From ‘Selling Out’ To ‘Selling In’: How The Relationship Between Artists and Brands Turned Inside Out

Sell out.

That’s what we used to call them. ‘Sell Out’ is the scarlet letter that awaited any artist who crossed the line into the world of advertising sponsorships. A brand for the branded. To cross that line meant you sold your soul and sacrificed your creative integrity at the alter of corporate power.

When I began my path as a musician seeking world rock and roll domination, artists and brands were not to play together. To compromise your art by mixing it with advertising would be a dilution of your creativity at best and a betrayal of the counterculture at worst. Artists and brands were oil and water, church and state. Punk against establishment. Rebellion versus Empire.

This cultural contract that exerted the taboo among artists against signing actual contracts with corporate sponsors was so pervasive it became a part of the culture itself. The 1992 film Waynes World played with it brilliantly, casting Rob Lowe as the greasy-haired, handsome face of big-business villainy opposite Mike Myer’s charmingly authentic rocker, Wayne.

The choice of a new generation indeed. For Gen X, brands were the devil in the new Faustian bargain. Don’t take the deal. Protect the counterculture. Keep it real, sacred and separate from the oversold, sold-out trash that pollutes the mainstream. Advertisers, simply put…were the enemy.

I recall in the early days of my on-boarding to the culture of creativity the virility of a deeply cutting quote about the relationship between art and advertising. It was attributed to the street artist, Banksy, who from his renegade graffiti-as-protest surprise acts of creative vengeance had become something of a creator’s folk hero and global art sensation. His sentiments about advertising’s corrosive effects on culture hit young and impressionable creatives like me with the full weight of his moral authority.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little. — Banksy

As firmly as this quote set the course for young artists like me, what it fails to express — or perhaps even grasp — is that many of those bright, creative, and ambitious young people don’t have the luxury of choosing what we’re attracted to. Maybe earlier generations had more of a choice to live as an artist and be free, but few members of my generation had the chance to even try. For many of us, it was over before it began.

The Creator’s Quagmire

If you’re somehow not already aware, I now work in advertising — for brands and with brands. I didn’t go into advertising because I was attracted to it, as Banksy’s quote implies. I went into advertising because art school put me in debt. I entered adulthood with $120,000 in debt after graduation with a six month window to start paying it back. So I stopped making art and started looking for work.

Work. We’ll come back to that word later.

Did I sell out? Yes. But I didn’t sell my soul the day I signed my first contract for work in advertising. I sold my soul the day I signed my first contract for a student loan. The irony. Perhaps going to college was a major miscalculation on my part. If it was, it’s a miscalculation made by many. As of 2022, 43.5 million Americans have federal student loans. The median debt for a bachelor degree in the arts is ~$26K. For a masters, ~$64K and for a doctorate, $134K. That’s a deep hole to dig yourself in before you even get started on living the life of an artist. You’ve got work to climb out of it.

In America, making that money back as an artist means creating for brands more than creating for people. It just does. It’s a simple fact revealed in a compelling snapshot from The Policy Circle on how creativity is funded in different cities around the world.

You won’t find any American cities on that list until you scroll down to the bottom of the chart and find Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York where 45% to 70% of funding for creativity comes from “Private giving & sponsorship”. Brands.

The Content?Creator

Over 2 million people work in advertising and marketing worldwide ( as the IAA reported in 2021). Some them consider themselves to be artists, some don’t. All of us make ads for brands.

The Mad Men of the 1960s were artful with advertising, of course, but with the clear directive of selling products, not creating culture. They shared the understanding that Ads and Culture should be separate too. If a brand’s jingle became a cultural sensation, that’s the exception — but not the rule. Creativity for advertising meant being artful with your pitches printed in the pages between the journalism of magazines and with your thirty-second vignettes broadcasted in television commercial breaks. Oil and water. Church and state.

Look around at the intermix of advertising with culture today and it’s obvious that this has changed. It’s getting harder to tell who’s an artist and who’s an advertiser and which of what they make is art and which of what they make is an ad. It’s all blended together into one cultural fever dream.

After all, the content being created for the culture and all the content being created for the brands is intermixed in the same feeds. Whether artist or marketer, you’re still chasing the same algorithm. In digital feeds, the differences between what is culture and what is an ad is mostly semantic. People show up in the ad placements and brands show up in people’s profiles. It’s all one show.

It has led to the birth of a new term for artistic pursuit: content creator. It’s an identity that relies on having a presence on digital platforms that incentivize creation in support of ad-driven models. The play is to build an audience with regular output and then monetize it through partnerships with brands.

At least 50 million people worldwide consider themselves “content creators”. Of those 50 million, 450,000 can call themselves full-time content creators. It’s a career. Altogether, they generate over $6.8 billion in annual earnings; the vast majority of which comes from brand sponsorships. It’s a growing slice of the pie within a $615 billion global advertising industry.

That’s more than enough to help pay your bills. It’s lucrative. It’s a deal a lot of young creators in particular choose to take in hopes that building an audience as a social media influencer can give them a path toward independence as a business owner. A 2022 report from Adobe on the ‘Creator Economy’ demonstrates this clearly:

Adobe’s publicly available report is thorough and worth reading. Take note that it’s authored by a $10B brand that has pivoted its entire strategy around understanding this new cultural force. Who’s influencing who here?

It details not just the aspiration of young people to be a ‘content creator’ but also how those aspirations play into their want for happiness and for a voice in social causes that matter. In Adobe’s survey of over 5K ‘creators’ across nine global markets, they identify a growing cohort, which they coin the ‘social cause creator’.

The aspiration to be a ‘creator’ or a ‘business owner’ or to work, as I do, within the machinery of the industry of brand represents a new culture entirely different from the culture more familiar to prior generations. It is a culture in which the colors of artists and brands are mixed…and it’s unclear who is using who.

A Moment of Reflection

Walking around at SXSW, itself a crossroads of cultures both artist and brand, I was asked by Stagwell, a marketing agency group to reflect on how the creative industry has changed since I entered it.

This had been nagging at me for a while. It felt like a slow, but monumental change we hadn’t really adequately discussed as a culture. I had woken up one day to a world where being a Millennial meant being old. It gave me cause to consider the tides of these generational shifts. The Gen X loathing of sponsorship stood as a clear and opposite mindset to the Gen Z legions of ‘content creators’ slinging products for brands every day. I felt equally familiar with and alien to both. I spoke openly.

This interview caught me at an interesting moment of reflection. My relationship with work had changed. I’d only recently dug myself out of that deep hole choosing the creative path had put me in. I’d paid off my student loans. I’d saved enough to fund a wedding and buy a house. It all came from the money I made working in advertising. All of it. From that, my life planning had turned away from how to survive and toward to how to thrive. The work…worked. For me.

In that work, I had just transitioned out of an administrative role and into a more creative role as a brand ambassador, which meant public speaking and figuring out what ‘thought leadership’ is supposed to mean. I’d just begun to promote the book I’d written about creativity. It was time to get back to the art and this was the first time I was really asked about creativity in a long, long time.

I felt like I’d freshly stepped out of the myopic prison I’d been stuck in for over a decade of solving the immediate (mostly fiscal) challenges in front of me. The seeds planted long ago had sprouted and broken through to start unfolding. I could finally feel the light, breathe the air, and return to those deeper creative pursuits. Now…what was it I was trying to say? All those years ago when I decided I wanted to be an artist?

The rebellious artist in me wanted to scream, “I’m still here motherfuckers!” But I didn’t. I didn’t because I could see that this burning impulse was part of a much larger and much more interesting truth, bigger than just me. There are legions of creatives who have been on the same journey as me.

We had to work to pay the bills, yes…but because we did, we now get to plug into the power. Us artists, we create the culture now. Not just the counterculture(s); the whole damn thing.

Seizing The Means of Production

My story is just a droplet in a wave. There are many other stories who tower over mine, but we are all riding the same tide that has shifted what it means to be a creative in culture today significantly.

Whether we meant to or not, artists have seized the means of production.

A silent revolution is underway. Let’s talk about it.

Kicking off 2023, Rihanna’s first act in her Super Bowl performance was to apply Fenty Beauty makeup on camera and on stage. Fenty Beauty is Rihanna’s brand of beauty products. Promoting her brand was as much a part of her act as the performance of her songs.

That very same week of Rhianna’s performance, producer and recording artist Pharrell Williams was appointed as creative director for the luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton. It marked perhaps the biggest news story about him since his release of the 11x platinum single, ‘Happy’. It’s a high watermark for a distinct new phase of Pharell’s career, notably divided into chapters on his Wikipedia page for which ‘2014-present’ highlights not his music, but his ‘ventures’. Business is Pharrell’s art now.

Rhianna and Pharrell are far from alone.

Katy Perry has a shoe brand.

Kanye has (or had) a shoe brand too.

Lady Gaga has Haus, Selena Gomez has Rare Beauty, and Alicia Keys has her beauty line too.

You can’t say it’s all pop and not punk when Paramore’s Hayley Williams has her own hair dye brand. Green Day’s Billie Joel Armstrong owns a coffee brand. Blink-182’s Travis Barker has his line of cannabis products. Of course, so does Snoop. How could we forget when Dr. Dre, the producer behind 1988 NWA track ‘Fuk Da Police’ became a billionaire with the sale of his brand Beats by Dre to Apple?

Relatively new artists like Post Malone come out of the gates with their own brand of rose. Actors and athletes like Ryan Reynolds, Tony Hawk, and Shaq have launched some of the buzziest new advertising agencies, turning the tables to become the ones putting contracts in front of brands to sign them. These creative voices are distinct and disrupting the advertising industry, because they carry each founder’s unique voice. You can even watch a compilation of Ryan Reynold’s best ads on YouTube.

Full-fledged content creators like Mr. Beast who wield large Gen Z audiences are launching massively successful new product lines like Feastables seemingly overnight, highlighting their collaborations with creators along the way.

It’s like the brand launch is the new album drop.

Whether creatives entered the house of brands because we wanted to or we had to, the fact is we are here. The call is coming from the inside of the house. We’re not just the content creators, we’re the executives. We’re the celebrities. We’re the copywriters. We’re the brand managers and strategists. It’s our party now. We control the music, we’ve got the mic. Now…what was it we were trying to say?

The First Murmurs of the Creator’s Voice

As creators began rising into positions of power in the advertising industry, a rising trend of discussion in its halls of power rose with it. It speaks to the responsibility brands have for the impact of not just their products and services in the world, but of the stories they tell about them in their marketing. It’s called ‘brand purpose’.

Marketers love to talk about it, especially if they hate it. Brand purpose makes very little sense to many of the traditional business leaders in the marketing world. A lot…a lot of ink has been spilled in industry trades debating its merits and it has become a pervasive theme at conference panels and keynotes. At the core of the critique is that much of the effort around brand purpose goes toward messaging in market rather than the factors that impact a business’s bottom line. Brand purpose, say both its critics and champions, is about a commitment to a brand’s values and beliefs.

Values? Beliefs? It makes sense that this doesn’t make sense to business leaders, because these are the kinds of things that make sense to artists. I’ll just say it flatly…brand purpose makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. I don’t need it to be explained because it is entirely aligned with the values and beliefs that shaped me at the start of my artistic journey. That’s why I’ve been one of brand purpose’s outspoken champions and have been championing it for a long time.

These SXSW interviews are 5 years apart. The message is the same. There is a legion of creatives like me intermixed with the world of brands, changing it from the inside out by questioning the assumptions we found at the foundations of the businesses into which we started working at the ground floor. It’s a trend because we made it one. We’re here to talk about it and we’re not stopping. This is how we work.

The older generations; the incumbent leaders in the business world who might be more conditioned to the expectations of what a good worker should do, might find this behavior subversive. It’s not. This is what artists do. We question the narratives we are born into to reorder our generational story into a better one.

Artists add the “R” to evolution. That’s our real job.

The economic conditions of today’s generations coming of age put more creatives into the workforce than might have happened otherwise. Now, it’s become our field of play and as we each begin to sprout, we’re stepping into power.

The story we collectively tell to define how we ‘work’ has become our creative canvas. We’re rewriting, repainting, rewiring, rethinking it. We are adding our “R” to the evolution of business.

“The medium is the message” media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said. What if an artists creative medium wasn’t just ink or clay or image, but an entire brand with all the business resources it represents?

The Revolution of?Work

It’s not just artists driving the change. It’s everyone. The role of artists is to express the stories the rest of us experience to help us better understand the story we are entering from the story we are leaving. Should we overcome our own vanity, we might find a way to express a story universal enough to catalyzes societal change and give it color, texture, a name.

Brand Purpose is one of these stories, creatively tuned to speak to those who are in charge. It comes paired with another story, creatively tuned to speak to those who are not: Anti-work. Both stories grew from the same garden, planted by the same seeds of change. Together, they feed a new culture.

The Anti-work movement has been the driving force behind cultural moments such The Great Resignation and new behaviors such as Quiet Quitting. It’s been growing rapidly.

These concepts of the ‘great resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting’ are new narratives for society. They’re not like the labor movement that birthed unions and wage laws. The anti-work movement, for its economy of effort, is more subversive than rage. It’s dismissal. Non-participation.

It’s a compelling prompt at the dawn of artificial intelligence tools that stand to subsume most of the administrative tasks we call work anyway.

The propagation of the anti-work story is not driven by protest. It’s largely spread through the channels of social media platforms where ‘influencers’, ‘content creators’, and ‘social cause creators’ pump their messages constantly. Anti-work stories resonate with young users of each platform enough to engage with them and so the algorithms begin to favor similar content. Virility forms. Empowered by the algorithms, these anti-work stories become verified trends for which journalists at media institutions dutifully follow with coverage and commentary to fulfill their fiduciary responsibility to drive clicks.

At that point, the story becomes its own reality and society is changed. Rapidly, a new culture begins to bloom. Spring.

Speaking Truth Through?Power

I write this to the artist in you. No matter who you are. There is nothing special about being artist. It just represents a way to make a commitment to your humanity.

Just like ads, not all art is good. Some of it is cheap. A lot of it is vain. Most of it misses the mark. Just like all ads are driven by making money, all of art is bound by its shared purpose too: to seek the truth to speak it.

Truth is what compels the creative soul, not the dollar. It has only seemed that way because the dollar decides what gets to be heard. That’s why every artist has had to learn how to sell.

Selling out is when you let your truth be shaped by the power of the channels you want access to. Selling in is when you shape the channels you access with the power of your truth.

The specter of selling out isn’t going anywhere. So long as there are people who fold to power or their own vanity, we will have bad art and we will have bad ads to propel them. Culture hasn’t closed the door to selling out, but it has opened the door wide to selling in. We’re better for it.

On the other side of the journey from selling out to selling in, I can see something almost sinister in the original myth of the culture wars. Artists telling artists not to play with brands is artists telling artists not to touch the dials that shape culture. The idea of ‘selling out’ — that artists are not supposed to play with brands — is an illusion that keeps artists hands away from the levers of power. Don’t buy it.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” doesn’t even entertain the thought that the man behind the curtain could be you. Greatness…whether with art or the dollar is in knowing not just how to speak truth to power, but through it.

Are you willing to be great?

Maybe you’re an executive now. Maybe you’re an influencer or a business founder. Maybe you’re a creative director or maybe you work inside of an advertising agency. All of that is just the answer you give when people ask you that annoying question, ‘what do you do?’ It’s work.

That doesn’t represent who you are as a human. That human is a creator — an artist inside of you that started this journey of life. Let’s ask it a better question than ‘what do you do?’

You came here for a reason. What was it you were trying to say?

What are your values? What are your beliefs. What is your purpose…

Say it.

Use the power you’ve been given. Speak through the power you’ve earned.

Sell in.

Which Way Is North: A Creative Compass For Makers, Marketers, and Mystics is a handbook for today’s managers of meaning responsible for keeping our culture’s stories. It deals with the idea that anxiety is creativity ready to be transmuted and that much of the modern malaise culture faces can be addressed through embracing the creative purpose of the emotions that make us most uncomfortable.