Making and Marketing are a Creator’s Catch-22
🌟Career Coaching: A candid look at the crazy demands being placed on film and theater makers today, and one possible strategy to protect your sanity.
So hey, I’ve been marketing entertainment projects for decades. And from low-budget indies to swanky commercial projects, the rhythm used to be familiar:
Make something great.
Tell people about it.
Let the work speak for itself.
Sure, we hustled. A lot. Sent press releases. Courted critics. Got into listings. Dropped some cash on postcards and email blasts and digital ads. Attended incredibly lengthy marketing meetings with various stakeholders every week.
That used to be enough.
Now? There’s a shrill, non-stop command pulsing through the industry: "KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE!" If you do NOT know your audience, the reasoning goes, then you will never ever sell a ticket. Not even one, because your mother doesn’t count.
And that “knowing” is not conceptual, like it used to be. Creators are supposed to know their audience literally. As in know their handles, their follows, their likes and dislikes. They should be your Instagram followers, your LinkedIn connections, your Substack subscribers. You should be reading the audience data and the dashboard analytics and the tea leaves. Your creative work should take all of this into account, because what good is the data if you’re not responding to it? And that’s just the beginning!
Once you’ve "got" them, the demand evolves. Speak their language. (Gen Z says “up”, Millennials say “down”, Gen X hums softly, Boomers are unresponsive unless it's written in 14pt font). Post at the right time. Use the right emoji (or none). And since the internet never sleeps, neither should your engagement of your audience.
Before the project is green-lit, before you get into the rehearsal room or set foot on a set, you’re supposed to be a fully-formed marketing machine.
When Marketing Steals All the Focus
This new mandate to pre-package an audience is blurring priorities for film and theater makers.
The process of making something is messy. Crazy messy at times. And slow. And creators often need to wallow in that mess and slowness to get to the truth of the story they’re telling. And the best wallowing is often a solo endeavor.
But audiences (and algorithms) want proximity. They want to know the creator before they know their work. They want access to the creative process so they can have input, even if that input is simply a “like” on a post.
So what’s the priority? Creative exploration, risk-taking, storytelling, wallowing? Or being sure that you can engage an audience for whatever it is you are in the process of making?
Over-communicating about what you’re making too early in the process can result in storytelling by committee. Is that what we want? Do we want our work to be innovative, provocative and original? Do we want to shift to a model where we ask our audiences what they want and then we make it?
Of course this isn’t an either/or situation. And of course there is a middle ground. A lot of people talk about the beauty of compromise on this creative economy conundrum. The compromise is usually something to the effect of “do both simultaneously like I am successfully doing”, which is not terribly helpful for most. For most creatives, it’s two separate parts of the brain. One part makes them a master at creating; a different part allows them to comment on LinkedIn.
So what happens when most creatives try to “do both”? They delay their creative work. They drop down the rabbit hole that is social media. They second-guess their instincts because they’re not “big” online or because their audience isn’t responding to their posts.
These creators feel behind before they’ve even begun. And that's exactly what leads them to burn out, or worse, to back out entirely.
A 4-Part Framework to Keep You Sane (and Seen)
You don’t need to be a digital savant, but you do need a strategy. Here’s mine:
Define the Creative Bubble
Choose specific hours or days that are sacred for the creative process. No posting, no checking likes, no DMs. Use a focus timer if necessary. Give yourself permission to stop selling yourself and/or your work on a routine basis. Your work deserves that. You do too.Designate an Audience Hour
Once you have your creative time scheduled, do the same for your marketing. It can be an hour each day or all day on Mondays; just be consistent and make sure the hours are on your calendar. This is your time to post, reply to comments, acknowledge someone’s win and share a behind-the-scenes photo. Boundaries help. So does structure.Create Before You Share
Make the thing first. Share second. Let your work lead your marketing, not the other way around. Capture process photos or thoughts as you go, but don’t worry about posting them in real time. Your audience doesn’t crave immediacy. It wants authenticity. (Which is why the proliferation on some platforms of posts and comments (!) written by AI is so irritating, but that’s a rant for another day.)Choose the Simplest Platform That Fits
Don’t be everywhere. Pick the one platform where your audience is active and you feel like yourself. If that's Substack, great. If it’s YouTube or a podcast or a monthly email, that's great too. Go deep, not wide. You’re not a content factory.
How Are You Coping?
The new demands on creatives are real and relentless. You’re expected to be a gifted storyteller, a savvy business strategist, an expert marketer and a caring, engaged friend to your audience. All at once.
So tell me: how are you navigating this shift? Are you finding a balance between making and marketing? Or are you feeling like you’re faking one just to survive the other?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and maybe even feature a few reflections in a future issue. Let’s not pretend we’re all doing this perfectly. Let’s figure it out together.
