The Ad Executive Who Found Her Own Definition of Success

Who is Jaime Robinson?

You might be able to pinpoint the specific ad, award, or campaign that kicked off a career. Jaime Robinson, on the other hand, can point to a mall.

Her sixth-grade class was sent out with video cameras to record a news segment for a homemade news channel. Back then, having a camcorder in your family was the hot-ticket item. While most of Jaime's classmates documented fashion shows and the newly opened Orange Julius stand inside the mall, Jaime and her best friend opted for an alternate option: making commercials for a sixth-grade video magazine. The ads ran between other students' segments.

Fake advertisements. Made for fun, which worked in Jaime's favor - because it marked the turning point for this now Emmy-winning executive, who has never really stopped making advertisements ever since.

She never went to college to study advertising; instead majored in English, and minored in creative writing (after she spent four weeks dabbling in economics and found that macroeconomic analysis didn't appeal to her), which taught her to dismantle a concept and explore its many nuances. The creative writing coursework taught her to do something equally as valuable: to create work from nothing, facing an intimidatingly empty page with a looming deadline in the form of a tangible project. It turned out these were, in fact, her two career skills all along.

Those combined curiosities eventually spawned JOAN, the advertising firm co-founded and spearheaded by Jaime as CCO, to which Emmy's alone would be an insufficient career summation. If you asked Jaime where the work really begins, however, you would hear that none of her recognition reflect that; in her case, the job isn't about business logistics. It begins the instant she no longer has to file paperwork-the emails to lawyers and designers, managing her banking and insurance - and can simply sit down to think. In her opinion, that's what advertising truly is, and everything else is what provides room for it to occur.

Redefining What Success Gets to Mean

Permission. When I asked what skill or strategy she wished she could have received in an earlier stage of her career, that's what she said. For years, Jaime measured her self-worth on a scale that reflected the success of her work: whether it received industry awards, whether it generated enough buzz among her colleagues. It's a trap she's seen plenty of other creatives fall into as well. The twist: her self-perception has changed completely now.

"Being a person is totally separate from being the brand creative, as separate from being a businesswoman. None of them has to be successful to be fully and totally complete on their own." You get to define what success looks like without ever sacrificing your understanding of self, is what Jaime learned.

"Try to find the one thing that is both: you love it, and you can get paid for it. I think a lot of people are working really hard to make things worth your time. When you find work like that, it's worth chasing."

Q: What's something about your job that would surprise someone who's never done it?

A: "How strategic and how business-oriented it actually is. Even as just a creative, not even as a businesswoman, you have to understand where the nexus is between what the business needs to accomplish, what the audience needs to hear, and what the creative output is going to do to connect those things. People think it's just about doing crazy stuff. It's actually really, really disciplined."

Q: For everyone entering the workforce, what's a piece of advice you'd give them?

A: "Understand what you are really deeply passionate about, and try to figure out where that intersects with what you can get paid for. Not enough young people are working hard to figure out what they're passionate about that they can also get paid for. Try to find that one thing that is both."

Q: What do you want people to understand about your job that they usually get wrong?

A: "Being a boss is actually very difficult, and you are essentially serving the people that work for you. You care more about those people than I think they realize. A lot of entrepreneurs don't see themselves as bosses. They see themselves in a service position."