Related Posts
Where do you get most of your golf gear?
Additional Posts in Londoners in Advertising
👇👇👇 Discuss. 👀
Double fault from W+K London.
Better pay rises being offered in Public sector?
What’s the & partnership like these days?
Thoughts on Anomaly London?
Salary for Sr. producer agency-side? Thank you!!
Best agency in town?
New to Fishbowl?
unlock all discussions on Fishbowl.
People who are over 50 today? Probably not that many. They had a job paying enough to buy property in London in their late 20s, so they managed to catch that wave of wealth building. Barring some huge financial missteps or bad luck, even fairly lowly agency employees are likely millionaires in terms of net worth.
However, for people who are around 30 now and will be 50 in roughly 20 years? Many of them will be in in deep trouble. The cost of living in London has grown massively, and salaries haven't really moved much. Many, if not most, agency employees can't afford to purchase a home. Even if they do, the era of rapid growth in the property market is over. I know some seriously good and talented people who are living in flatshares with less than ten grand saved. Despite being brilliant and working like dogs, they're fucked.
Rising Star
😭
I think about this a lot. But I have a good rationale.
It’s best to go into this business with your eyes wide open and the best thing to do is to view your advertising career as the first act in a two act career.
Advertising is a remarkable melting pot of talent and a university of incredibly useful skills that you need to succeed in life and business. There is so much you can do elsewhere with what you’ve acquired while working in ad land.
To have a 30 year career in advertising you need to be pretty special. You also need to be very flexible, useful, have MASSIVE stamina and some luck. This isn’t banking, the further you climb, the more work you do. You’ll probably need to work in multiple countries and if you don’t make ECD, the few ways you can stay as a CD for 15-20 years is to be the creative lead on the unsexy accounts at a big agency. Like o2 at VCCP for instance. Agencies lose clients all the time and getting rid of the CD on £125k-£150k is just too easy when you’re the cost of 5-6 juniors.
Advertising pays enough in your 30s for you to save for a career pivot (if required) in your 40s. This is also not a phenomenon unique to advertising. I know estate agents who were previously brokers made redundant in their 40s and couldn’t get back in.
If you really love this business, then invest and save your income, live within your means, keep your skills relevant - If you’re just doing TV, print & radio, then you will need to upskill to more specialist and niche digital specialisms such as customer experience (CX). Otherwise view it as a first act in a two act career.
It’s still incredible to me that you can live a good life earning money from creativity, advertising is one of the few ways you can do that. You have go starve a lot in other creative industries - film, TV etc