Why advertising needs to do a better job of selling itself

Opinion | Future of Talent and Leadership Week in Focus

For an industry built on creativity, innovation, and connecting with people, we’ve done a surprisingly poor job of showing the next generation what a career in advertising actually looks like, argues Lucy Hinton.

Advertising is an industry built on making people care. We know how to turn unfamiliar products into household names, create cultural moments, and convince audiences to pay attention. Yet when it comes to our own industry, we’ve been far less successful at explaining why young people should want to be part of it.

The evidence is there and getting harder to ignore. Nearly one in three UK young adults want a job in the creative industries, but almost half have no idea how to get there. 

For an industry built on creativity, innovation, and connecting with people, we’ve done a surprisingly poor job of showing the next generation what a career in advertising actually looks like.

Ask a child what they want to be when they grow up and, more often than not, you’ll hear ‘creator.’ That instinct for audiences, content, and brands is advertising in all but name, yet the trail usually goes cold there. Not because ‘programmatic specialist’ is hard to pronounce for a 10-year-old (though it is), but because most young people don’t know these roles exist.

The irony is that advertising has never offered a broader or more exciting range of opportunities.

Today, we need strategists and storytellers, analysts and engineers, creatives and commercial thinkers. Whether one’s interests lie in psychology, maths, film, AI, or design, there’s almost certainly a role in advertising that didn’t exist just a decade ago.

Yet the way we present our industry hasn’t kept pace. If you know someone who works in advertising, you might understand what media planning or ad tech involves. If you don’t (which is the case for many young people), those opportunities can feel invisible, hidden behind jargon, unclear job titles and informal routes that favour people who already know who to ask.

AI makes this more urgent

We’ve moved beyond asking whether AI will transform advertising. It already is. But as technology becomes more accessible, human creativity, cultural understanding, and critical thinking become even more valuable.

There’s a talent risk here too: many of the junior tasks people once learned on are now automated. If leaders use AI to remove entry-level roles rather than redesign them, we’ll hollow out the pipeline that produces tomorrow’s strategists and creative leaders.

That changes what we should be looking for in future talent. As AI takes on more executional work, curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, and commercial awareness become crucial. We need people who can challenge technology rather than simply rely on it, and who understand audiences rather than just algorithms.

But we can’t expect the next generation to develop those skills if they never see advertising as a career option. This is where the industry has a responsibility to do more.

Opening our doors isn’t another item on the CSR to-do list. It’s a long-term investment in our industry’s health. Whether that’s offering work experience, mentoring students, visiting schools, supporting apprenticeships, or simply taking the time to explain what we do, every interaction helps make advertising feel more accessible.

Mentorship can turn that interest into a career. A work experience day can spark curiosity; a mentor who reviews a CV, offers advice, or makes an introduction can help turn that curiosity into a real job opportunity. 

Initiatives like Digilearning and WYK demonstrate what’s possible when businesses come together to demystify our industry. They show that careers in advertising aren’t reserved for people with existing industry connections or a predefined route into the sector. That kind of visibility matters because awareness is often the biggest barrier.

We saw this first-hand at Innovid recently, when we hosted young people from Digilearning for a day with our team. It wasn’t a demo and a goodie bag. They worked through a real client brief and built a campaign from scratch, using AI as a tool with human judgement at the centre.

Young people hear plenty about AI taking jobs. Seeing how it can be used alongside human judgement and creativity gave them a very different picture of what a career in this industry could look like. 

There’s another reason this matters

Advertising has always reflected the people creating it, and fresh perspectives don’t arrive by accident. They come from opening up access to people with different experiences, backgrounds, and ways of thinking. That matters even more with AI, because homogeneous teams build, prompt and judge homogeneous work.

If the next generation doesn’t see advertising as a place where they can build a meaningful and rewarding career, that’s on us.

We need to open up the industry, invest in mentorship, and create more accessible routes in.

Every day, we spend billions helping brands connect with the next generation. Perhaps it’s time we brought that same energy to telling a better story about ourselves.

Lucy Hinton is SVP, GTM strategy and growth at Innovid