Behind the Scope

Most creatives spend their careers chasing the next brief, the next award, the next step up the ladder. Dian did that for 20 years, at some of the most respected agencies in Austria, and then stopped to count what he actually had to show for it.

In this episode, Dian gets into what that realization felt like, why the advertising industry is brilliant at consuming creative talent without giving much back, and what it took to finally walk away and build something on his own terms. We talk about the award culture that shaped his entire career, why the definition of great work has fundamentally changed, and what it actually means to use your creativity for yourself.

Guest links
Website: https://www.cainne-angste.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cainne_angste/

The creative industry spends a lot of time romanticizing passion.That's how we got here. But there's a version of that passion that can make you bad at pricing your work, bad at setting boundaries, and bad at building a business around it. And there's another version that stops being about the client altogether and starts being about you.

Sandro Siller, founder of Wort Weit Wien, was building his copywriting business right as ChatGPT hit. We get into what kind of creatives are at risk for being replaced by AI. Why selling output alone was never going to be enough, and why most creatives don't actually have a process worth selling (yet?). We also talk about why Sandro completely restructured his business around education and consulting instead of chasing the same clients with the same pitch in a market that had fundamentally changed.

Guest Links:
Website: https://www.wortweitwien.at
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandrosiller/

In this episode, we sit down with Julia Weithaler, founder of To Be Honest, a Vienna-based design studio built entirely around working with purpose-driven, values-aligned clients. We get into what that actually looks like in practice, and whether it's realistic to think you can hold your values and keep your business alive at the same time.

We get into the gray areas, and discuss the industry's obsession with performing progressive values while doing none of the work. Imperfect action is still better than no action. But we get into where the line is.

Guest links:
Website: https://tobehonest.studio/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tbh.designstudio

No context. No curiosity about the brief, the client, the requirements, or what the person was actually trying to solve. Just a verdict stated as fact, and dressed up as professional opinion.

We've been watching this play out for a while. The way creatives pile on other creatives online. The way critique gets weaponized without any of the information that would make it useful. The way opinions get presented as objective truth by people who weren't in the room, didn't read the brief, and have no idea what they're looking at.