The Demise Of The Post Room

Post rooms (mail rooms for those of you reading in American) are becoming a relic of another time. I know some big companies, either by necessity or habit, still have them. But in general the growth of email, FTP and all other new ways of communicating and passing documents back and forth means that old-fashioned post rooms are becoming obsolete.

I have sort of a perverted sentimentality for some of the traditional and arcane ways of business. So the idea of losing the post room and the characters it harbours is a bit sad.

But most of all, I worry about what it means for the ad business.

The post room has been a way in to advertising for a generations of people who haven't been able to make it in by the front door. Traditionally it's been a hell of difficult business to get into. And whether we like it or not, sometimes background, education and who you know has made it much easier for some people to get into than others.

I used to say here that generally once you're in it, the ad business is a meritocracy. The shit and charlatans get found out pretty quickly. But I think that was actually pretty naive, and I know that isn't the case at all. But 'getting in' is what I'm worried about here. Specifically, ways for hard-working, committed, hungry people, who don't have connections, or money, or 'the right face', to get in.

There have always been short-cuts for certain people; your family knows some people in the business, you go through the grad scheme, you go to the right ad course and get introduced to some agency people. But what about the people who don't have that? The people whose families don't mix in the right circles, or who didn't go to university, or who took a circuitous route to realise they wanted to get into the ad-game?

The demise of the post room deprives the business of a way for interesting people, and people from different backgrounds, to elbow their way into the business. And that's real shame I think. Even now, I feel that people in the business aren't as diverse as they might have been twenty or thirty years ago. For my taste, there is already too much of a culture of 'the right path' to take to get into the business.

You end up with cookie-cutter creatives coming in from the same ad courses, with the same books, the same way of thinking, and the same teaching. And you end up with legions of planners and account people who are uniform in their thinking, or their life experience. It's not a recipe for a diverse and excitingly dangerous melting pot of people. And that's what advertising has had at its best. And what it needs for the future.

The business needs mavericks, it needs street-savvy people, street fighters. It needs people who haven't had exactly the same background as the next guy. It needs people who aren't just pleasant, white, middle-class from a comfortable background. It needs people who did ten weird jobs before they started in advertising. It needs people who start out in the business in their thirties, their forties, or later. It needs people with different life experiences. The business needs to realise this quick, before it gets too stale.

Take creatives, for example. I've always been of the mind that if you want it bad enough, you'll prise your way in. You'll work as long or as hard as it takes to make it happen. And that is true. Kind of. It's true for a lot of talented people I know. People work two jobs so they can work on their book, and do the slog that it takes to get an opportunity in a creative department. But as the cost of living rises, especially in London, we have to ask ourselves, is getting into the business within reach for people who don't come from reasonably well-off backgrounds, or who don't have the education to follow the traditional path in?

That's part of the reason that I'm not a fan of placements, and why we don't do them here at Sell! Sell!. To do a full-time placement (ie, you're in an agency, not being paid), you have to have some kind of other money to keep you afloat. Yes, you can surf the sofas of friends, but that hospitality runs out at some point.

That system certainly favours people who's savings or family money can keep them running. But people who have to work to keep themselves afloat can only do that so long. That can't be a good thing if we want a job in advertising to be purely on merit. And if we want to make it attainable for as broad a range of people as possible.

If we want advertising to be full of talented interesting, diverse people from different backgrounds, the demise of the post room makes it that bit harder. The advertising business needs to solve this problem.