Not about age. About what we have decided experience is worth.
The advertising industry speaks often about young talent. Usually with affection. Sometimes with awe. And not without reason. Younger teams bring speed, cultural awareness, and an instinctive comfort with change.
Spend time with them and it gets evident.
They work. They care. They show up.
At some stage though, another pattern begins to appear. Not as a failure, more as an erosion.
Everyone is good. Some are clearly better. A few bring a certain rigour that’s harder to describe.
That rigour doesn’t come from effort alone. It reflects in how problems are approached and the ability to pause. To ask what’s missing and to hold ambiguity a little longer before rushing to the resolution. It often feels absorbed rather than taught.
Most people don’t learn this through instructions (I surely didn’t) . They learn it by watching. By being allowed to try their own way while quietly observing how others think, decide, hesitate and recover. Independence helps, but it only works when there’s something worth observing around you.
That surrounding field feels thinner now.
Many young professionals are making decisions early. Leading conversations. Owning outcomes. Not because ability is missing, but because there often isn’t enough experience nearby to add pause or widen the frame.
We talk a lot about learning through pressure. What pressure mostly builds is stamina. The deeper learning usually comes from watching someone explain why they didn’t take the obvious route. Or why they chose not to act at all.
That kind of learning depends on proximity to experience. Most seniors will vouch for this.
And that proximity is becoming rare. Why?
Part of it is economic. Margins are tight. Experience costs. In systems built for efficiency and survival, seniority starts to look like weight instead of leverage. Younger teams are easier to justify, easier to scale, and easier to keep moving.
Part of it is generational. Not all seniors adapted easily to the new pace or the new tools. Some struggled to stay relevant. Others indexed heavily on past playbooks. The industry moved quickly, and not everyone moved with it.
Still, when experience is present, it brings something the system otherwise lacks.
Not answers, but perspective. Not authority, but restraint.
Call it the ability of framing the problem before committing to the solution.
It’s hard to miss how consulting firms protect this differently. They organise around judgement. They keep experience close to the work. They price for thinking explicitly. Their value is clear because their structure supports it.
Advertising chose another route. Speed became central. Output became visible. Thinking became assumed and non-chargeable. Experience drifted to the edges. And fees followed perception.
This isn’t a critique of young talent. If anything, it’s a reflection on what they’re being asked to grow without.
Talent develops through challenge, yes. But it also develops through context.
Without enough experience in the system, learning becomes uneven. Reactions arrive early. Even before perspective has had time to settle.
The industry’s focus on young talent isn’t wrong. It just feels incomplete.
And in the end, the conversation was never about young talent. Its only about what experience is allowed to cost. And the rest followed from there.
