I’ve noticed a lot of people about the place lately doing it a bit tough. And with little wonder. With the almost constant talk of out of control property prices, childcare costs and totally off-kilter work/life balance, people in all sectors of business – and from all walks of life -- are feeling the heat to compete. Not just to get ahead, but increasingly in the desperate hope to just not fall behind.
For the people who’ve been at it for a while (and whatever ‘it’ is – from my mate Dean who runs a successful panel beating business, to my mate Kruse in hospitality) the constant drifting of the goal posts is an almost accepted fact of life. But how does it feel for someone just starting out? The advertising business has always been a relatively young persons’ game. Given everything else that an early 20-something finds themselves up against today, how do they feel about the prospect of embarking upon an uncertain career path into the teeth of a broadly uncertain future? Would I have chosen advertising now if I were them? I decided to ask one of our brightest AEs, Annie Sherbon, how she felt - and I have to say I was buoyed and inspired by what she had to say…
Annie: There is not much you can say to deter a bright-eyed, bushy tailed 20-something when it comes to their first gig in advertising. I’m allowed to say this because thankfully I am one of those 20-somethings.
But just before I paint myself as some sort of tender young lamb, let me make it clear that this is by far my first job. I’m not filled with enthusiasm by default, but because I am genuinely excited about the prospect of working with the people in my agency, and learning what makes each of them good (read: fantastic) at their job. At times I want to pull out my hair and jab a perfectly sharpened (and of course, branded) pencil into my left eye, but who doesn’t? In those moments, I silently curse those that never complain about their work, something that I find to be a healthy expulsion of energy and seriously underrated. It’s akin to a very quick, and efficient therapy session, often better solved with a glass of wine in hand and some self-deprecating humour. Cut to thirty minutes later and all is forgotten, clients are your long lost friends and creative seems shiny and new again. By no means is it healthy to be optimistic all of the time, but it’s certainly destructive not to try.
A few things I have learned in my relatively short time in the advertising industry are as follows:
Train yourself to say yes to (almost) everything, to quickly learn your own value and understand that there is no faster way to assimilate than to be thrown into the deep, dark depths of a new business pitch.
However, before we go any further, please excuse me whilst I momentarily remove my rose-coloured glasses and reveal some frightening truths. The median house price in Sydney is one million dollars, wage growth is at its lowest in twenty years and the average age of retirement continues to move incrementally upwards. So, should we just give up now, take a job with stability and longevity and a nice fat pay packet at the end of each year? Or, should we have a little bit of old fashioned faith, because if I’m honest whilst those statistics should terrify me, and could cause the desire to rock gently in the foetal position, they have actually made me hungry to work harder.
There is something in that age-old notion that you always want what you can’t have… and in this case, we aren’t being told what we can’t have, so much as what we won’t have. Well being as stubborn as they come, that just isn’t going to work for me so, I pose this question; in an industry that may not have any resemblance to its former self 20 years from now, do we really know enough to make the judgment on what may or may not be the future of our unique industry?
If you want something enough, they say, you can make it happen. I genuinely believe this to be true, and I am not religious, nor am I spiritual. I just believe in hard work, and so far, most of the things I have wanted in my career, despite the odds, I have found a way to make happen through giving myself a pep talk (think Paul Rudd in Wanderlust), understanding nothing happens overnight and just getting shit done.
It’s not easy, and I think we just need to learn to be okay with that. But if you’re anything like me, the reward you get from seeing a job well done or from knowing you have contributed to something inspiring – it’s pretty bloody brilliant.
I’m not ready to let that go quite yet…but call me in 20 years.