To All The Students/Juniors Out There
What will this recession/depression/armageddon mean for you?
Well, the way I see it, you’ve got a mixture of good and bad that might net out at no overall effect whatsoever.
On the pro side, you’re cheap. That means that when a CD is deciding whether to hire two £100k creatives or eight at £25k, he might well do the latter. This isn’t just a financial decision: because of the marginalisation of creatives that has happened in the last few years, some clients are now looking for quantity over quality. If they get four six-out-of-ten routes, they prefer that to one ten-out-of-ten because it gives them a choice, the ten-out-of-ten is usually both a risk and difficult to spot and they need multiple routes for research.
(NB: the above paragraph is the vanilla version of something that was so rude my wife wouldn’t let me post it. She asked me if I actually wanted to work in advertising. I said yes, looked sheepish and changed it.)
So that’s the good news.
The bad news is that there just isn’t any money at all, anywhere. I don’t know where it all went but Agency finance bods are currently checking down the back of the sofas in reception in the hope of finding a 20p piece to keep the wolf from the door, and that means that even your meagre, Pot Noodle-esque needs may not be met by them.
The combination of the above means that some of you will get jobs and some of you won’t. It’ll be a bit of a crapshoot, but then that’s kind of what things are like in non-recessionary times.
xxx
Oh, and to make up for the censorship, here’s Cartman telling a joke that I’d suggest you don’t play at top volume in front of your MD as he’s showing a famously intolerant and puritanical client around the agency. Actually, this might be the most offensive thing you’ve ever seen, so don’t say I didn’t warn you: