Hi kunilou, Just so you’re aware, I took issue with the way you cast aspersion onto me and my kind: “you will be a commodity, easily (and quickly) replaced when your particular quirkiness either grows cold or ceases to be cost-effective,” as though those traits are unique to the creative field. To top it off, you proclaim that my career is living on borrowed time. Please understand if I sound hacked off for some reason.
But as for the citations you’ve provided, I’d like to offer counterpoints that call out some extrapolations you’re adding to the research.
Your cite includes *account managers and planners *into the median, which indicts the account side as well as the creative side. Not only that, but the article states it was an “informal study” by a 44-year-old who was lamenting the trend of treating baby boomers as over-the-hill. I’d love to know how “informal” is “informal.”
The full quote is, "Writers and art directors are usually between 25 and 35 years old, anyone older having either made it to the executive floor, beyond the day-to-day marketing activities, or been pushed out altogether.”
This gets to what I think the core of our disagreement is. If we’re simply looking at job titles, then yes, younger people do inhabit the non-managerial, day-to-day, on-the-boards role of an agency. But as creative types get older, if they aren’t moving beyond these roles, it’s a result of their limited abilities, not the fact they are in a creative field. Art Director and Copywriter is not the ceiling for creative professionals (thank god).
Case in point: I have a colleague who used to be my partner on my primary account. She was the editorial director counterpart to me, the art director. Not too long ago, she got promoted into a brand director position for the larger company (still a creative position). She is close to opening shop with a colleague of hers in which she will be partner (still applying the mad creative skills that she’s always relied on. But a title like “Partner” isn’t going to show up on polls on creative positions.
Anecdotal and specific to the online advertising agency and again doesn’t distinguish between creative and account positions. I would argue that the newness of the technology component in the advertising field is the primary attribute that generates to this median age figure. In my own experience at my last job, my employer had two “groups”: print and interactive. The respective ages of the interactive group’s was indeed lower than that of the print counterparts. But I have to tell you, there was no shortage of gray hair in the upper creative echelons on the print side.
Again, this article cites median ages relative to the industry, not solely creative. From this, we should be just as concerned for age bias to affect the account side of the agency as the creative side of an agency.
I will concede that the creative industry requires a youthful mind-set and perspective and that, in the less-talented examples, do correlate to actual age. But I argue that a skilled creative professionals move up within their creative field, not out.