Rant or something.
I was doing my daily ritual of online readings and I came across an article by Fast Company on Six Jobs That Won’t Exist in 2016. Which profession was number three on the list? None other than “advertising creatives.” Bastards. The article claims that “talented amateurs making ads for fun and posting them online” are better at our job and will eventually make my profession obsolete; I have two arguments against this.
One, usually things online aren’t better. I would say that about 85% of the shit that gets uploaded to the Internet is just complete and utter crap (enter: Geocities, Xanga and MySpace). I’m all about for a democratic medium (I’m utilizing it now), but there really should be some sort of test to ban the completely inane from the Internet. That or an enforced age limit; 21 gets you trashed and online. And anyone with a legitimate amateur talent belongs at an agency anyway. Like the high school teacher who created his own iPod mini ad last year. But even then, the ad wasn’t perfect. A good amateur attempt is still an amateur attempt.
Two, the “gatekeepers” they claim will be gone in ten years are exactly the reason bad advertising exists. They’re the MBA-educated, bottom line driven, dry as an 80 year-old hooker’s g-string executives that want bad advertising. Bad advertising is easy. It’s safe. It’s comfortable. It’s input = output (i.e.: if we spend X amount on advertising we should get Y increase in revenue). Creatives don’t want to create bad advertising. I’ve seen shloads of incredibly smart and quick advertising shot down because a client was afraid of running it. “That’s not what our competitors are running…we don’t want to be the black sheep.” Idiots! Shitty t.v., print and interactive ads aren’t the result of smart creatives– they’re the work of backseat art directors and copywriters in the form of overpaid marketing execs. (For the record, radio ads are just the result of a bad medium. Die radio ads, die.)
Usually I don’t bitch about petty articles like this, but pretty much all of their good-as-dead jobs applied to me in one way or another. I for one, can’t wait to see the fall of the outsourced Indian tech support. I will gladly sacrifice anything, my future career included, to see a rise in competent phone tech support.
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I wonder what they were basing any of this on? It really looks like they just sat down and thought of the first six jobs that were vulnerable to their simplistic version of cause and effect.
People were predicting the fall of journalism a couple years ago because they saw a fad rise in bloggers (ironically, number two on this list). It was the same kind of faulty, layman’s thinking: people are getting tired of innacurate reporting in a job “anyone can do.” What they forgot to mention is that the alternative they were suggesting is by nature one-sided and biased — the vast majority of bloggers are by their own admittance always pro- or anti- something. If people were tired of biased news, why would they turn to a news source that tells you up front that it’s biased?
Advertising is another one of those jobs that doesn’t sound hard to the average person, because most of the things you need to learn are things that wouldn’t occur to you otherwise. Technical jobs sound hard because you can see exactly what you’d need to learn. Even with writing people have an idea — they’re forced to write in high school, so they already know if they don’t like it or aren’t good at it. But no one regularly forces creative ad projects down their throats sophomore year.
Anyway, this report doesn’t really sound at all credible, particularly since the one-line arguments they gave for each job were based on intuition rather than research.
If it makes you feel any better, the latest issue of U.S. News & World Report just listed auto mechanics and high-tech jobs as two of the top 8 growing careers. The difference is that their report was based on economical/technological trends and data, not “things we can think of on our coffee break that annoy us.”
@raf: Save the auto mechanics, that’s what I always say.
We have hard jobs, you and I.
well.. no, my job’s pretty easy. but I take comfort knowing not everyone can do it.
that’s why I make the big bucks.