The Hollywood problem: Why doesn’t advertising value experience?

Lucian Camp is a financial services brand consultant, copywriter, author and blogger. He co-presents the On The Other Hand podcast.

Once again, the launch of a new agency both staffed by and targeting older people is generating a lot of PR bemoaning the lack of people aged over 50 working in ad agencies.  Only 6%, we’re told, are into their second half-century, and  the average age of agency personnel is just 34.

Why is this, ask the articles on the subject.  Given that older consumers are a) more numerous and b) more affluent, why on earth do agencies seem to care so little about them?  Why does advertising, unlike pretty much every other profession, place so little value on experience?

I think I know the answer, and I learned it from an impeccable source:  the great screenwriter William Goldman, in his superlative book about his life in Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade.  The book is a testament to the infinite reserves of stamina, patience, self-belief and commitment that you need to get your movies made, in an industry in which getting a go-ahead means getting the support of an endless sequence of brain-dead executives who know absolutely nothing about anything, and whose judgment on film scripts is about as reliable as mine on the design of nuclear power stations.

Goldman’s three-word summary of all of that is simply No-one Knows Anything, and he means it quite literally.  A hundred years or so after the launch of the first talking pictures, no-one has been able to come up with any reliable principles about what works, and what doesn’t, and how to increase your chances of a hit, and reduce the risks of a flop.  (Which is why his script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was turned down by every studio in Hollywood.)

This is of course quite unlike the way things work in other professions.  Over the years, doctors have learned how to set a broken ankle, and lawyers know how to create a trust, and accountants know how to read a balance sheet.  In each of these areas, a body of knowledge has been accumulated, which practitioners can learn and use (and maybe add a few new ideas of their own).  Time spent gaining experience of these proven principles, and practising how to apply them, is time well spent.

But advertising is much more like Hollywood.  No-one Knows Anything.  There are hardly any proven principles about how to do advertising that are generally accepted, that can be passed down the generations, that can be learned and practised over time.  Among a long list of other areas, just think about creative execution for a moment.  Are straplines important?  Do people remember visual identities better than names?  Is it true that consumers don’t buy from clowns?  Do celebrities add to impact and brand recall, or detract from it?  How much does it matter if people like your ads?  How often should you change your campaign? Should you feature the brand name in the first ten seconds of a commercial?   Does having a point of difference matter?

Everyone has opinions, but no-one knows the answer to any of these or a thousand other questions.  The point of view of a 20-something who’s been in the business for five minutes is just as valid as the thoughts of a veteran with 40 years’ experience.   In fact, the 20-something is likely to score more highly on “originality” and “freshness”  and “challenge,” compared to the veteran’s stale old cliches.

I honestly don’t know why advertising aligns itself so much more closely to the Hollywood model than to the medics or the lawyers or the accountants.  Some would say it’s because advertising is creative, and you can’t formularise or systematise creativity in the same way that you can bone-setting or bean-counting.  But to be honest, most advertising really isn’t all that creative – have you looked at the ads that appear in print media lately? – and doctors, lawyers and accountants would claim there’s plenty of scope for creativity in their chosen fields anyway.

I think that maybe, for reasons I really don’t understand, it’s mostly attitudinal.  Advertising people don’t want to believe there are things that can be learned from experience.  On the contrary, many of us believe that deciding there is a right and best way to do something is dangerous and foolish – there could always be a righter or better way.

I don’t think that’s a point of view that would appeal much to captains of airliners or transplant surgeons – they may come up with a better way, but until it’s proven they’ll still land the plane by the book.  But I think it does explain why we tend to see experience as a liability rather than an asset, and to assume that over-50s are too set in their ways to have much to offer.

So I don’t hold out much hope for that new agency looking to hire older people to create ads for older people.  I’ve seen too many others with the same proposition fail before.

But then again, I could be wrong.  In a no-one-knows-anything industry, why should I be any different?