes of John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, James Corden, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Maher, Trevor Noah et al get paid exceptionally well. (You can expect to get at least US$5,000 a week for an entry-level writing role and double, triple or quadruple that once you move up the ranks). The catch is they labour in obscurity and don’t get the chance to build their brand. Indeed, a stand-up who has been painstakingly building their personal brand for years through live shows, podcast appearances and spots on radio and TV programs will usually have to cease all or most of those brand-building activities when they get a job on a TV show.
That’s a trade-off many struggling stand-up comedians are willing to make in their twenties and thirties. The problem arises when these stand-up comedians cum behind-the-scenes joke writers quit or are forced out of their jobs. (Part of the reason writing jobs pay so well is that even the hardiest souls tend to burn out within a few years. Even if they don’t, rampant ageism means a TV comedy writer is almost always on borrowed time once they turn 40.)
After 5-10 years spent in writers’ rooms, many comedy writers find themselves unemployed and with no useful personal brand. (Granted, they probably have a personal brand within TV industry circles. But if they are unable or unwilling to work in that industry, that doesn’t help them much.) As a result, many fortysomething ex-comedy writers struggle to find any employment, let alone enjoyable and lucrative employment, for the final 20-30 years of their working lives.*
Of course, they can try to leverage the comedy writing skills they’ve developed by, say, starting a Substack blog, or writing books, or going back to performing at comedy clubs. But as Maurer frequently points out, it’s hard to attract subscribers, readers or audiences when nobody has any idea who you are.
Which brings us to the latest mainstream media contretemps…
Institutional vs personal brands
The old deal offered to journalists was that they would join a media company – a newspaper, magazine, TV news show or talkback radio program – labour in obscurity for years, or possibly even decades, then just possibly achieve fame as a ‘star’ columnist, or primetime newsreader, or talkback radio host.
In this long-gone world, the interests of the media company and their employee were, more or less, in alignment and personal and institutional brands were inextricably intertwined. For instance, both Hunter S. Thompson and Matt Taibbi achieved fame writing for Rolling Stone and are – or at least were – thought of as Rolling Stone journalists. (Thompson’s best-known book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, began life as a Rolling Stone feature article.)
It was always the case that relatively few of those who aspired to become ‘name journalists’ actually managed to create the strong personal brands that delivered the remuneration and profile that the likes of Thompson and Taibbi enjoyed. Nonetheless, for a long time, plenty of bright and ambitious 21-year-olds were happy to commit to being humble company men and women in the belief they would ultimately get their time to shine.
Over the last 10-15 years, many low-profile toilers have been shown the door as the mainstream media’s business model has collapsed. (Some of the big-name stars have too, but they’ve usually been able to trade on the strength of their personal brand to find alternative and often better-paid employment.)
There are now many erstwhile media workers in their forties and fifties who, understandably, feel they’ve been screwed over. Even more understandably, there are a lot of twentysomething and thirtysomething media workers who want to make very sure that the same fate isn’t going to befall them. These individuals are typically laser-focused on building their brand, even if doing that will potentially damage the institutional brand of their employer.
One of the quickest and easiest ways for a journalist or commentator to build their personal brand is to constantly churn out edgy tweets and, even better, get involved in a Twitter war with someone who has an even stronger personal brand than they do. Up to a point, this helps or at least doesn’t harm the institutional brand of their employer. But what happens to the brand of, say, The Atlantic or The New York Times when a staffer tweets, or is found to have tweeted, ‘Hang women who have abortions’ or ‘#CancelWhitePeople’?
Should the New York Times brand be its staff’s first priority?
In early 2022 a long-running civil war at the New York Times erupted into the headlines. On her way out the door, departing reporter Taylor Lorenz slammed the New York Times for restricting its employees’ personal-brand-building opportunities. She remarked, “When you think about the future of media, it's much more distributed and about personalities. Younger people recognise the power of having their own brand and audience, and the longer you stay at a job that restricts you from outside opportunities, the less relevant your brand becomes."
Several loyal company men and women at the New York Times fired back at Lorenz. They argued she should have been less self-interested and more grateful for the opportunities provided by her former employer. I’m not entirely unsympathetic to that argument. Certainly, had the world’s most prestigious newspaper offered me a job early on in my journalistic career, I would have been inclined to keep my head down, pay my dues and put any personal-brand-building activities on the back burner.
But as I’ve written about elsewhere, loyalty tends to be a one-way street when it comes to the sellers and purchasers of labour. Like just about every other media business on the planet, the New York Times has laid off hundreds of dedicated staff in recent times. Those current employees criticising Lorenz for being insufficiently loyal might like to think about how loyal the New York Times is likely to be to them in the years to come, especially once they age out of the ‘promising up-and-comer’ demographic.
Somewhat reluctantly, I’m in the Lorenz camp. Especially if you’re a gig-economy worker, you need to pay careful attention to your personal brand. And you also need to think about whether you should continue to work for clients that don’t provide you with the opportunity to enhance it.
Further reading
*If you want to learn about it’s what it’s like to go from being a $300,000-a-year Hollywood comedy writer with a happy marriage, big brood of kids and lovely home to being a middle-aged, divorced and homeless man who can’t even land a minimum-wage retail job, you should check out this brilliant article by one-time Roseanne writer Dan Raether.