Adland is a cosy club for some; why do so many want to leave?
Welcome to Best of the Week, written in beautiful, chilly Sisters Beach. It’s good to be home in Tasmania for the rest of the winter.
Making space – the ACA carrot or Woolley’s stick?
One of the challenges of writing about the marketing industry is finding an acceptable point on the spectrum between naivety and cynicism.
It’s an industry the demands scepticism to write about properly. Most of the articles from over the years that I wish I could rewrite have been where I was insufficiently sceptical and people got free passes they did not deserve. But to continue to work in the industry without being driven mad, you also need to find ways to love it, and luckily there are many.
The last few days have seen me seesawing between cynicism and scepticism about the establishment’s reaction towards adland’s cultural problems.
Unmade Substack
I wonder how those figures compare to both (a) our media industry as a whole and (b) all Australian workers? The observation that it’s three times worse here than in the UK doesn’t seem unique to the marketing industry.
Of course adland should put its own house in order. It’s just that, having worked in both the UK and Australia, in media and other sectors, I see workplace behaviour accepted in Australia which wouldn’t have been tolerated in the UK I left twenty years ago.
Whilst everyone big corporation has their fine HR words, which make the board and the shareholders feel like they’re OK, day to day life is all too often a long way from that.
I’m not saying the UK is some sort of nirvana (as clearly it is not). But there is a much larger cultural issue here, which also needs to be taken seriously.