My Biggest Lesson: Jon Austin
Jon is the co-founder of Supermassive, a creative studio in Sydney, Australia.
His work has been recognised at every major advertising awards show in the world for PR, entertainment, social, music, media, audio, content and more. With a background in commercial music, which saw him playing on stages around the world, his passion for entertainment and popular culture has also helped him accrue more unique accolades.
He’s created a #1 charting true crime podcast for the AFP, and written a #1 charting Christmas carol which is still being taught in NZ schools. He’s launched a world-first gamified model of ecotourism that has been praised by global policymakers as a tourism game-changer. He’s created a global brand platform for Tourism Fiji that brought new levels of authenticity (and visitors) to the islands. He’s written two Gold Albums, a school song for Montessori, and even helped get a five year overdue release date from George RR Martin for The Winds of Winter.
I’ve found that the best pieces of advice aren’t the ones you listen to, but the ones you learn by seeing how others act - particularly those that show you how you don’t want to be.
Here’s one that stuck with me.
When I first got into advertising, ECDs were more mythical creature than management.
Like those blurry photos of Bigfoot, you only ever seemed to catch occasional, fleeting glimpses of them in the wild. As luck (or so I thought at the time) would have it, when I was at my very first agency, my very first review was with the ECD.
I can’t remember the brief, but I do remember being desperate to impress.
I was getting paid in office stationery rather than human money at the time (that’s a whole other story), so I thought this would be a chance to show my worth and hopefully take home a salary rather than armfuls of CD-Rs.
I approached his office, a pile of paper in hand, only to be stopped by his EA.
She told me he’d decided to go fishing instead. She then clued me in on his review style.
“Just lay them all out on his floor so he can look after fishing and before he goes for lunch.”
There would be no creative review, or at least, none that I was invited to.
But how would I know which ones he liked, I asked.
Her response - “Well, he’ll still be wearing his fishing shoes, so they’ll be the ones with the least amount of shit and sand and mud all over them.”
This guy’s approach to creative direction was to literally walk all over the work.
That kind of creative leadership was certainly nothing rare. Along my career trajectory, I had no shortage of experiences just like it, from being asked how many people I’d made that cry day like it was a badge of honour, to us all being told at an all staff that the men in the agency were the ‘award hunters’ and the women were the ‘providers’ who had to make sure the men had everything they needed (true story).
But that very first experience with my ECD was the one that really shaped my own style of leadership.
It felt crazy to me that great creativity could be borne out of fear and shame and humiliation.
It still does.
Pressure, sure. By all means. But not the stuff that makes you go home feeling like you’re less than. That's fucked up.
That one experience showed me exactly who I didn’t want to be when I got to that level. It helped shape a style of creative leadership that gets results through collaboration, fun and empathy.
So in a way, that ECD did give me some of the best creative direction I've ever had.
Crawling around his office floor, sifting through piles of paper covered with mud and shit didn’t just lead me to his favourite idea. It led me towards a style of leadership that has stayed with me to this day.
