Mike Wilson is the chairman of media agency Hatched. Here, he writes on behalf of the Experience Advocacy Taskforce about how everyone can put their experience to use by being stubborn, bloody-minded and steadfast in their useful and helpful in adland.
Let me begin with a confession. I am old. Not antique old – not yet requiring a museum plaque or climate-controlled storage – but old enough to remember when a “programmatic campaign” meant ringing up someone called Dave. Old enough that junior colleagues have started speaking to me the way you’d explain a smartphone to someone who still has a landline. I’ve earned that.
Because here’s the thing nobody in the over-50 marketing crowd wants to admit: we built this industry. We set the culture. We were the ones who spent two decades worshipping at the altar of youth while simultaneously sneering at every generation that followed, as if we’d personally invented competence and neglected to pass on the recipe.
Remember how we talked about Millennials? They want trophies just for showing up. They eat avocado toast instead of saving for a house. They’re obsessed with their own feelings. We said this with the full moral authority of a generation that confused “arriving before 9am” with “having values” and “owning property” with “working harder than everyone who came after us.”
We were the critics standing at the back, arms folded, telling anyone who’d listen that the Sex Pistols couldn’t play – missing the point that the Sex Pistols knew they couldn’t play, and understood that anger and truth mattered more than technique.
Then came Gen Z, and we did it all again. Same speech, different PowerPoint.
We constructed the very machine that is now regarding us with polite confusion – the way you might regard a CD rack at a garage sale, uncertain whether it’s charming or simply sad. We are, to borrow from a song we probably played too loud in a sharehouse in Camden or Newtown, reaping just what we’ve sowed. Lou Reed knew.
So when I hear fellow veterans muttering darkly about ageism over their third Sauvignon Blanc at Cannes, I have limited sympathy. The least we can do is laugh about it before we go quietly into that good night.
However, nostalgia is not a strategy. The more interesting question is what we do next. Because the answer is not to demand respect on the grounds that we once had a corner office and an expense account the size of Fleetwood Mac’s rider.
The answer is to become genuinely, stubbornly, irritatingly useful. And to do that, we need to understand something the best artists and musicians have always known: principles remain, practices change.
Nick Cave hasn’t spent 40 years filling rooms because he mastered whatever format was fashionable. He understood grief, desire, mortality, and the dark comedy of being human. And those things translate across every room he’s ever walked into, from the Espy to the Sydney Opera House. The Clash were punks, yes, but London Calling is a masterclass in how anxiety about the present gets transformed into something that outlasts it. The medium changes; what’s true doesn’t.
And this is where we come in.
The adtech industry is drowning in data and starving for judgment. It has more dashboards than a 747 and fewer people who can explain what any of it means for a real human being choosing cat food at Woolies on a Tuesday.
We’ve lived through enough “this changes everything” moments – remember Second Life? Alta Vista? QR codes the first time round? – to know that the ones that genuinely do change everything usually arrive quietly, without a keynote or a Cannes Lion.
Pattern recognition cannot be downloaded or prompted. It is the slow, occasionally uncomfortable accumulation of being wrong in interesting ways until you can tell the difference between something genuinely new, and some repackaged nonsense in a beautiful AI-designed Canva deck.
But here’s what we don’t say loudly enough: the fact that those of us still standing are still standing is less about superiority and more about curiosity. Maybe some of the ones who didn’t make it stopped asking questions. We didn’t. That’s not nothing. Maybe it’s everything.
The veterans who make themselves indispensable treat Gen Z’s instincts not as a punchline but as signal. They mentor without condescending, ask the uncomfortable questions the 26-year-old is too sensible to ask out loud and then do something rarer still: they stand up in the room and say it out loud themselves, so the younger person doesn’t have to carry that risk alone. They share the failures, not just the frameworks. Because a true, human story is worth a hundred polished case studies.
It’s a long way to the top, as someone once memorably observed, and the view is considerably better when you bring people along with you.
We caused this problem. The culture of disposability, the fetishisation of youth, the quiet cruelty of managed exits dressed up as restructuring – that was us. Owning it isn’t self-flagellation. It’s just honesty.
And honesty, like a great bassline, doesn’t always announce itself. But you absolutely notice when it isn’t there.
The times may be a-changing. But curiosity, it turns out, has no retirement age.
