Existential Dread Meets Inspiration: Advertising Week NY Through the Eyes of a Creative Veteran

Advertising Week in New York took place a couple weeks ago. I went as an evangelist for Catch+Release. My mission was to meet modern marketers and creatives and spread the word about creator content licensing while soaking in everything I could about all the new marketing trends and technologies. Heading to the event made me think about how much has changed in the three decades that I’ve been in the advertising industry.

(And yes, this gets a bit dark. But, in the end, I was inspired. So stick with me and read to the bottom!)

Creative Leaders, Where Art Thou?

This year, Advertising Week was held near Penn Station, the same train station I commuted to all through college. I lived in New Jersey and majored in Advertising Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, which is just a few blocks down 7th Avenue. Back then, the Art Director’s Club (later merged with The Copywriter’s Club to become The One Club for Art & Copy) was the place to meet all the creative legends in this business. That was where my classmates and I went to see Gary Goldsmith and Bob Jeffrey, founders of Goldsmith/Jeffrey, talk about the new Everlast campaign. Creatives were rock stars who we all wanted to grow up to become.

The Canva Brandega where attendees created their own juices.

There are still great creatives in the advertising business. And some of them even spoke on panels at Advertising Week. Chris Beresford-Hill and Tiffany Rolfe both gave talks. (I missed them both, unfortunately. I had meetings.) But I didn’t see any of my friends walking the halls or riding the escalators. And I know a LOT of creatives. Most people I met were marketers. Performance marketers. Data marketers. Niche marketers.

But the real stars of this year’s AWNY were the tech companies, and mostly the very large ones. Funny, I wonder who today’s up-and-coming creatives aspire to be since you can’t grow up to be a tech company.

The Malling of the Industry

This year, the event was held in the old Manhattan Mall, originally built for Gimbel’s in 1910. That department store (made famous by the 1947 movie Miracle On 34th Street) went out of business in 1986. The building then became A&S plaza, until Abraham & Strauss went out of business in 2001. In 2009, the building became the Manhattan Mall, featuring the first JCPenney in New York City. But then COVID hit. And the whole thing closed down in 2020.

An ad from 1910 announcing the opening of the new Gimbels. Today it is the defunct Manhattan Mall.

Last week also just happened to be the week WPP announced that they were shuttering Wunderman Thompson and folding it into VMLY&R, creating the new biggest agency in the world: VML. A lot of people I’ve talked to were very sad about this, especially the people who worked at J. Walter Thompson, Wunderman or Young & Rubicam.

These defunct entities will now take their place alongside Gimbel’s and Abraham & Strauss as vestiges of a simpler time, I guess. No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.

The Killer App: Humans

Every nook and cranny of the event seemed to be filled with technology. Google’s A.I. Speedway looked like a ride at Epcot. Snapchat had a VR haunted house on the top floor. The Paris Olympics let you take a virtual picture with a group of athletes. I even got myself scanned in a booth that promised to email me a 3D rendering of myself that I could drop into any picture.

But all this technology left me feeling kind of cold. The Google Speedway turned out to be just an elaborate way of having you page through case studies. The Snapchat virtual haunted house sat silent (and beautiful) on the wall because nobody scanned the QR code. I tried, but it turns out I didn’t have Snapchat on my phone anymore and I was late for a talk in the sub-basement.

The Netflix claw game where I won a pair of socks.

The most talked-about technology may have been in the Netflix Mall area. Making a statement on the location of AWNY, Netflix built a nostalgic Mall experience to show off their IP. It had a record shop, a Halloween pop-up shop, a sporting goods store and an arcade featuring a Stranger Things pinball machine and a claw game where you could win a Wednesday Funko Pop doll or a pair of Netflix & Chill socks. I appreciated the human wink of all this. I went back several times. And, yes, I did win a pair of those socks.

But the most inspiring technology, as always, were the humans I met. TikTok brought actual humans in the form of creators. They stood in front of big screens featuring their creations and fans could meet them and ask them anything. I met a creator who specialized in fashion for plus-size men. I met an aspiring musician who uses TikTok to connect with brands.

I went to a discussion on GenZ habits featuring actual GenZ panelists that gave me hope for the future. And the most inspiring talks by far were at the Group Black stage, where a lineup of incredible marketing experts spoke about how to navigate the industry, helping a new generation of talent break in and move up.

It was nice to see people helping people. It’s the only way forward in this crazy business that is currently struggling with how to embrace and leverage new technologies, especially around the unavoidable topic of AI. We’re so enamored with Artificial Intelligence. But maybe we need to remember that there is a heck of a lot of Human Intelligence all around us. Let’s not take it for granted.

TL;DR

Advertising Week NY offered a mix of nostalgia, tech, with much welcomed sprinkles of humanity. And even though some of the technologies were cool, humanity is what shone through and will continue to stay with me. Because there’s one thing in advertising that will never change: people matter most. Especially people who will go into a photobooth full of leaves to take a fun picture with you. I’m looking at you Rasha Clark, Kumar Doshi and Andrew Kim! :)