The trick is to provide our creatives with projects that allow them to do work that gets them heard in culture.
Brandon Henderson, co-chief creative officer of W+K New York
Nurturing talent will also mean creating an environment where “people can make mistakes and take risks. If they know they have your support, they can feel safer to go to places of discomfort”—and perhaps result in more groundbreaking work for the business, Chiu said.
Agencies have to compete harder for talent with the rise of platforms like TikTok, which has led to a “democratization of creativity” and more opportunities to build lucrative creative careers outside advertising, Gartrell observed.
“The trick is to provide our creatives with projects that allow them to do work that gets them heard in culture,” added W+K New York co-CCO Brandon Henderson. “If they don’t find that [in our business], they’ll move on to somewhere they can get heard.”
Appealing to fresh voices
W+K’s Gartrell and Henderson allude to a problem that has plagued advertising leaders for a while: how to make the industry more attractive to creative talent.
“We used to be better at selling ourselves as an industry and making advertising an exciting place to be if you had a creative streak and wanted to make that a career,” said Davis-Lyons. “We’ve taken that for granted and operated on the assumption that there would always be people who want to work in advertising.”
This year will continue to bring challenges such as economic troubles and hybrid working growing pains. But amid these stressors, Davis-Lyons and other leaders are calling for a renewed focus on ensuring the industry is a breeding ground for the best creative talent.
“We need more people who are vocal and passionate about what’s good about the industry,” he said. “In the absence of that, it’s a vacuum and negativity and cynicism will fill it.”
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