I turn 60 this year. In most industries, that milestone comes with a quiet easing toward the exits, advisory roles, consulting and the occasional cameo of relevance. In advertising, it can feel more abrupt. We are an industry obsessed with the new: new platforms, new formats, new language, new faces. And now, of course, new intelligence, artificial, tireless and ever-evolving.
So, it’s an odd moment to find myself arguing that experience, the hard-earned, analogue, occasionally unfashionable experience, is not just relevant, but essential. It’s more valuable than ever, because in the age of AI, the real scarcity isn’t capability but judgment.
If you’ve been around long enough in advertising, you’ve lived through several cycles of disruption dressed up as revolution. The rise of digital shattered our media models. Social media rewired how brands behaved. Programmatic promised efficiency at scale. Data became both oracle and obsession.
And each time, the narrative was the same: everything is changing, and those who came before won’t keep up. And each time, there was some truth in it. There always is.
But here’s the part that gets forgotten: those who endured weren’t the fastest learners of tools; they were the fastest at understanding what mattered and what didn’t. Where it could be applied to make the biggest impact and how to make it commercially successful.
AI is different in scale, but the pattern is familiar. We’ve breached technological barriers before and felt that vertigo that comes with uncertainty and change. But that learning, the accumulated pattern recognition of decades, is what gives experience its edge now.
Campaigns are conceived, tested, optimised, and replaced in cycles that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. Content is no longer crafted; it’s generated. Ideas aren’t debated; they’re A/B tested into submission. Efficiency is the baseline expectation.
You can now produce in minutes what once took weeks. You can simulate audiences, generate scripts, design visuals, and iterate endlessly.
The industry is moving faster than ever. The bottlenecks are gone and AI has poured accelerant on all of this. But gone too are some of the natural pauses that once protected the work. The pause where someone asked: ‘Is this actually right?’ The pause where instinct pushed back against data, where craft is valued over speed, where simple is chosen over complex. When everything speeds up, the cost of a wrong decision compounds faster.
There’s a tendency to reduce experience to nostalgia: war stories, fondness for longer lunches and bigger budgets. But that’s a caricature. What experienced leaders bring - when they’re at their best—is something far more practical, and far more necessary: Discernment, judgement, clarity or leadership.
Not everything that can be done or should be done. In a world drowning in options, clarity is power and experienced leaders cut through noise quickly. They know the difference between a strategic shift and a tactical distraction. Speed is only useful if decisions hold up. Experience builds an internal library of outcomes: what worked, what failed, and what looked promising but collapsed under real-world conditions.
Experienced leaders are efficient in a different way. They arrive at the right answer faster. Not because they rush. Because they’ve been there before.
I am no longer the person who needs to know how to do everything. That would be impossible. The tools are evolving too quickly.
The value I bring in my role at Leo lies elsewhere. In framing the problem correctly before the work begins. In interrogating the output, not just accepting it. In providing context that tempers overconfidence. In creating structure in environments that default to chaos, and in mentoring without constraining. It’s less about control and more about calibration. When anything is possible, choosing becomes harder.
That’s where experience reasserts its value. It doesn’t replace new thinking; it’s the counterbalance.
I’m fortunate that the people I work with see the true value in diversity and what it brings to the work, while at the same time also pushing the boundaries on technology and innovation to drive impact, efficiency and growth in a constantly changing landscape. In this market, investment in talent and technology is a differentiator. It is between these two worlds that I find my value. And who knows, I may even be still here when I’m 70.
Amanda Wheeler, chief client partner at Leo Australia, argues that experience doesn’t mean knowing how to do everything—it means knowing how to judge what matters.
