This week I’m travelling abroad on business and am therefore time-challenged. My editor suggested that, instead of my usual article, I write a listicle.
While here on a business strategy assignment, I’ve found myself pondering the fate of my first love—advertising.
The old certainties of advertising have faded, and new ones are yet to fully emerge. From being a profession that once attracted the best and brightest, it has been reduced to playing second and third fiddle to harried brand managers, haughty social media executives, and—let’s be honest—greedy influencers.
And yet, things can change.
While many wonder whether the age of AI will further marginalise the advertising agency, I have a sneaking feeling it may do the opposite. As social media giants peak and plateau, and as people increasingly interact with AI avatars of various kinds, the initial flood of AI-generated slop will give rise to something else: a renewed hunger for taste, judgment, and true creativity.
When that happens, brands will once again seek mavericks—those who can marry the creative facets of business and marketing strategy with the strategic facets of the creative process. The advertising agency—and the ad man and woman—may yet ride again.
Once again, agencies could become places where one can have the most fun with one’s clothes on.
Perhaps this prognosis is wishful thinking. But it is also an appeal—to today’s top-rung young talent—to give advertising as a career option a second look. In the very challenges the profession faces today lies its greatest opportunity, and those who rise to meet it will be well rewarded.
Invest in an advertising career, and it will invest in you. It is not merely a profession, but a lifestyle and a mindset—one that enriches you in multiple ways. And since this is, after all, a listicle, here they are:
- Some of us are burdened with our IQ overpowering our EQ, while for others it is the other way around. A few years in advertising, and the two begin to find equilibrium.
- Every human interaction has multiple layers. Years of incessant digging into brands and their relationships with people quietly but surely deepen your empathy—enriching not just your work, but all your relationships.
- You learn to understand hierarchies without being overwhelmed by them. This serves you well both at the bottom of the ladder and as you climb it—and proves unexpectedly useful in life outside work too.
- Variety is not just the spice of life; it is its nourishment. In most professions, variety diminishes as one climbs the ladder. In advertising, it increases—keeping you curious, engaged, and younger than your years.
- One spends half—or more—of one’s life with colleagues. In advertising, those colleagues form an ever-changing kaleidoscope of characters, ideas, and fun.
There it is—the listicle.
My editor tells me that this MxMIndia column is popular with collegians in business and commercial arts courses. Hopefully, this piece will persuade some who might otherwise have overlooked advertising to see it afresh: as a challenge that, if met, can still pay rich dividends.
hardraincafe.blog 