The Green Desert of Talent

Why undervaluing experience is costing us growth

Part 1: The Problem We’ve Built

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece for the IPA considering how a shift to task based working would help our industry. While the IPA piece focused on the broader need to move from roles to tasks, there’s one important thread I held back: age. Having held that thought back to make space for other themes, this felt like the right moment to bring it forward. It’s a sensitive topic, but an urgent one. While our industry celebrates youthful energy and fresh thinking, we’re far less adept at retaining and valuing the experience, perspective, and leadership of older talent. Too often, we’ve built a system that quietly encourages experience to exit stage left, despite everything it offers.

The advertising industry, like many others, has inadvertently created systems that make it harder for people to stay as they age. Hiring practices too often favour “fresh perspectives” over hard-won experience. The cult of newness, of being a digital native or riding the next cultural wave, can create implicit age barriers. Career ladders are built for sprinting, not sustaining, swerving, pausing, or rejoining halfway up after a break (heaven forbid). When life priorities shift or promotions slow, the system quietly encourages exit, then scrambles to replace that experience with another eager graduate. It’s inefficient, expensive, and deeply avoidable.

One particular quirk of agency economics is especially revealing: in client and agency contracts junior FTEs are costed and billed rigorously, while experienced heads, often the most valuable strategic thinkers in the room, are routinely given away for free. This isn’t just odd, it’s operational self-harm. It tells seasoned professionals their value doesn’t count, and it rewards volume over depth. It tells seasoned professionals that their value isn’t worth charging for, and it builds systems that reward replacing depth with volume. In any other professional service, law, consulting, finance, this would be seen as commercial negligence.

Biologically, it’s nonsense. Humans are one of the only species to evolve post-reproductive longevity. Menopause is a design feature, not a bug, offering leadership, perspective, and continuity across generations. When we support that kind of experience, particularly in older women, we create teams that are not only more inclusive but fundamentally more robust and future-fit.

A future-fit workforce must embrace this, not just as a DEI footnote, but as a core strategy. And we see the consequences of not doing so echoed in nature. In the 'Forests' episode of Planet Earth III, David Attenborough highlights the ecological collapse that follows the replacement of diverse rainforests with fast-growing monocultures like eucalyptus. These trees deplete the soil and choke out life, creating what scientists call "green deserts." A workplace built only on fast-growth and easy replication can suffer the same fate: surface-level vitality, but no depth, no resilience, and no future. Older professionals don’t just hold knowledge, they hold the long view, providing mentorship, commercial pattern recognition, and emotional intelligence that strengthens teams from the inside out.

Part 2: A Task-Based Model Can Fix This

The good news? There’s a fix. Reframing work around tasks and outcomes offers a practical way out of the mess we’ve built. By moving away from static job titles and rigid hierarchies, task-based models allow organisations to allocate work based on contribution, not just position. This shift enables businesses to more accurately reflect the commercial value of experienced practitioners, connecting their impact directly to the tasks they perform rather than the role they occupy.

It also removes the artificial tension between seniority and billability. We no longer have to accept the flawed idea that experience should be invisible on a timesheet. With a task-based model, we can, and must, bill our senior talent appropriately. This means valuing strategic thinking, creative problem-solving, and mentorship as deliverables in their own right, rather than as implicit extras. It allows us to surface high-value thinking as a commercial asset. And at the same time, we can give younger employees the breathing space to grow into more complex roles without being treated as pure executional capacity from day one.

Task-based structures don’t just improve efficiency; they create space for better training, smarter deployment of skills, and more sustainable career development. They make it easier for senior employees to mentor and support others, and they provide the framework for more deliberate development of critical skills in junior staff. When senior talent is deployed effectively, junior employees gain better exposure to strategic thinking and cross-disciplinary collaboration, accelerating their growth in ways the current system too often prevents. According to Channel 4’s recent study on trust and Gen Z, younger generations are actively seeking workplaces that invest in them, develop them, and reflect their values. Structuring around tasks, not hierarchy, is how we stop designing for churn and start building for longevity.

Part 3: Designing Better for Everyone

We have an opportunity to design better. Task-based systems let us build teams that are not only more effective, but more balanced, where experience is respected, and junior talent is nurtured. They support flexible career arcs: portfolio roles, returner pathways, alumni engagement. Not built on tenure or title, but on what people actually bring to the table.

And crucially, they help us confront the pressure some businesses feel to use AI to cut junior roles. As Ian Whittaker has recently pointed out, that temptation is real, but it’s short-sighted. If we automate junior work without redesigning how we train and grow people, we gut the very pipeline we rely on for future talent. In service industries, where value is created by people who can connect disciplines and navigate complexity, we need to invest in developing those capabilities earlier and more intentionally. Task-based structures give us the space to do that, ensuring advertising remains a distinctive, value-driving profession even in an AI-enabled world.

This is about designing a system that values talent at every life stage. If we want future-facing organisations that solve complex problems, connect insight to action, and build strong team cultures, we need models that allow people to grow, adapt, and contribute across an entire career. Age isn’t a hurdle, it’s horsepower. When channelled properly, it propels teams forward, not by standing in front, but by lifting others with it.

Just as long-term investment in brand marketing makes your performance media work harder, investing in experienced talent makes your junior teams grow faster and smarter. It's not a trade-off, it’s an accelerant. When experience is well deployed, it doesn’t just support future success, it accelerates it. That’s not nostalgia. That’s good strategy.

Nature has always understood this. Forests thrive when they are diverse and multi-layered. Healthy ecosystems thrive on interdependence. Organisms evolve to play different roles, not to all compete for the same space, but to build resilience through diversity. Humans evolved to live beyond their reproductive years, for a reason. Our progress, like any ecosystem’s, depends not just on speed or novelty, but on the deep roots we grow from.