Related to the NYT article about Gen X-ers in creative industries that I posted yesterday, graphic design historian Steven Heller explores what happened with advertising—specifically print—creative in the 2000s.
Advertising did not change when the Times Square ball fell at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, but the industry began its creative decline in the early 2000s. Here are several indicators to support this claim: For one, the traditional print outlets for advertisements, notably magazines and newspapers, sharply declined in numbers (some turning to digital-only) during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Major advertisers were cutting print budgets and earmarking creative talent for television work. TV had already plucked away many of the most imaginative ad-people during the preceding decades, and print slipped lower down on the hierarchical ladder.
He continues:
The work of 1960s and 1970s “mad men” smothered conventional establishment agencies at Art Directors Club award competitions, spawning the innovative Big Idea creative dynamic where exceptional art directors and copywriters made witty, ironic and suggestive slogans and visuals. But, by the early 2000s, these teams started to cede their dominance with, among the other social factors, the death of many national print magazines and the failure of television networks to retain large audiences in the face of cable.
In my first couple of years in design school, I was enamored with advertising. It seemed so glamorous to be making ads that appeared in glossy magazines and on TV. I remember visiting the offices of an agency in San Francisco—the name escapes me—and just loving the vibe and the potential. After graduation and into my career, I would brush up against ad agencies, collaborating with them on the pieces my design company was working on. Sometimes it was with FCB on Levi's retail work, or BBDO for Mitsubishi Motors digital campaigns. I ended up working for a small ad agency in 2010, PJA Advertising & Marketing, doing B2B ads. It was fun and I learned a lot, but it wasn't glamorous.
Anyway, back to Heller's article…it's reinforcing the idea that our—potentially Boomers, Gen Xers, and even Millennials—mental model of the creative and media world must change due to reality. And we must pivot our careers or be left behind.
