It’s a worry. I’m 46 and three quarters and this is my first ever blog. Not only that, I’m ‘babysitting’ (babyblogging?) for my boss, whose blogs are the stuff of legend. And he’s younger than me. In fact everyone at Speed is younger than me, which confirms two facts: first, I am old; second, we work in a young industry.
Obviously, I haven’t always been old. But when you’re the oldest person in a team of almost 40 PR professionals, you certainly feel it. Speed is not unusual in this respect – all the agencies I have worked at (and there have been a few) have a similar age profile, with most people in their late 20s and early 30s. Quite what happens to PR folk in their 40s, I’m not sure, but there aren’t many of us around.
This is a worry. At a recent iMedia Agency Summit in Brighton, one of the keynote speakers was Professor Sarah Harper, director of the intriguingly-titled Institute of Ageing at the University of Oxford. In a wide-ranging presentation, Prof. Harper argued that the wider marketing community needs to rethink its attitude to the ’silver’ market and shift the focus away from an obsession with all things ‘yoof’. The flurry of approving tweets from the largely 30-40 year old delegates at the summit were testimony to the fact that the professor had hit a raw nerve.
Simon Hill (almost 47)
