It’s fitting that my first post on this blog was inspired by the recent story from CBC about being in advertising past the age of 40. Coincidentally, my path to professorship started at the tail end of my 40th year on earth when I started teaching part-time. I enjoyed the industry immensely but I had a feeling I would need an exit strategy. Why? That’s for another post.
Between the casual dress code, the whiteboards, the brainstorming sessions, the beer and wine at 4:00 on Fridays (or Thursdays depending on the agency), the holiday parties, the summer patio sessions…it’s a pretty youthful industry. Sometimes it feels like an extension of university dorm life.
But the thing I most love about advertising is that it’s real. Yes, I didn’t put a 😀after the word “real”. Yes, there are times when we create a fantasy for the consumer but the way we get there feels as real as you can get in the white collar world.
I like to work (and hang out) with smart, funny people. You see a lot of them in advertising. You see a lot of them in the corporate world too but I’ve found that the funny gets toned down a lot and occasionally even the smarts have to get toned down because of corporate conformity or political expediency. In the corporate world, you put on a work personality. In advertising, you bring your personality to work.
Thanks, Advertising. I’m glad I got to live that life for several years. Your youthfulness served a young-at-heart guy like me well.
So why the move to academia? Because it’s time. I came into digital advertising during its infancy and I’ve been educating colleagues and clients about it ever since. I also evolved from simply a digital strategist to a strategist enamoured more by the psychology of human behaviour than the shiny new object of technology.
Now I have the pleasure of training the next generation of marketers and advertisers. Now I get to bring the old war stories into the classroom. Now the students help keep me young-at-heart. I haven’t really exited from advertising and I’m loving this current adventure.