Leah McCann Smith | Writer & Editor

This blog is a response to an article written and posted on LinkedIn by Tom Goodwin, EVP, Head of Innovation at Zenith Media. The article is titled “Why I miss old people in the workplace.”

To Tom:

Hello! Should you ever see this, I’d like you to know that this is a fantastic article. It touches on many points—and problems—of the ad industry. Was it just me, or were most of the Super Bowl ads this year the same, where the brand names were interchangeable? I don’t know.

Here were some of my favorite points:

1. “We have incredible levels of vision, an abundance of precociousness, brilliant creativity, but as an industry we pretty much have no wisdom at all.”

Couple years ago, I took an advertising class in New York at School of Visual Arts under Mark Burk, an industry vet. He’s been doing the advertising thing for, gosh, 30+ years? One of the best things I learned from him was to never stop researching and creating, even if you’ve been working on the same idea for months. Wisdom doesn’t come from a quick Google search. It comes from fully immersing yourself in the world you’re going to be speaking to.

2. “We’d fly hapless 24-year-olds around the world to ensure we had the voice of youth on the team, but we abandoned the voice of context….These days we lazily assume that things have changed & their knowledge would be out of date now…”

My older coworkers are level-headed (they know it’s not worth stressing over one bad call or missed deadline) but get the work done well, with speed and accuracy. They are a calming and knowledgable presence.

3. “It’s gotten to the point that it’s now possible to be in a room with 400 agency employees, earning tens of millions of dollars in revenue, without a single person who can remember the advertising world pre-mobile days, let alone pre-computer.”

We use the Internet as a crutch and claim that it’s sufficient enough to give people the knowledge they need to create great ideas. We are wrong.

Thank you so much for writing this, Tom. It made me (and I hope a few others in the industry) think.