Why aren’t there any retirement parties in our business?
Consider the case of chemical engineering research professor John B. Fenn. Aged 70, he was forcibly retired from Yale University. Believing he had plenty more to offer, Fenn moved to Virginia Commonwealth University, where, aged 72, he published a ground-breaking paper that aided the discovery of new drugs and our understanding of human molecular makeup.
He was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2002, aged 85.
"I’ve never been to one", says Sam Phillips, chief marketing officer of Omnicom Media Group UK and chair of OPEN (Omnicom People Engagement Network), Omnicom’s diversity and inclusion program.
The last IPA Census in 2018 revealed the average age of employees in our humble profession to be a positively doddering 34. It also identified that only 6% of staff in member agencies are over 50, compared with 31% of the UK workforce or nearly half of the total population. Even more shockingly, the number of over 50s plummets to a little over 3% for media folk.
In other words, you’re 10 times more likely to keep your job after 50 if you do something else for a living.
It is little surprise then that 78% of over 50s feel that their age group is under-represented and mispresented in advertising.
So, what’s going on?
The truth is that ours is an industry of rampant neophiles.
- We fetishize novelty and innovation often at the expense of wisdom and experience.
- We obsess over the latest shiny tactic or technology; Tik Tok, AR, AI, blockchain.
- We’ve bought into the pervading narrative of digital natives and hyper-specialization, of Mark Zuckerberg’s ignorant insistence that only the ‘young and technical’ are of value.
In so doing, we’ve lost sight of the value of the older head and the generalist.
We have seemingly come to believe that the passing of years brings a passing of ideas. That creativity has an age limit. This is simply not true.
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