Oh hi. Welcome to the first ever episode of the Hurdling with Emily Ash Powell podcast. How very exciting, daunting and terrifying all at once.
This podcast invites brilliant people from all walks of life to unpick and celebrate how we get over all the hurdles that stand in our way – from work, love, friendship, families, life admin, bad luck, good luck, self-inflicted self-sabotage, people being dicks or just in the small moments of simply trying to get by (like when you're hungover and they’ve run out of salt and vinegar hula hoops at the corner shop, ffs). It exists to dig deeper beyond the fact that we only ever seem to really talk about what happens after we’ve cleared our hurdles – glossing over the blood, sweat and tears that actually got you over it in the first place.
My first guest is Vikki Ross, a star copywriter who tells brands how to talk and shows ad agencies how to write. Vikki has worked with the likes of Sky, NOW TV, Sony Music, Twitter, Spotify, Adidas, ITV – to name but a few. Vikki is also a D&AD Masterclass Trainer and mentor. She is the founder of #CopywritersUnite, the online community turned IRL global event that supports, motivates and celebrates the world of copy and words – all over the world. We met over eight years ago at a D&AD copywriting workshop she was hosting, began a six month mentoring programme (where she helped me to figure out a very specific problem I had) and eventually became friends. Lucky me. Vikki is someone I admire massively, both as a friend and as a copywriter. She’s endlessly generous with her time, advice and has nailed how to balance freelance life with the rest of her life, too.
In this episode, Vikki and I talk about how we met, how we got our starts in the world of copy, what it really is to be a person who spends their days obsessing over the right words and a few of the hurdles we’ve faced so far in our creative careers. We also talked about what it is to be a good mentor (and how to be a good mentee), the danger of shiny job titles and why FOMO can be the curse of the freelancer. We also confessed to our love of telling restaurants it’s your birthday even though it’s not, just to get a free dessert.
This episode was recorded as a live Zoom event with paid subscribers of the Hurdling Substack newsletter as guests. At the end, they joined the Q+A to ask Vikki all their burning questions. To get access to these live events in the future and to get your questions answered live, you can upgrade to a paid membership here.
Massive thanks to Vikki for spending her Monday night on a call with me, to everyone who joined the live event and asked such great questions and to my husband Jonny for his editing skills and his endless patience with my unwillingness to understand how technology works.
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