Cultural Curators

Steering away from its original nature of life sharing, social media platforms have increasingly become sites for advertising creatives to maintain a professional presence. While an abundance of studies on social media and creative work have been conducted on self-presentations and online identity construction, few have focused on the intersection of personal and professional identity in the specific field of advertising creative workers. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with a group of senior creatives in the advertising industry and content analysis of their Instagram data to explore the ways and motivations of their self-presentations on Instagram and investigate how social media mediates the intersectionality. The findings reveal that advertising creatives tend to blur the boundary between personal and professional identity through curatorial self-presentation, constructing a unified "cultural curator" persona that merges personal taste, aesthetic expression, and professional credibility. Instagram's affordances, especially its visual formatting and dual structures of permanence and ephemerality (Grid vs. Stories), enable this blended identity construction. Rather than experiencing context collapse as a major tension, most participants actively embrace the overlap between personal and professional spheres, using authenticity and visual cohesion to assert creative autonomy and build visibility. However, this intersectional identity also intensifies the emotional labor of self-branding, reflecting broader tensions in the advertising industry between artistic ideals and commercial imperatives.