Creatives Breaking Into the Industry

One of my biggest concerns with the ad industry is the increasing difficulty for young, talented creatives to break in.

I was told by a creative recruiter, that I highly respect and admire, that he feels a college education should be a requirement or a high level consideration. Speaking as one that has an expensive college education from a private design school, I totally disagree with this analysis.

I also believed that one of the best things about the ad industry is some of the best creatives had absolutely no intention of doing advertising in the first place and have no formal education in it. I think it should, as it has for so long, come down to only the work. No matter if the creative spent four years putting his or her book together or a weekend, the only determining factor should be how good their book is.

Yet, no matter what, the monetary and time investment in trying to break into the industry for networking, developing concepts, putting together a book, making revisions, publishing a website, interviewing, following up, etc. is rapidly rising and may hold back some extremely talented creatives in the future.