I had a fun post planned for this week, in observance of my birthday on Sunday. I was going to throw way back to my own times as a baby creative and open up the archives. But today, I’m going to self-indulge in a different way, because something else came up. And that something was an injection for a chronic back problem I have, during which the doctor used the dreaded A-word — arthritis — which was medically accurate but also not a word he’d used with me before. And it just served as a reminder that the birthday I’m having on Sunday is my 40th.
I’ve always been a pretty confident age-is-just-a-number type, but I’ll confess that the arrival of a new decade has tended to throw me a little. And the approach of this one seems to be hitting me particularly hard — I haven’t been to a gym since March, I have a couple of pores you could store your car keys in, I’m writing this from flat on my back on doctor’s orders, and people seem to think it’s hilarious to remind you that you’re approaching an age of perceived obsolescence. But there’s something else, too, and that’s the fact that the advertising industry is pretty enthusiastic about getting creatives on their ice floe as they get on in years.
Admittedly, it feels kind of weird to focus on this particular -ism when issues like racism and sexism remain so pervasive. But it’s still an issue, and it’s one that affects people’s careers and livelihoods based on something they’re unable to control. In 2017, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 63 percent of people in advertising and advertising-adjacent industries are under 45, and the median age is 39.2 — numbers that hadn’t changed much in the preceding decade.
(And if you really want to see this in action, this summer WPP’s Mark Drum was happy to say the quiet part out loud by bragging, “We have a very broad range of skills, and if you look at our people – the average age of someone who works at WPP is less than 30 – they don’t hark back to the 1980s, luckily.”
Dude.)
The Rationalizations
A lot of lip service is given to the importance of knowledge and experience in doing advertising right (see, for instance, Drum’s No, for real, we love our Peepaw creatives tweets in the wake of his gaffe), but it’s frequently accompanied by some beloved dog whistles.
“We need someone who can keep up with emerging technology,”
they say, and who understand all the arising social media platforms. And yes, grown adults tend to favor platforms like Facebook and Twitter more than newbies like TikTok. But just as a younger creative should be expected to come up with commercials for broadcast even though they don’t do anything but stream, older creatives can still grasp the ins and outs of Snapchat advertising.
We’re not talking about the stereotypical TV mom who can’t figure out how to use her fancy new smartphone here — the industry is increasingly pervaded with digital natives who grew up or quickly adopted the technology that forms a base for the advances we’re seeing now. We’re not struggling to figure out what all these buttons do as junior creatives run TikTok circles around us, and the idea that aging stands in the way of technological progress is, in and of itself, outdated and conceived with a poor understanding of how advances in digital advertising work these days.
“More experienced creatives are more expensive,”
they say, and they’re damned right. That experience and absorbed knowledge — and adaptability — were developed over a matter of years and not at minor cost. But it’s a cost a lot of agencies and clients are reluctant to pay. As someone who spends a lot of her work hours hunting up new projects, I’m seeing more and more contract and full-time listings asking for “2+ years of industry experience” and offering comparatively low rates for work demands that, realistically, call for more time in grade than is specified. But it’s easy to find someone who isn’t technically up to the job and doesn’t have enough experience to recognize that they aren’t really up to the job. And I have to say, that’s kind of exploitive.
On top of agencies being reluctant to sign up for higher salaries, they’re frequently quicker to unload the more experienced (and thus higher-salaried) creatives they already have when finances get tight. (Like, for instance, during an economic downturn caused by a global pandemic.) It’s hard to tell agencies, “Hey, don’t do that,” when undeniable financial pressures are undeniable. But, like… don’t do that.
The story of Picasso asking $10,000 for a napkin sketch may be apocryphal, but it’s also illustrative — the supposed art buyer wasn’t paying for a thirty-second doodling but for forty years of experience. I don’t know what the equivalent of Picasso would be in the advertising world — not me, certainly — but the allegory is a good one. Agencies get what they pay for.
And I’ll highlight a quote from former Ogilvy ECD and copy chief George Tannenbaum: “I am not expecting clients to trust their billion-dollar brands to a holding company whose CEO discriminates by saying ‘the average age of someone who works at WPP is less than 30 – they don’t hark back to the 1980s.’ That is, they don’t know Bernbach, Ogilvy, Gossage, Abbott, Hegarty, Riney etc. Meanwhile they seek to ‘transform’ your business while suffering double-digit losses virtually every year.”
The Crusaders
The problem of ageism has been getting better over the years, but like an arthritic facet joint, it isn’t moving as quickly as one would want. And what progress is happening isn’t coming without targeted effort. Luckily, people are making that effort so that others of us don’t have to.
Seasoned agency professional Cindy Gallop founded If We Ran with World, a site dedicated to helping individuals and entrepreneurs manifest their values and passions in action. For herself, she’s passionately acting toward the goal of drawing attention to and fighting ageism in the advertising industry.
Part of her mission there, she’s said, is informed by the number of industry professionals being forced onto their own ice floe as early as their mid-thirties. She’s worked with industry leaders and senior creatives at top levels to determine where the problems lie and what can be done about them, offering specific and relatively easy action items to help combat the issue. And, just as she’s working on ageism in hiring, she’s also working on the consumer side of the creative we create, both in looking at the older end of the spectrum as a target market and depicting them in a more diverse and realistic way. She’s currently working with the AARP on their Disrupt Aging campaign to help make that happen.
Indie agency Oberland has taken on the fight against all kinds of bias in our industry with their “Nothing Changes if We Don’t” campaign. Their campaign sprang out of agency ECD’s discussion with the Southern Poverty Law Center about racial microaggressions, but it grew into a consideration of how that and other form of bias can invade our field. Ageism is a part of this, and Oberland’s campaign includes videos like this one.
“I’m, uh, 43.” Ouch.
And call it favoritism, but I can’t not bring up Ian Davis, a former creative director (and source of inspiration) of mine who has experienced ageism and faced it head-on by establishing his own creative agency, FEARLESS. FEARLESS (all caps, thanks) brings together talented, experienced freelancers, including professionals of all ages but focusing largely on the issue of ageism and highlighting the fact that a) people over 50 are a huge but neglected part of the market, and b) a talented 60-year-old art director is going to produce work comparable — or even superior — to the youngsters.
Back to me. (Whew.)
As a freelancer, I’m (thankfully) somewhat insulated from the ageism issue, both because a) I have the freedom of having a greater number of opportunities in the eternal client-hunting process, and b) freelancers are frequently the go-to for agencies in search of industry experience but too cheap to shell out for a permanent hire. (I also, of course, am merely nibbling at the edges of the too-old-to-advertising age range, so a part of this is just me looking forward and speculating somewhat based on the industry environment.)
But even now, I do face prospective clients who are discouraged by the (well-deserved) number in the tens column of my hourly rate. When looking for long-term contract work, I face clients who aren’t sure about cultural fit, as if I’m going to Back In My Day way through every Zoom call. And it’s not something I’ll be able to study or certify my way out of. There’s nothing I can do about the fact that I graduated from ad school 17 years ago, and that number is only going to get bigger, not smaller.
But like I said, I’m still just nibbling around the edges and feeling a milder impact of this major problem. Hopefully, with the hard work of people who’ve already had to struggle with the real impact of ageism and are now dedicated to defeating it for older generations and for younger generations who will someday become older, I’ll make it to retirement* without having to thus struggling myself.
Thus ends my whiny, self-indulgent birthday post. See? I might be pushing 40, but I can be just as mature as your average 12-year-old.
*HAHAHA retirement.