This past year
I had lunch with a friend who used to run his own agency. He closed it
ten years ago and built a brand strategy consultancy. Although he calls
on marketing executives, and sees agency people in meetings, he was remarkably
removed from goings-on in the advertising business. Stopping for a
moment, he thought, and said: “My overall impression is ‘turbulence’.”
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| It was either this... or start in the mail room. |
We won’t argue
with that: Turbulence. Clients continue changing agencies at a
rapid pace. Assignments are spread among different agencies, either
within or across holding companies. It’s a buyer’s market, with agency
fees generally down. There were more layoffs
last week, and many others change jobs voluntarily. How do you
survive all this turbulence?
It’s not just
advertising. Also this year, Fast Company announced “The Four-Year
Career” and advised that “career planning is an oxymoron”. The gist
was that you may as well plan for constant career change because it’s going to
happen to you anyway. Their modern definition of a career path:
“Tacking swiftly from job to job and field to field, learning new skills all
the while.”
How
to Survive the Ad Biz in 2013
This blog made
a similar point in How
To Get Ahead in Advertising: “Advancement is not so much a straight
line through one discipline, but tacking like a sailboat across various
disciplines. We will always need specialists, but it’s the generalists
who will advance the farthest in agencies of the future.”
In the days of Ye
Olde Marketing, there were fewer specialties, therefore, fewer specialists,
so becoming a generalist was more achievable. Most of the ways to reach
consumers only reached them, i.e., with one-way messages from
advertisers to audiences. Today, there
are many, many specialties and new ones invented all the time. Media has
multiplied and specialists have proliferated.
You’re already
a specialist by virtue of what you do every day. Copywriter. Art
director. Social media community manager. Web developer.
Shopper marketer. Account executive. Everyone shows up for work to
do a specific thing. You probably don’t expect to be doing that job
forever. How do you become a generalist, too?
Be Curious
First, be
curious. While you’re doing that job, have good peripheral vision, paying
attention to how others contribute. If you’re at an agency with many
different services, take advantage of the many opportunities to learn. If
you’re at a specialist agency, for example a digital shop, you can still learn
because by nature the work will intersect with other disciplines. For
example, your mobile app may also be part of a shopper marketing program.
You can also read about a couple of disciplines you haven’t learned yet.
Pick a couple of topics and focus on those.
Be Courageous
Second, be
courageous. Take a step outside the comfort zone of your day-to-day
activity and try a new specialty. I’ve been impressed by the willingness
of up-and-comers to move from one discipline to another. We even ran a
program that rotated account executives over a two-year period among
advertising, direct, digital, shopper and experiential. More experienced
people should do this, too. I had a colleague who took his 25 years
writing successful TV commercials and applied it to writing all the SEM copy we
did for a large client.
Capabilities
lead to Possibilities
Over
time, you will go from specialist in a couple of areas to generalist who can
see the big picture. That kind of perspective gives you two
super-powers. One is that you are obviously more marketable. The
other is that you are more effective. You’re not just a specialist
playing your position well, you have a sense of how the other parts of the
marketing program come together. Ultimately, you’ll be qualified for a
job to centrally run those interdisciplinary marketing efforts, either as a
client, creative director, or agency account lead.
Put
another way, capabilities lead to possibilities. You need
possibilities. You could lose your job, it could bore you, or it could
cease to exist, but chances are you won’t be doing the same job four years from now. The trick isn’t just to survive, it’s to survive by growing along
with the industry.