Honestly, I don’t know what it takes to quash ageism in the advertising industry. I do understand that it’s a wider problem than our industry. Ageist jokes are still considered funny. Advertising prides itself on influencing culture but it still has no appetite for influencing this part of it. [:ed]
Every now and then, though, an ad voice speaks out. Like the newly formed Federation Against Ageism towards Advertising Creatives (FAAAC), founded by an anonymous group of agency creatives whose mission is “to speak the truth about ageism towards creative people in advertising, build awareness about the problem – especially amongst those considering it as a career – and work on solutions to remedy it.”
Raucous Content director, Kiran Koshy, has directed its first campaign, a film called The Last March of an Ad Creative – an unvarnished truth about what a creative career has truly become. Its dark humour exposes the truth of ageism within creative departments – the truth, in fact, of what it means to have a creative career in advertising today.
The film has been released to coincide with the ad awards season that vows to “celebrate creativity,” to call attention to the industry that tacitly fuels chronic age discrimination towards the people behind the creativity, for profit, without the desire to acknowledge or remedy it.
“As a former agency creative, I’m very aware of this issue, and it’s something I care about deeply as most of my friends are still agency creatives,” Koshy stated. “I really gravitated towards the idea the FAAAC team had about creating the most honest recruitment ad for the ad industry ever, to expose the guts of the problem. We worked on making sure the script didn’t rely on hyperbole as the truth was shocking enough and just needed to be told well. Every line is rooted in the truth, and it’s a dark piece because the truth is dark, and we should all be outraged. However, we did balance it with deliberate humor to make for a more engaging piece.”
Koshy continued, “I’ve seen a lot of my incredibly talented friends be discarded by the industry in their prime, and I’ve seen how it’s affected their mental well-being and family life,” he says. “Almost everyone in their 40s questions if they made the right choice in getting into the business and the industry has quite consciously promoted the myth that younger people are more creative because it lets them lower salaries and squeeze margins.”
Koshy recently penned an op-ed piece in AdAge, where he explored the problem.
“The response to the article has been very gratifying,” Koshy stated. “It’s an issue no one is doing anything about and the time is right for us to take it on.”
The entire crew, and post team, including Charlie Uniform Tango and Nice Shoes, donated time and resources to make the film. “It’s something they all believed in,” Koshy noted.
