The "Exit Plan" is a conversation I seem to be having with more and more of my peers these days. As in "what's your Exit Plan" for when you're deemed too old to work in advertising anymore?


It's a real threat for anyone close to or over 40 and scares the living hell out of me. For at an age when executives in other industries are hitting their professional stride, advertising creatives are uniformly being tossed out and left for dead.
The story is familiar. We all seem to know someone who was a creative director at a big agency, making a comfortable six-figure salary. One day an account leaves, the CD loses his job and suddenly he can't seem to find another.
He freelances, plays his connections. But all he can find are a succession of lower-paid jobs in less glamorous areas of the industry until he's freelancing for a small medical agency in the 'burbs and has the sell their house to put the kids through college.
Now there are plenty of reasons that advertising casts off its senior members. Overly inflated salaries. Inability to keep up with changing technology. Perceived unwillingness to put in the same 80 hour weeks as the 25-year-olds. But mostly it's about prejudice: the notion that nothing new or interesting can come out of a 55-year-old mind and that even if it could, this person is not the face the agency wants to show to the world.
Or is he?
As the Baby Boom ages, there will suddenly be a giant cohort of seniors. None of whom particularly care about Facebook or Twitter. Their cultural references are to the Jackson 5, not Maroon 5. And yet there's no reason to believe they're going to suddenly stop buying the same high end and trendy gear they always have been. So who is going to advertise to them? Will there be any creatives left who can speak the same language?
Chances are there won't be. As I've noted before, our industry is driven by a misguided belief that every ad needs to be judged by the standards of an, upscale 30-something white, male hipster And so ads aimed at Boomers will be written in accordance with an aesthetic that isn't their own.
If an agency, somewhere, would discover the value of retaining senior creatives on anything other than the most unsexy pharma accounts, they'd probably discover they'd found a real market niche. That they were able to talk directly to the sweet spot of their target in a voice the target, the people actually buying the product, found both real and convincing. And that they were able to make themselves and their clients a lot of money doing so.
If.