Advertising is “dying”. At least, that’s what I’m told. Repeatedly. With charts. And honestly, after the way the industry has behaved over the last couple of decades, I understand why fewer young people are queueing up to join it. Long hours, fragile business models, performative culture, and a habit of confusing resilience with endurance. None of that is especially attractive. But here’s the bit I think we’re getting wrong... When people turn away from portfolio schools because advertising looks unstable, they’re not rejecting an industry. They’re rejecting a set of skills they’ll wish they had later. And those two things are not the same. A good portfolio school isn’t really about advertising. Advertising just happens to be a brutally efficient training ground. What’s actually being taught is how to: • notice human behaviour properly, not lazily • turn vague, messy situations into clear problems • generate ideas under constraint • communicate those ideas so they move people, not just fill space That’s not an “adland” skillset. It's a how-to-be-useful-in-the-world skillset. Now, I know the obvious counter-argument. “Isn’t the smart move now something solid? A trade? Something practical?” Sure. If someone wants to be a plumber, an electrician, a builder, that’s a brilliant path. The world will always need people who can fix real things in the real world. No argument from me. But most people aren’t choosing between plumbing and portfolio school. They’re choosing between learning how to think, persuade, and create, or drifting into a safer-looking default without ever really learning how they operate best. And that’s the risk. AI is getting very good at execution. It’s terrible at judgment. It doesn’t know what matters, what’s culturally sensitive, what’s emotionally charged, or what’s worth doing in the first place. That work still sits with humans. Especially humans who’ve been trained to spot patterns in behaviour and shape them ethically, creatively, and entrepreneurially. The irony is that the moment creativity starts to look “unsafe” is usually the moment it becomes most valuable. When industries wobble, people who can reframe problems and communicate change are the ones who stay standing. So no, I’m not arguing that advertising is fine. It isn’t. It needs to change. But opting out of learning creativity, problem-solving, and communication because one industry is going through a messy transition is a category error. Those skills don’t disappear when a sector struggles. They adapt and they compound. And in a world that’s becoming increasingly automated, synthetic, and efficient at producing stuff, the ability to understand humans and influence outcomes thoughtfully is not a luxury. It’s leverage. Debate very welcome. So too are applications for our September cohort.
The 2 big elephants in the room. In fact, the enormous elephants are how the companies that own the agencies and many agencies have all allowed (a) their role to go downstream. Ideas and creativity filling in a box or an ad vs being let loose in a business to bring a brand to life and engage an audience or media. (b) how they no longer get, or encourage people in the industry to see themselves as part of a team building brands, knowing that a brand is not just a logo. WPP or Omnicom is now the brand vs what a DDB, Ogilvy or VML meant. I can get the efficiency, but I'd love to know and have the brand distinctiveness. If the people running the business don't get or can't articulate how the holding companies' brands are distinctive, how can the talent within them expect to do the same and move the industry on?
Advertising sure is somewhere between a headstone and a tomb - but as with everything AI is touching the ‘top’ 5 or maybe 10% of creative minds (where your cohort lives) will be fine. It’s everyone else who will need to rethink their futures. And actually, I think it’s a positive situation if you can reset your mind to that.
I taught Advertising for 40 years at universities and portfolio schools. I learned more mentoring here. Most schools are stuck in yesterday, Marc and his model are all about tomorrow. Did I mention I never got paid a penny? Did I mention I couldn’t wait to spend more time? The thing I miss most about London, my career and mentoring is alive and thriving thanks to Marc
Really interesting take Marc Lewis, I wander what you think of this.... an view from the outside (mainly Oxford), back in :) https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/opinion/the-real-crisis-in-advertising-isnt-ai--its-imagination/7237#
Interesting points Marc. I wrote a post this week about cognitive surrender, generally in the industry but potentially accelerated by AI. Learning how to think deeper about the world and getting paid for it is a gift that I pray will remain.
Growing up, adverts were part of entertainment. I remember sitting with my siblings watching TV, when the ads came on we played guess the product. These days, people can't wait for the Skip button to appear or use other methods to avoid being sold to, some even paying subscriptions to avoid ads. So, what changed? IMO it's simple, the advertising industry, as with many other industries, took a hard left turn. Companies who'd previously focused on clever creative campaigns, began to lead with ideology. We saw, traditional beauty replaced with character faces, healthy replaced with obesity and mixed race/same sex couples featured in almost every ad, whilst very few should have a problem with this, it became the standard and caught the public's attention. They became super sensitive to this new messaging and instead of seeing the product, they saw a political stance. Some agreed with it, others didn't but folks on both sides began to silently turn their backs on an industry once celebrated for its peak creativity. Politicising a brand is a gamble on what any given marketing department thinks their customer's zeitgeist is. Politicising an industry is the same gamble and silent protest is all some people feel they have left.
One more thing if you’ll allow me. The word Advertising sucks. It deserves to die. I always hated it, even as I loved teaching it, doing it. I found students hated it as well, when I asked them why they were paying good money to learn how to do it… the answers were all about the opportunities. The ART of communication will never die, but we need to put that other A word to rest.
I’m very much in agreement with this. Having been a visiting practitioner to the school some years back, I saw first hand how the course is structured to galvanise a pure creative thinker. — It was never really about producing ads. It was about producing people who can think with intent. Pushing for the unique. Regardless of specialism or background. You arrive one way and leave seeing differently. — When younger people turn away from advertising, they’re often reacting to the industry’s behaviour, not the value of the skills. Those skills still matter. Observation. Judgement. Clarity of thought. The ability to shape and communicate an idea that actually moves someone. That travels anywhere. — AI will get better at making things. It still won’t know what matters. That’s human work. And it’s work best learned in environments that challenge how you see and solve. — Marc’s ‘Movement’ is all about opening the mind’s eye. Encouraging people to think differently about where creative training can lead. — Because at the exact moment creativity starts to look like the risky path, it becomes the real leverage.
A survey of advertising over the last 50 years reveals a steady decline in quality, including effectiveness and building brands and brand trust (loyalty). The likes of campaigns such as Volkswagen Beetle, Apple Macintosh, Alka-Seltzer, and Wendy's are long gone. When I was a kid, ad and campaign lines frequently entered everyday parlance ("I can't believe I ate the whole thing," "Where's the beef?"). This slide accelerated with graphic design apps, which although a great tool, allowed the work of hacks to APPEAR professional. Digital marketing/advertising exacerbated that, inducing an obsession with incremental measurement and collecting data—with little investigation of the quality of the measurement and data. A major flaws of these applications is that they frequently mistake random curiosity for buyer intent. Pointing to numbers is comforting to many, but it often serves as an abdication of what it takes to create good material. Advertising these days is usually forgettable junk any GenAI app can create. Intuition, judgement, and experience seem to be right out the window. From the look of the work of graduates of "portfolio schools," I don't see that they are doing anything but contributing to the slide.
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