A successful career in the ad business will soon demand we each become more than the traditional one-tool player that has been our standard since Leo Burnett was knee high to a pencil.
The advertising business is under siege, we all know it.
The consultants are at the gate – Accenture and Deloitte and their kin. The robots and their machine brains are climbing the ramparts, well fed by the daily harvest of cookies that have completely redefined the nature of our work.
The shoppers are leaving the high street for the digital malls of click purchase and delivery to the door.
Ad agency margins are not what they used to be, not by a long shot.Resource budgets will almost certainly continue to feel the increased downward pressure.
We are moving steadily to a place where writers will need to do more than write, art directors will have to be more than visual virtuosos, planners and designers and thinkers and all of us will have to show multi-discipline ability.
But we should not think of this future as one that will be populated by generalists.
This looks more like the call for super-skilled talent, something similar to the preoccupation that motivates major league baseball’s corner offices to engage players who hit for power, run like the wind and defend like Schwarzenegger.
Almost two decades ago, Alex Bogusky then CD of Crispin Porter Bogusky the hottest agency of the day, declared with more prophetic power than he perhaps realized at the time: ‘Media is the new creative’.
What he began to call our attention to, is the need for our creative departments to not only be drilling for oil, but to also become involved in shaping the pipeline.
Inevitably it was the explosion of digital media and the proclaimed algorithmic predictability of pretty well all media, that attracted more direct hands-on involvement in the final product from all disciplines responsible for the project at hand.
Now is the time for each of us to look beyond the singular blade of expertise that defined us in the past.No longer simply a blade, we should think of ourselves as something more like a Swiss Army knife in all its multi-faceted ability.
And if you’re wondering what describes the chief assets of this metaphorical Swiss Army knife in this day and age, it is more than sharpness.
It is two things, the first of which is your own authenticity. Be the one A.I. can’t impersonate. Not only will you do better, more original work, you’ll also protect your job from the robot eyeing your job.
The other is to look for wonder. Go to the places the data doesn’t reach, because that is where true insight lives.
– Ian Mirlin
