Is advertising attracting talent?

By Gonzalo López Martí- Creative director, etc / LMMiami.com

• There’s a strange phenomenon in the rarefied atmosphere of professional tennis: for quite a while now the top slots of the men’s ranking has been ruled by dudes in their 30s.
• Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer.
• Not necessarily in that order.
• A few decades ago this would’ve been unthinkable.
• The best of the best used to enter the top ten in their late teens only to be consumed by the meat grinder in a handful of years or less.
• There are many possible explanations for the staying power of the ATP elders, namely newfangled scientific training and dieting techniques, miraculous medical advancements to treat injuries, etc.
• Toni Nadal begs to differ.
• This gentleman, who happens to be Rafael Nadal’s uncle and former coach, claims that the new generations are, to put it mildly, mentally, emotionally, and thus physically, weak.
• They lack “values”.*
• Hence they can’t dethrone Roger, Nole and Rafa.
• See, there are lots of youngsters with plenty potential in the top 50.
• But they seem to be more than content making two or three mil a year.
• They appear to believe that the sacrifice and emotional toll it takes to make it to the top ten and earn dozens of millions is not worth it.
• The theory makes sense.
• Or is it rooted in prejudice?
• Methinks Mr. Nadal is falling for a very old & faulty judgment call: gauging the present with the criteria of the past and vice versa.
• I think Mr. Nadal is overlooking a tangible reality: tennis is aging for the same reason rock n roll is.
• It has lost popularity among kids and teens.
• Have you attended a major tennis tournament recently?
• It feels like a Bruce Springsteen concert sans the working class attire: most fans are in their 40s and older.
• IOW, fanhood might be wandering elsewhere.
• Anyhoo.
• Let’s try and extrapolate this phenomenon to the advertising racket (wink wink nudge nudge).
• Our business model increasingly looks like this: a few senior executives running a sweatshop of glorified interns, underpaid and overworked youngsters chasing the carrot while running away from the stick.
• The Madison avenue version of what Silicon Valley calls “scale”.
• Of course, the litany you get again and again to justify this reality is that “it is impossible to find good talent in this town, the younger generations are weak, they are not committed, blah blah blah.”
• Anyway, my point is, even if the outcome is different (tennis is aging, advertising is de-aging) the root cause might be the same: what if talent simply doesn’t want to work in advertising anymore?

*Or so he claimed in an op-ed he wrote for Spanish daily El País, which you can read CLICK HERE.