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OLD AND IN THE WAY
A few weeks ago, Mark Read, ceo of WPP, the world's largest agency company, made the quintessential rookie mistake. He told the truth.
In a call with analysts, Read said... "the average age of someone who works at WPP is less than 30. They don’t hark back to the 1980s, luckily.”
In doing so, Read acknowledged out loud and in public something that ad industry aristocrats have been denying for years -- their brazen flouting of laws forbidding age discrimination.
Since then Read has been tripping in his underwear issuing feeble apologies and pretending that what he said isn't really what he said. The worst kept secret in the ad business is the enthusiasm with which agencies create fictitious rationales for getting rid of older employees.
While people over 50 represent about 45% of adults in the US, they represent about 6% of ad agency employees. That was before COVID. Now that agencies have cover for firing older employees, you can bet the percentage will go even lower. According to the chart on the right, at WPP 75% of their 130,000 employees are under 40. About 8% are over 50.
To compare the maturity and experience of WPP employees to other fields, let's have a look at the medical and legal professions. While 75% of WPP employees are under 40, 24% of doctors and 26% of lawyers are. Apparently experience and maturity are valued quantities when your health or freedom may be at stake, but not so much when your business is on the line.
If you want to excuse the blatant discrimination of the ad industry by claiming that creative enterprises require young people, I urge you to watch video I link to below. I think it will debunk that baloney.
The demographic cleansing of experienced, talented people in favor of young inexperienced people in the ad industry is not without its consequences:
- Marketers are virtually unanimous in believing that advertising is not as effective as it once was.
- Consumer perceptions of the ad industry are at an all-time low.
- It is widely acknowledged that creativity in advertising has become abysmal.
- Ad fraud and the acceptance of unsavory practices have become normalized.
None of this is an accident. It is the predictable outcome for an industry that has systematically weeded out mature, experienced, and talented people.
Creating effective advertising is difficult enough in the hands of the best minds in our industry. When it's in the hands of the unskilled or inexperienced it can be a very expensive clown show, or as a comedian named Fred Allen once described it, "Advertising is 85% confusion and 15% commission." Perhaps a little too close for comfort.
Instead of having the best available people create their advertising, marketers have been conned into wasting billions of dollars on idiotic schemes concocted by bungling amateurs and posers.
As regular readers know, the stupidity of ignoring and devaluing mature people has been a cause célèbre of mine for years. Here's a video excerpt from a talk I gave last year on the subject.
If you think that ageism in advertising is solely a byproduct of agencies having to cut costs, you're wrong. Most agencies wouldn't hire a 55-year-old copywriter if she came free and gift-wrapped.
And if you think that Read's remark was just an unfortunate slip of the tongue, you're also wrong. MediaPost reported that Gabriel Dorosz, executive strategy director at The New York Times, had this to say about Read and WPP: "I assure you, no one who has worked at WPP, and there are many of us, are shocked or even remotely surprised by Mark Read’s comments."
I suspect Mark Read has learned his lesson -- never speak the truth in public.
"A Disaster For The World"
Another of my pet grievances was reinforced this week when a NY Times opinion columnist penned a piece entitled, "Facebook Has Been a Disaster for the World." I strongly suggest you give it a read. A couple of excerpts:
- "Facebook has been incredibly lucrative for its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, who ranks among the wealthiest men in the world. But it’s been a disaster for the world itself, a powerful vector for paranoia, propaganda and conspiracy-theorizing as well as authoritarian crackdowns and vicious attacks on the free press. Wherever it goes, chaos and destabilization follow."
- From Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook. “In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions...I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count.”
Dep't of Idiotic Non Sequiturs
This line of copy comes from an incredibly stupid State Farm ad I heard last week: "Human nature is greater than nature." Huh? What?
Firmly Held, Ill-Informed Opinions
Earlier this week I wrote a piece on my blog that may be of interest to those of you who have to make zillion dollar media decisions for major brands.
The piece is called "The Mystery of Modern Media." It deals with the question of the role media plays in the building of a dominant brand, and which version of media strategy is best suited to the job. You can find it here.
Tweet of the Week
Here at The Ad Contrarian Newsletter Global Headquarters, flattery will get you everywhere. Consequently, two nice tweets here about my most recent opus.
I didn't know which one to pick as Tweet of the Week, so let's go with both of them. The purpose of this, of course, is to get you over here where you can purchase the masterpiece in question.
