A Heaven for advertising

Somewhere up there is an advertising heaven. Yes, I’m sure most people would disagree with me on this primarily because they believe that advertising’s place is a little further south, but I for one am rather convinced of an advertising after life up there. It’ll probably be an awesome place, if advertising is your cup of tea.

In fact it’ll probably be like the perfect agency. Servicing and creative get along really well, the clients are all awesome and once in a while they all sit down and do scam ads for Jesus or something. An all round fantastic day at the office, apart of course from award season where Mr. Burnett and Mr. Ogilvy engage in their own little proxy war to represent their namesake agencies. But then they both win a bunch of stuff and everything goes back to normal.

Ad heaven sounds fabulous but how does one get in, especially in this economy. No one is hiring, but that’s not entirely true. They’re just not hiring new people. They’re hiring people from other agencies. In essence their keeping the pool of talent in the advertising industry from growing hence, keeping the number of people who work in advertising the same, hence putting people like me on the street and the on the wrong side of those pearly gates.

Now I’m not saying I’m on the fast track to ad heaven. I’m not even close. But I’d like a shot at the very least. And how am I supposed to get that shot if agencies only poach people from each other and flat out refuse to give anyone else a look in. For god sake’s the new writer here used to work at Ogilvy and before that at Contract and somewhere else before that. And he’s the NEW guy. How the hell am I supposed to compete with that? Every agency just hires from each other when they want someone new and no one actually hires anyone ‘new’.

In fact they seem so against hiring new people that the time will soon come that O&M will probably go into a backroom, take an embryo out of storage, Piyush Pandey will fertilize it and voila, 18 years later you have a state of the art copy writer. Stupid genetically enhanced creatives. It’s like Gattaca all over again.