In advertising, you’re not “too old” when you’ve lost your edge. You’re “too old” the second someone else decides you are, writes Kevin Kivi, founder of True North Executive Coaching and Leadership on World Ageism Awareness Day and on behalf of the Experience Advocacy Taskforce.
And that moment has little to do with your ability to deliver. It’s about perception and in this industry, as most of us know, perception is currency.
The numbers don’t lie. According to the Advertising Council of Australia, fewer than 6 per cent of agency staff are over 50. Yes, fewer than six per cent – that is simply awful. Meanwhile, in the “real world”, Australians over 50 control more than 40 per cent of disposable income. This isn’t a minor imbalance. It’s an abhorrent disconnect between who makes the work and who buys the products, with consequences: blind spots in strategy, shallow insights, and campaigns that play well in the bubble of agency culture but fall flat in the market.
Other industries offer a stark contrast. In law, many senior partners are in their 50s and 60s, where experience and judgment are the very currency of the profession (1). In education, over 38 per cent of teachers are over 50, shaping the next generation with decades of classroom experience (2). In medicine, consultants and specialists routinely practice into their 60s and 70s, trusted precisely because of their depth of expertise (3). These sectors treat accumulated wisdom as a gold standard, not a liability.
Advertising, by contrast, has inverted this model. We’ve convinced ourselves that only the young can decode culture, while experience is treated as overhead. “Fresh” has become code for “inexperienced,” and valuable voices are pushed out long before they’ve delivered their best work.
Excluding older talent doesn’t just hurt people, it hurts the work. It dilutes creativity. It erodes trust. It leaves billions in potential growth untapped. And the idea that people in their 40s, 50s, or 60s can’t “hack it” is demonstrably false. Australians are living longer and healthier lives: life expectancy has risen by 13.7 years for men and 11.2 years for women since the 1960s (4), and a 50-year-old today can expect to live another 32.9 years if male, or 36.3 years if female (5). These aren’t years of decline; they are decades of vitality, productivity, perspective and wisdom.
You see the same pattern playing out in technology. Surveys show that Millennials and Gen Z are adopting AI tools at far higher rates than older cohorts, using them for everything from content creation to idea generation. However, the people designing, governing, and guiding AI strategies are often more experienced, bringing the maturity and perspective required to anticipate bias, safeguard ethics, and ensure long-term relevance. Youth may drive adoption, but wisdom shapes direction. Advertising, if it continues to push experience out the door, risks becoming an industry of enthusiastic users without seasoned leaders; an echo chamber that confuses speed with substance.
The question isn’t about capacity. The question is whether the industry is willing to confront its addiction to youth and admit that ageism is costing it relevance, revenue, and credibility.
The future of advertising isn’t young. It isn’t old. It’s both. It’s the collision of energy with wisdom, fresh perspective with lived experience, speed with depth. That’s where the real breakthroughs happen.
If we claim to care about creativity, growth, and clients, age diversity can no longer be lip service. Just a few years ago, the industry (globally) rallied around DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) as a non-negotiable, with measurable targets and accountability. Yet somehow, age has been treated as an exception, as if it falls outside the very principles DEI is meant to uphold. Age must be measured, reported, and demanded with the same rigor as gender balance, cultural inclusion, or any other dimension of diversity.
Until that happens, the industry will keep selling the illusion of relevance while systematically excluding the very people who hold the keys to it. Ageism in advertising isn’t just discrimination, it’s malpractice. The longer we tolerate it, the further we drift from the people we’re meant to serve.
The question now isn’t “How do you know when you’re too old for advertising?” The real question is: “How much longer can advertising afford to stay this young?”
