I spent the best part of fifteen years in advertising. Independent agencies, creative shops, the kind of places where the work mattered and the clients were ambitious and the briefs were actually interesting. I was a Strategy Director. I led teams, shaped campaigns, pitched for business, and occasionally wrote something that ran on a billboard or a screen or in a magazine that a real person actually noticed. It was a good career. And then, gradually and then suddenly, the industry became unrecognisable.
I don't mean that advertising stopped existing. Obviously it didn't - there's more of it than ever. I mean that the thing I loved about it, the thing that drew me in and kept me there, started to disappear. The craft. The audacity. The conviction that a brilliant idea, beautifully executed, could change how people felt about a brand. That was the promise of advertising in its golden age. And the golden age, if we're being honest with ourselves, is over.
But here's the thing nobody in the industry wants to hear: the skills that made advertising great aren't dead. They've just moved.
What went wrong
The easy answer is digital. Digital fragmented attention, undermined the thirty-second spot, created infinite channels that all needed feeding, and turned advertising from a craft into a volume game. But that isn't quite right. Digital was the tool, not the cause. The cause was a fundamental shift in what clients wanted from agencies.
In the era I fell in love with - Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Wieden+Kennedy, Mother, Fallon - clients wanted fame. They wanted to be talked about. They wanted cultural relevance. And agencies delivered that by being brilliant, provocative, and occasionally reckless. The Honda "Cog" ad. The Cadbury gorilla. Nike "Write the Future." These weren't pieces of content designed to perform well in a media plan. They were cultural events. They were made by people who believed that advertising could be as good as the best films, the best music, the best design.
What clients want now, mostly, is performance. Clicks, conversions, cost-per-acquisition. The metrics are precise and the expectations are short-term. The thirty-second spot has been replaced by ten thousand variations of a social ad, each one optimised for a slightly different audience segment, none of them designed to be remembered by anyone. The craft has been squeezed out by the spreadsheet.
I'm not saying data doesn't matter. It does. I'm saying that when data becomes the only thing that matters, you lose the part that made advertising worth doing. The surprise. The emotion. The moment when someone sees an ad and thinks, "I didn't expect to feel something." That can't be A/B tested into existence. It requires conviction, taste, and the willingness to bet on an idea that can't be proven in advance.
Where the skills went
Here's what I've realised since leaving the agency world: the skills I developed in advertising are absurdly useful in product building. Not slightly useful. Absurdly useful. The overlap is much bigger than either industry realises.
Advertising taught me to understand audiences. Not in the data sense - in the human sense. What motivates people. What they're afraid of. What they aspire to. What gap exists between how they see themselves and how they want to be seen. This is exactly what you need to build a good product. Every product is solving a problem, and understanding the problem requires understanding the person who has it. Not their demographics. Their psychology.
Advertising taught me to tell stories. A good brief is a story about a brand's place in the world. A good campaign is a story told across touchpoints. A good product is a story too - a story about what you believe and who you are building for. The narrative that runs through Modern Retro, or CultureTerminal, or Taste OS, isn't accidental. It comes from years of practice at finding the story inside the strategy.
Advertising taught me about craft. The obsessive attention to detail that separates good work from great work. The typography. The art direction. The way a piece of communication feels, not just what it says. This translates directly to design, to the experience of using a product, to the visual language that makes someone stop and pay attention.
And advertising taught me to present. To pitch. To walk into a room and sell an idea to people who are predisposed to say no. Every product launch, every LinkedIn post, every portfolio presentation draws on this muscle. The ability to make someone care about something they didn't know they cared about is the core skill of advertising, and it's the core skill of entrepreneurship.
The new containers
The skills are the same. The containers are different. Instead of putting audience empathy into a brief, I put it into a product. Instead of telling a brand's story in a thirty-second spot, I tell it through the design and experience of a website. Instead of obsessing over the craft of an art-directed campaign, I obsess over the craft of a well-designed interface. The muscles are identical. The gym is different.
I think this is where the advertising industry is missing a trick. There are thousands of people like me - strategists, creatives, planners, account directors - who have deep skills in understanding audiences, crafting stories, and executing with taste. Many of them are frustrated by the state of the industry. Many of them are looking for what comes next. And many of them don't realise that what comes next might be building things, not just selling them.
The tools make it possible now. When I was in advertising, building a product meant finding a developer, raising money, forming a company. Now it means opening Claude Code and describing what you want. The barrier between having an idea and making that idea real has collapsed. And the people who are best positioned to take advantage of this collapse aren't engineers. They're the people who already know how to think about audiences, stories, and craft. Advertising people.
What advertising got right
I don't want to be entirely negative about the industry. At its best, advertising did something that very few disciplines manage: it made commerce creative. It took the act of selling a product and turned it into art. Not always. Not even usually. But sometimes, in the hands of the right people, a piece of advertising was as culturally significant as a film or a song or a piece of design. It entered the culture. It changed how people talked and thought and felt.
That ambition - the belief that commercial work can also be culturally important - is something I carry into everything I build. Modern Retro is a commercial project in the sense that it generates revenue through print sales. But it's also a creative project. It has an aesthetic point of view. It exists at the intersection of commerce and culture, which is exactly where the best advertising always lived.
The other thing advertising got right was the discipline of the brief. A good brief is a constraint. It tells you who you are talking to, what you want them to feel, and what the single most important thing is that you need to communicate. Building products without briefs is like making ads without briefs - you end up with something unfocused, trying to do everything, communicating nothing. I write briefs for my projects now. Not formal ones, but the discipline of defining who this is for and what it should feel like - that comes directly from advertising.
Long live advertising
So advertising is dead, in the sense that the industry I joined no longer really exists. The holding companies have won. The procurement departments have won. The performance marketers have won. The era of advertising as a creative discipline, where the work mattered more than the metrics, is largely over.
But advertising is alive, in the sense that the skills it developed are more valuable than ever. Storytelling matters more in a world drowning in content. Audience empathy matters more when everyone has access to the same tools. Craft matters more when AI can generate infinite mediocrity. And the conviction that commercial work can be culturally significant - that you can build things that make money and mean something - is perhaps the most important idea advertising ever had.
I didn't leave advertising. Advertising left itself. But I took everything it taught me, and I'm using it to build things I actually own. Things that carry my name and my taste and my point of view. Things that exist because I believe in them, not because a client approved them.
That feels like the best possible outcome for an advertising career. Not a thirty-year ascent to Chief Strategy Officer at a holding company. But fifteen years of skill-building followed by the freedom to use those skills on your own terms. The industry may be dead. The craft is very much alive.
