Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety…
How old do you have to be to write an ad? Or be a CD? Or start your own agency?
When I was at Watford the average age of people on the course was 24. Nearly all were post-grads, but some had tried an alternative career and found it not to their liking. That meant that we had sufficient experience of ‘life’ to have a go at briefs and hopefully answer them with a simple human truth. Could an 18-year-old have done that? Probably, but I think they might have found it harder or hit the bullseye less often.
I think the industry shows us that, like many skills, a person’s ability to create ads increases along with the number of times they have to do it. You get to a point where you know what to do, what not to do, what’s been done and what constitutes ‘good’, and when you combine all those it’s bound to trump naivety more often than not.
In the middle of writing this post I started reading this interview with David Cronenberg. He touches on the increase of ability that comes with age:
“You have power and potency at this age. There’s the mythology of age, the bearded elder, the wise old man. In some cultures advanced age is very much revered, the Chinese culture, Confucius and so on: you are supposed to gain in wisdom and experience and therefore be quite a valuable member of society who should be honoured and listened to.
“I can say that the novel I wrote now, I really expected to have written when I was 21 instead of 71, but it couldn’t have been the same novel and I doubt that it would have been as good.”
Reading the above, you might then wonder why you see so few older people in advertising agencies. Well, it’s an industry built on a misguided neophilia, as well as a tightfistedness that lets go of some of its better practitioners because they have risen to a position where their salary is high enough to be questioned, no matter what their contribution.
And what do we lose because of that? Those of you who read the wisdom of Jeremy Bullmore, The Ad Contrarian or Dave Trott will appreciate just how much the less young have to offer. How many others are out there could contribute to the strength of the industry in a similar way?
We’ll never know because those two kids who have just graduated from St Martins know who Deadmau5 is and will only cost £20k each.
You’ll never win anything with kids.
I guess its about a blend. The right CD pointing the exuberance of youth in the right direction is a potent force.
Make that £22k, they’ve got standards after all.
I guess that’s why we crusties all go freelance and have more fun, mostly dealing direct with clients who:
1) Appreciate the wisdom and speed of experience.
2) like having fun without organisational strictures of agencies.
3) As Day/Devito once put it, like buying their ads direct from the manufacturers.
I went to Watford straight from school in 1965 AND I know who Deadmau5 is.
Jerry Della Femina once (re-)quoted, ‘when you get old, you don’t get shit, you just forget how hard it is to be good’. I love that.
I am getting older and just won some quite big awards. I also know who Deadmau5 is and how to spell it. Sadly, despite these two persuasive facts, I think I have 5 years left before I get replaced by 2 posh blokes called Sam & Sam who will, indeed, be on £22k.
I will then do a poorly-attended speaking tour about a book which young creatives don’t give a fuck about which tends to over-reference and rose-tint ‘the good old days’. My young wife will then soon me and I will end up drinking in pubs on Mondays at 11.01am with my fellow chubsters, wondering why we never appreciated those all-dayers in The Cow. And what ‘Jezza’ is up to these days.
Hmm… she will not ‘soon’ me or ‘spoon’ me. She will realise that I have left the word ‘leave’ out, which will, in turn, cause her to do the same. All of which is sort of ironic in that Alanis way.
I’m with you on this Ben.
Ad agencies have themselves in a real muddle about this. If you go back even further than your example of when you were at college, ad agencies would tend to be staffed by a fairly large proportion of people who had come into the business in their late twenties and thirties even, after a career in another business or in the forces.
The vitality and energy of youth is a great thing for the business, but those qualities are not unique to the young. Advertising agencies are too quick to sideline or ditch people who have years of knowledge and experience, especially in the creative department.
The tendency has to been to remove experienced (invariably older and more expensive) individuals and replace them with a larger amount of younger, cheaper people. This correlates with ad agencies’ obsession with quantity over quality – it’s attractive to them to have legions of cheap teams churning out ‘route’ after ‘route’ quickly, as they have allowed clients to judge them on their willingness to produce quantity and to work at speed, rather than the quality of their solution.
These habits are harmful to quality and not in the best interestes of either the client or the end-product. We need to make sure we have experienced creatives as creative leaders and agency heads – but also make sure we have experienced people actually doing the thinking and doing on client business, not just overseeing young teams.
A lot of the problems that ad agencies currently have (lack of credibility, cojones and confidence for example) can be related to a reduction in the diversity of the social, economic and education background of their people.
Blame the creative directors.
They get given a choice.
Get a budget of £200k
Do they go for 4 at £50k
2 at £100k (older maybe)
6 at £33k younger?
All down to what they think is most likely to get them the best results
Or what makes them feel most comfortable
Toast, you’re kind of right. But it it fair to blame the CD? What is the context? How much work is the creative director being asked to get for that 200k? Is it meant to get multiple routes across three different accounts, or just the right answer on one? The sad fact is that many agencies have become more about quantity than quality. You can see why it ends up in a situation where the CD hires a load of junior teams to churn out route after route to keep the clients ‘happy’. On one hand it’s unfair to blame the creative directors because they might simply be hiring the best cogs for the poor agency system that they unfortunately work in. On the other hand, maybe we should blame the CD for standing up to the agency’s way of working and making them put quality first? Then again, precious few agencies put creative people in positions of such power these days. Back round we come to creatives starting running their own agencies…
The other problem with the lack of experienced older people is that the youngsters don’t have anyone to look up to and learn from. Thus fucking up the next generation of creatives form the start.
Good point Sell. I suppose I meant it less in a day to day running of a dept and more as in who is more likely to crack a brief with the volume vs quality
Sell, it’s not just about churning out route after route, it’s often more a case of ‘Feck, we’ve got 25 briefs coming into the agency, and not enough bodies to do them if we don’t employ child labour’. Agencies might be capable of coming up with pearls before swine, but these days there’s a lot of sausage-making too. I’m not saying it’s right; I’m saying it happens, probably to keep the stakeholders in Chateau Lafitte.
I’m the oldest person to do the Watford course at 37. Age is a number, it’s your attitude that matters.
I did the obligatory 2 years of placements/bit of freelance and have been hired at Quiet Storm for 2.5 years, where probably my most successful ad had people who looked like they were masturbating.
My motto is: Don’t ever grow up, it’s a trap.