Limited availability makes things seem more valuable or urgent.
More quotesApparently creativity expires at fifty, except when people are writing novels, making television, winning prizes or doing almost anything more demanding than a banner ad.
That should embarrass advertising. Instead, the industry still flirts with “digital native” as if touching an iPhone during adolescence bestowed judgement, curiosity and taste. It bestowed familiarity with an iPhone. My nephew can operate a games console; I would hesitate to ask him to reposition a pension brand.
Experience can harden into convention. So can youth. A twenty-six-year-old is perfectly capable of repeating fashionable nonsense they learned from last month’s podcast. An older colleague may bring a larger library of failed claims, forgotten formats, human reactions and cultural references. Neither age guarantees imagination. That is precisely why age is a shit proxy for the work.
The commercial stupidity is obvious. Brands sell to people across decades, then concentrate interpretation inside one narrow age band. Small type passes. References cluster. Older customers appear as research subjects instead of colleagues with authority. The campaign calls itself inclusive after changing the stock photograph.
Hiring two senior people for decorative wisdom cannot fix this. Look at who recruitment language filters out, where training stops, who receives important briefs and whose salary is treated as an awkward historical artefact. Assess ideas, craft and judgement directly.
Fresh eyes are valuable. “Fresh” can mean new to the problem, unimpressed by the fashion or experienced enough to recognise an old mistake returning with a podcast. Put the same brief in front of candidates across ages and score the work before inspecting dates of birth. The industry might then discover who can write the online rectangle without asking a demographic proxy to do the judging.