For older advertising creatives, the prospect is a career with no clear second half: higher pay means moving into management, or leaving the work they are good at. Management is a different job, and many strong makers neither want it nor are suited to it.
The industry has come to regard experience as an expense rather than an asset. A senior maker costs more, while agencies can often deliver a brief adequately with someone cheaper.
The result is a business thinning at both ends. Just 8% of agency staff are over 51, according to the IPA Agency Census 2025. The same census found that under-25 headcount fell 19.2% year on year. Advertising is losing its youngest intake while struggling to keep people beyond middle age.
The old badges of promise offer little protection. Many people who appeared on 30 Under 30 lists have left the industry by age forty-five.
When a person leaves at 44, an agency loses judgement built through repetition. They may recognise a client’s familiar behaviour, or see that a supposedly creative brief is really a political problem. Junior staff are meant to acquire that pattern recognition by working close to experienced colleagues.
Agency life also makes assumptions that fit one stage of life better than another. It expects workers to absorb an unpredictable evening, afford a lateral move and accept prestige as a form of payment. Those terms are easier to live with at 26 than at 46.
There is a case for youth in a business that sells cultural fluency. Advertising’s defence is that culture moves quickly and that closeness to it matters. Youth is genuinely part of that fluency, though fluency and availability are different things.
The pressure is sharpened by the hunt for Gen Z audiences and workers. For Gen Z, TikTok has become a channel for finding information, including careers information. Some 95% of Gen Z candidates say a company’s social-media presence affects their decision.
Yet the audience agencies seek is usually older than the talent profile they reward. IPA age-inclusion work says mixed-age teams understand a broader audience better. Most campaigns are aimed at people over forty.
The changes identified in the industry’s age-inclusion work are practical: predictable hours that continue through a pitch, senior posts outside management, and pay that rises with judgement rather than the number of people supervised. Whether artificial intelligence can help older creatives remain relevant, however, remains unanswered by the available evidence. The problem is clear. The role AI might play in solving it is not.
Comments (0)