Sep 19, 2007

Perspective

Just to show you where advertising is at these days vis a vis the Mad Men era:

There's a review of the book How Starbucks Saved My Life, in today's Wall Street Journal. The book tells the story of the authors descent from unhappy Creative Director at JWT to happy Starbucks barista.

But that's not the relevant part. This is:

At Yale, Mr. Gill was inducted into Skull & Bones. A fellow member of that secret society used his pull to get his friend Michael a much-coveted slot in the training program at the J. Walter Thompson ad agency.
Now JWT no longer has any sort of training program. And even if they did, you can bet you would not need to use your Skull & Bones connections to get into it.

(NOTE TO NON-US READERS: Skull & Bones is an elite secret society at Yale, limited to the sons of the elite. President Bush was a member as was Senator John Kerry, among others.)

3 comments:

MHB said...

Are you saying that the ad industry has now become a diverse meritocracy? While MadMen is the days of yore, our industry has not evolved as progressively as we think it has.

Alan Wolk said...

@the elephant: Nothing even remotely like that.

My point was that getting a job at an ad agency used to be something so prestigious that it took serious connections to get in the door. Today, all you hear is how hard it is to recruit anyone halfway decent.

MHB said...

ahhh, cool, I see, thanks for breaking that down....keep rocking.