Ageism In Advertising

Ageism in advertising is an open secret but is rarely discussed.  There is a tremendous amount of age discrimination in the advertising business.  Some is overt and most is very covert.  Everyone in the business has always said, “It is a young person’s business.”  I never thought much about it until I became a recruiter many ago.  At that time I met many people in their fifties who were worried about their ability to get a new job; they were right.  Many had to leave the business because they couldn’t get rehired.

I naively believed that the problem might resolve itself since the business was starting to be run by the Baby Boomers.  The population is getting older, people are living and working longer so I assumed that as people aged, they would continue to work and be productive.  I also thought that as management of agencies aged, they would hire older people as a reflection of themselves.  I was wrong.

It is a cultural problem. Agencies remain very age conscious.  They are afraid when they go on a new business pitch the client merely sees a group of older people; as if, older people can’t be creative or have great, strategic ideas. Agencies believe that clients falsely believe that ideas and creativity come from youth.  In point of fact, the heyday of the creative agencies came when their leaders – Bernbach, Ogilvy, Chiat and many others – were well into their late forties and fifties.  The biggest problem for some agencies with leaders who are now in their fifties or older, is that they actually believe that they are too old, so they surround themselves with youth.

The result is a cult of youth which demeans and minimalizes skill and experience.  The truth is that there is no substitute for life experience.  One of the things which caused the dot com bust was that when the economy tanked in the late nineties, the twenty-something executives who ran those companies simply did not have enough experience to know how to handle their companies in crisis.  By the time they started hiring older executives to help steer their companies, it was too late.

Ageism is pervasive in our society, not just advertising. 

My observation is that there are several kinds of ageism.

Financial Ageism

No secret: older executives most often make more money than younger people.  When companies have financial problems, it is easier and more profitable, at least on the surface, to find excuses and terminate an expensive person and replace her/him with someone who costs less.  This is not the place to get into the pros or cons of that, but suffice to say, that is often penny wise and pound foolish.

The first time I became aware of this was many years ago, when a magazine sales person who I liked very much and who was highly successful was replaced with a very inexperienced person who actually knew nothing.  The magazine (a major one) rationalized that if they gave this new sales person their major advertiser accounts,  they would not lose them because those advertisers needed the magazine.  (My friend went on to a competitor and within about eighteen months managed to pitch and win a lot of business away from his old employer.)

Intentional Ageism

This happens when companies feel that younger is better. Often, there are problems with the business and companies blame those issues on aging executives. (I once ran account management at an agency and refused to stay until 2am to approve a mechanical – I had very competent staff, and lots of them, to do that.  I was told I was too old – about forty – to run account management.) 

This is less true today than a few years ago, but it still exists in many ways.  Creative directors in their fifties are deemed to be too old to have the ability to work late and be productive to come up with great new ideas.  They are often replaced with younger people, often without explanation.

Inadvertent Ageism

This often happens in two ways.  When a new senior executive is hired they may be young and simply cannot relate to the older people who surround them. Those people may be terminated simply so that the new, younger executive can have his or her “own” people.  It is intentional, but it is not thought of as discrimination, but merely a management decision.

Or, and this is the most insidious, when a job opens and perfectly qualified executive is rejected because they are older than the person they would be reporting to.  The more experienced executive may be deemed to be threatening to the hiring manager or may be assumed to be a “bad fit” by an ill-informed human resource person. The result is that the older executive is not passed on to interview. This not only happens to people who are in their forties or fifties or older, but it happens to younger, successful executives who are out of work.  The problem is that companies put square pegs in square holes and do not train or retrain their executives on handling and managing employees. Often, management is completely ignorant of this happening.

Most businesses don’t do a lot of training any more.  But certainly there is absolutely no sensitivity training about age, anywhere.  I heard a story recently about a very young writer complaining about the age of voice-over talent auditioning for a commercial.

I have seen many senior executives who are out of work become highly successful consultants to the very clients they used to work for.  Some even get revenge by working with these companies to hire new agencies.

Ad agencies have been working hard on diversity.  This is an issue which largely affects hiring minorities.  People over fifty are certainly a minority in the advertising workplace and should be included in issues of diversity.