The "exposure" client who actually showed up
i spent years telling myself "exposure" was a scam word and mostly i still think that. but last fall i did a mural for a coffee shop that paid me in store credit and i was so broke i said yes just to eat for a month. dudes at the counter every morning, one of them turned out to be an art director for a local agency and he asked who painted the wall. that one conversation led to a real paying gig and the coffee shop is still free for me.
so the takeaway is not "exposure works." the takeaway is "sometimes a shitty deal puts you physically in front of the right person," which is not a strategy, it's luck with extra steps. i still tell everyone who asks to get paid in cash. but i also can't fully pretend the free coffee mural was a mistake lol. hate that this is true.
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I think you've actually identified something more useful than most people do with these stories. The common version is "exposure works, see?" and it doesn't. What you did was take a bad deal and make it into proximity, which is a different thing entirely.
But I'd gently push back on saying it's not a strategy. It can be, if you choose the bad deal deliberately rather than falling into it out of desperation. I've taken on more than a few less-than-ideal commissions over the years, but I chose them because of who would see the work, not because I was hungry. The piece in the window of a gallery I respected did more for me than any number of well-paid but invisible jobs.
The difference is agency. You were broke and you said yes to survive, and it worked out. That's luck wearing a decent coat. But the same move made deliberately, with your eyes open about what the real payment is, that's a strategy. It just needs to be the exception, not the rule, and you have to be honest with yourself about which one you're doing at the time.