Seventeen years of work experience. It’s the sort of number that terrifies potential recruiters if you’re not applying for the job of a CEO or Executive Regional Something or Subject Matter Expert, emphatically capitalised.
In a non-directorial role, people look at you funnily and you feel like the ad for the Economist that goes ‘”I never read The Economist” – Management Trainee, aged 55”. When people ask me how long I’ve been advertising I’m tempted to say nine years, except I know that sooner or later I’ll run into someone chatty from Bangalore and it will emerge as surely as day from night that I was the graduating class of 94. Or that our National Creative Writer in India was a writer with me in my first job in the same year. Or that the Executive Creative Director in Dubai was my art director partner ten years ago. Or that I knew the Global Head of Planning when he was a management trainee.
The age-group also means that my “network” is like the mythical ideal we create to flatter the gullible in ads for platinum cards and golf clubs. It isn’t the slightest use to me because I don’t have platinum-card-wielding , golf-club-swinging ambitions, but it is one of the problems of being a copywriter aged 38 – you puzzle your colleagues, and freak out the headhunters.
I wonder why. An engineer, architect, doctor or teacher would not be required to enter management to show progress, so why should a writer? Just like all those other professions, it too is a specialist skill that gets better with experience, constantly expanding and upgrading. (And its value should increase with time, but that doesn’t work that way either.)
But let’s get back to the main question – there are only so many positions of Creative Director and only so many creative hotshops you can start, so where are the rest of my peers? Did I somehow miss some bus to the glue factory?
Or maybe I should just add the word “strategy” to my title – it seems to be the current catch-all.
