VIEWPOINT: The ad industry is a great place to be; now let's tell everyone else

Many of these highly desirable people are not even bothering to make the detour into the advertising industry at all. What we are seeing is that many young people are simply going straight into the new media arena, making it increasingly difficult for the ad industry to recruit fresh, raw talent. It may be a whole new millennium, but some things never change. The issue of how to find and retain skilled, talented staff has been discussed to death over at least the last two decades, but has any progress been made? It seems not, going by some of the concerns raised by regional agency chiefs. Worse, where in the past the primary worries centred around poaching of existing staff by rival agencies, the advertising industry is now facing a new threat: that of the Internet and the booming dotcom companies. As MEDIA has reported over the last couple of months, the influx of these dotcom organisations into Asia has seen a steady stream of highly skilled, talented people leave the ad industry. Whether lured by the idea of a new challenge, or by the large sums of money being thrown around by the dotcoms, the fact of the matter is that the talent pool, already critically shallow in the twilight years of the last millennium, has shrunk even further. Now it looks as if many of these highly desirable people are not even bothering to make the detour into the advertising industry at all. Once upon a time, advertising was perhaps the only option for those who wished to exercise their creativity in a business environment. Now, dotcoms and the Internet offer the same opportunity, spiced up with the excitement of the new and the promise of huge rewards - God and the dotcom stock boom willing, of course. What we are seeing is that many young people are simply going straight into the new media arena, making it increasingly difficult for the ad industry to recruit fresh, raw talent. This will inevitably mean that poaching is likely to become more intense, as agencies fight to find and obtain the best among a diminishing supply of talent. For those who choose to remain in advertising, this is good news. Demand will exceed supply, which will drive prices - read, salaries - up. But for the industry at large, the signs are not good. Struggling as it is to recover from the hammering taken over the last two years, with the recession still lingering, the ad business faces a crunch. And with mergers along the lines of the AOL-Time Warner deal taking place, the pressure will intensify. Let's not kid ourselves: this problem is not going to go away. But what we should be doing is finding real, lasting solutions - training is one thing, but that only works if you can get your hands on people worth that investment. And the better trained and skilled your staff are, the bigger the risk of poaching. Perhaps what the ad industry needs to do now is to reinvent itself - convince people it is still the sexiest, most glamorous and exciting business to be in.

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