Not that long ago a write a bit on ‘hiring omnivores‘ trying to highlight again that we need to rethink the way we hire people if we want the advertising of the future to be any different than the advertising we’ve grown up with. And which we hate, or at least most of it. It’s not even a new idea, read on what Bill Bernbach wrote when he resigned from Grey long time ago:
“There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this sort or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”
And he continues:
“In the past year I must have interviewed about 80 people – writers and artists. Many of them were from the so-called giants of the agency field. It was appalling to see how few of these people were genuinely creative. Sure, they had advertising know-how. Yes, they were up on advertising technique. But look beneath the technique and what did you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. But they could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules of advertising. It was like worshiping a ritual instead of the God.”
All of this ain’t really new and yet very little agencies hire differently. Agencies hire out of other agencies, people are presented to the same type of ‘tests’ everywhere, test that need to reassure that the people hired know their ad basics.
And it goes beyond that. Not only is it interesting to hire different kind of people than what you would regularly find in advertising, it’s also interesting to hire people that haven’t followed a clear path. People that have been in various jobs with various experiences as they will use of all those learnings on the job. When Ian Fitzpatrick (Chief Strategy Office at Almighty) wrote about his 5 provocations, the fact that his experience before landing the job was all but planning-related made him stronger.
“If I impart nothing else today, I’d like to convince you that there are many paths up the mountain. Most of you are going to be graduating soon, with an advanced degree in advertising. I imagine that many, if not most, of you imagine that you’ll take a junior planning role at a large agency, work your way up to Planner, to Senior Planner, VP of Planning/Strategy, etc. I’m not here to suggest that this is the wrong path for you, just that it’s not the only one.”
Never underestimate the potential impact it can have to mix very different type of people with various backgrounds together. How can you in advertising, or anywhere else for that matter, trying to solve problems in a different way when you’re trying to solve it with the same people that tried to solve it years ago.
And not just agency side for that matter. I remember Guillaume (one of our agency’s founders) writing a few years ago:
“The lesson is this: If you want something new to happen, ask it to people with zero experience. Chances they come up with more of the same are small.”
Think about it. Who did you hire recently that didn’t immediatly seem to fit in? Who did you hire recently that you would have to define his/her role on the job, because it doesn’t exist yet.
'Cross The Breeze 