The talent problem in our industry isn’t money. It’s that advertising has become boring and totally useless.
When I started my career, if you were brilliant, curious, but didn’t fit in, you went to advertising.
The misfits. The rebels. The ones who couldn’t sit still in a bank or a law firm without wanting to burn it down.
Ogilvy, DDB, Saatchi, JWT, BBDO—here we came!
A lot of the hires were Ivy League- or equivalently educated. Oxford, HEC, Harvard, Stanford… Many were overeducated, some with PhDs, yet still rebellious. Unmanageable, brilliant, impossible, they produced the best work ever seen. And they were wanted for exactly that. Ogilvy wanted poets who could sell. Bernbach wanted outsiders who could think. The Saatchis wanted kids from the street who saw the world differently. They didn’t want safe people. They wanted dangerous people. They asked for your brain and your balls.
In 2026, that same kid goes to Google, Apple, OpenAI or Meta.
Even though pay has become ridiculous lately in advertising, we didn’t lose them to salary. We lost them to boredom. And the only people brought in to replace them weren’t rebels but process managers. People with a mediocre education, with a two-week “Executive Certificate” from Columbia or MIT plastered all over LinkedIn.
They didn’t complete a programme at Stanford or Wharton. They completed a Zoom call featuring someone from Stanford or Wharton. A $4,000 fee, eight pre-recorded videos. A quiz you can Google. And a PDF with a logo on it.
And then the LinkedIn post: “Thrilled and humbled to share that I’ve completed my Executive Programme at Stanford!”
Thrilled? Humbled? You watched Netflix with homework.
And look at the work we ask them to produce. Not an idea. More like decks to resize. A logo from 40px to 32px, and 47 adaptations of the same beige visual with a stupid CTA. Another useless content calendar that includes celebrating Siblings Day amid a tidal wave of stupid celebrations. We don’t ask them to create. We ask them to traffic, to resize and to deploy at scale. You cannot possibly attract brilliant minds to do that, can you?!
But here is a suggestion for getting them back:
Stop drowning the world in garbage. An agency should stop making a thousand versions of nothing and flooding our screens with the most irrelevant stuff.
Make one piece. One piece so good that it murders everything else on its own.
Because right now, we are playing a game we cannot win. We make 10,000 pieces of useless content, we pump millions into media to shove it down people’s throats, and they still scroll past it in 0.3 seconds. Scale is not a strategy. Scale is just expensive noise.
One piece of genius beats 10,000 pieces of nothing. Every time. One idea people actually remember beats a whole year of content nobody wanted. One video that stops the feed beats a thousand useless adaptations that were dead before they were made.
We don’t need more content. We need less, but lethal.
Each piece should hit harder than anything else out there. If it doesn’t, don’t make it. Don’t adapt it. Don’t resize it. Kill it before it embarrasses you.
No more safe. No more beige. No more “content.”
Genius or nothing.
Give the misfits something worth bleeding for again—and watch them come back and eat this industry alive.
#makeadvertisinggreatagain
