Thick skin, hardwork will get you through a tough career world

Emuron Alemu, an adverising creative and music manager sacrificed fun time to work extra hard, learn and grow faster in his career.
Photo by Edgar R. Batte

What you need to know:

  • I joined both the music industry and advertising industry as a result of two chance encounters with two different friends; One friend being Ernest Nsimbi, aka, GNL Zamba, and the other friend being Timothy Kasirivu (R.I.P.). My career as a music manager started in a bar.

Career journey. Emuron Alemu has worked with the country’s top advertising agencies. He has also had a significant career as a music manager. In between the jobs and illustrious career, he has learnt the power of persistence, and to manoeuvre through crisis.

What is your measure of success, and why?
My measure of success is based on the number of people someone can impact during their lifetime because the more people you can impact, the longer your name lives on. As long as people are still mentioning your name, you are still alive meaning that the more lives you impact, the more chances that you will be “immortal” long after your death.

Please walk me through your education and career path...
I was blessed to go through some of the best institutions in the country, that is Kampala Parents’ School, Kings’ College Budo and Makerere University. My [career] journey started at a boutique advertising agency called Ignition, I moved on to MAAD advertising where a lot of learning happened for me, did a stint at Fireworks Advertising and later moved to Scanad Uganda, and Ogilvy Africa in Nairobi. Most of the learning to be honest was on the job with lessons picked up by working with great teachers like Adris Kamuli, Amol Kulkarni, Sandeep Inamke, Joao Espirito Santo and many others who imparted the wealth of knowledge I have acquired over the years.

At what point did you decide to join the creative industry and what triggered this motivation?
I joined both the music industry and advertising industry as a result of two chance encounters with two different friends; One friend being Ernest Nsimbi, aka, GNL Zamba, and the other friend being Timothy Kasirivu (R.I.P.). My career as a music manager started in a bar.
I met Ernest Nsimbi at a Rock Catalina bar in Ntinda and when we got talking about his musical ambitions and started bouncing ideas off each other, it became obvious that we were meant to work together. My advertising career, however, started with me leaving the same bar. My friend Timothy Kasirivu invited me to his office to ask if I’d be interested in joining an ad agency. At the time I knew nothing about advertising.

How were you able to hold the musical and creative banners without tilting one over the other?
At the beginning, it was easy. Both my musical manager and advertising creative careers were still young and not demanding. As they grew and music began occupying a lot of my time, I was lucky that my bosses at MAAD advertising were flexible enough to let me work on music while keeping my advertising job. As the years went by and music and advertising were both demanding over 12 hours a day from me, I had to make a choice and chose to focus on growing my career as an advertising creative.

What would you tell someone who is wants to join the creative space?
Anyone hungering to join the creative space must know this: 1. You need a thick skin because it is a world full of rejection. 2. You need an unwavering work ethic because it demands more of your time and effort than most jobs. 3.You need to be passionate because only passion will push you through the hard days and indeed the early days of your career will be harder than you ever imagined but if you are willing to keep working hard, it is all unbelievably rewarding.

How have digital and Covid-19 spiced and disrupted your creative world?
Digital helped broaden the scope of creative thinking beyond the traditional formats of print, radio and film. It allowed us to better target consumers with our messaging and forced a new wave of fresh solution and customer-experience based thinking to surface. It also ushered in a new type of creative; the digital native, who in my opinion introduced borderless thinking to the advertising world.
What Covid has done is simply speed up the pace at which the world has adopted digital solutions and also forced advertisers to think more about providing business solutions to their clients instead of just communication ideas.

What do you envision your career space to be post-Covid-19, and how are you positioning yourself in this crisis?
Post Covid-19, I see a world in which we will be tasked to provide creative business solutions that are focused on transforming businesses and have clear return on investment for clients.
How I have been able to position myself for the post-crisis world is by ensuring that I spent my years not only honing my craft, but also understanding the business side of the clients I dealt with to enable me ensure that whenever I tabled a solution, it was a solution that stood to grow the business.

Looking back, what have you done right and what could you have done better?
What I did right was to work hard. I sacrificed a lot of fun time with friends and family to work extra hard to learn and grow faster and I am able to now reap the rewards. What I would have done differently, would have been to start earlier. I would have entered the creative world earlier.

Who has held your hand when things failed?
Without a doubt, my lovely wife has been there for me whenever things have gotten really tough. Aside from her, I am blessed to have a strong circle of friends who to me are like brothers. They never let me down and are always there to offer a word of advice when the world is throwing shots at me.

What do you do to let off steam?
I used to party hard. Really hard to let off steam but now, I mostly just take evening walks while listening to sports documentaries on my phone. That usually works for me.