The advertising industry is challenging throughout the world. It’s the kind of career that a lot of people pursue, but the competition is high for the few available positions. There is a misfit between the demand for labour and the number of available professionals. Another common situation is that companies have an old-fashioned mindset about everything related to advertising and design, at the same time, that communications and relationships are changing at the speed of light.
Long story short: companies are falling behind, the market is way further and the Advertiser is the guy balancing on the tightrope, trying to catch both edges at the same time and bring them to the middle.
Whoever is able to join these edges together will be the perfect professional for this era.
Despite all this, advertising is one of the very few industries that can provide you with a wider vision of how the world works – if you take this chance and really enjoy it. A good Advertiser is a “humanist” by nature: they are curious and passionate about everything related to people, like behaviour, communication, language, and trends. They are an almost modern anthropologist. On the other hand, they need to know the less human side too: the companies, the industries, the market, how things work, how they are made and all the science behind this.
The good Advertiser is, in essence, a translator. They need to learn the most technical “languages” to understand how a product works while learning how to influence a customer. They learn how to translate from “technical” to English.
Being an Advertiser can provide all sorts of things to learn. If you choose this path, you will keep a foot on marketing, journalism, design, public relations, account management, consumers, endomarketing, photography. You will also have a foot in product development, events, social media and web. Yet another foot on audiovisual production, sponsorships, stream media, market intelligence and even fashion.
Being an advertiser is to have so many feet that they could easily beat a centipede.
In the last decades, all the professions related to technology had to keep themselves updated. Advertisers are the only ones that, besides catching up the technological changes, need to look deeper into how people are changing with technology. The run to become an excellent professional is like making an ad – you spent countless hours dedicated to the task, thinking and rethinking, doing and redoing everything so that in the end, all of your really hard work turns into… a 30 seconds thing.
Frustrating?
Not at all! Good Advertisers know that it is their duty to gather all the pieces of the puzzle, solve the mystery and synthesize it in the most digestible way. The true communicator is not like a parrot repeating lines, but like a funnel that absorbs everything, leaking only what is necessary, filtered, little by little and to the right spot.
However, every Advertiser, at some point in their life, will start wondering about the hazards of their profession. Maybe it will come up in questions about capitalism, arrogance, collective blindness and much more. Many will give up. But being so used to trying to understand everything, one day they will also understand that, in reality, what they are really passionate about goes beyond appearances. It is all about the great beauty of the human spectacle – the show must go on, despite their personal convictions. It is up to them to be responsible and develop messages in an ethical way.
Is being an Advertiser hard? Yes, very much so. It is a daily struggle between the client and the market. But nothing could be more satisfying than ruling the art of communication, in all aspects. It is up to them to take this chance of being able to know the whole world through the lens of only one profession.
Silvia Oshiro
Marketing Communications Manager
& BRains Co-Founder
