The advertising industry, which has spent the better part of two decades insisting that everything has changed, continues to funnel its youngest workers into the same corners it always has: the ones that move fastest and pay least.
Agency executives, asked recently to identify the areas best suited for entry-level talent, pointed toward social media and experiential marketing — disciplines that demand long hours, rapid reflexes and a native fluency in whatever platform happens to be ascendant this quarter. The reasoning, as it has been since roughly the dawn of the Facebook age, is that young people understand these channels intuitively, having grown up inside them.
(Whether this represents an opportunity or a convenient justification for assigning the most junior staff to the most relentless work remains, as ever, a matter of perspective.)
The advice is not new. For at least a decade, agency leaders have suggested that the path into the business runs through the content mines of Instagram, TikTok and whatever emerges next. What has changed is the scale: social media, once a curiosity handled by interns, now commands significant portions of client budgets, which means the entry-level positions carry rather more responsibility than they once did, if not commensurate compensation.
Experiential marketing, meanwhile, has enjoyed a revival since the pandemic years, when in-person events were temporarily impossible and therefore became, in the industry's imagination, irreplaceable. Young workers are now advised to consider careers building brand activations and pop-up experiences — work that is technically creative, technically strategic and almost entirely exhausting.
The agencies, for their part, frame this as mentorship. The young people get to learn quickly, they say, in departments where the feedback loops are measured in hours rather than quarters.
The entry-level workers, one suspects, would simply like to sit down.
Original story published in adage.com: "Samsonite’s David Oksman on maximizing heritage - Ad Age"