Potential And Experience — Why Advertising Needs Both

Advertising has always had an interesting relationship with age. It loves new platforms, new behaviours, new faces. But when ‘new’ is given the opportunity to lead, readiness becomes a question.

Age in this industry comes with its own stigmas. Older implies experience. Younger implies potential. But potential and experience aren’t opposites. They’re stages of the same thing.

No one questions a brand that accelerates quickly. In fact, we celebrate it. We call it cultural. We call it disruptive. We write about its momentum.

The real scrutiny comes later. Can it sustain? Can it evolve? Can it stay?

For me, the same logic applies to people.

When Loriley (Sessions, my creative partner) and I sat over lunch with Mel (Arrow, our CEO) and Harjot (Singh, our global CSO), one line stayed with us: “It’s not how fast you get to success. It’s how long you stay there.”

That reframes the entire age conversation. Speed isn’t the risk. Plateauing is.

Advertising doesn’t suffer from being too young or too old. It suffers when it stops learning. And learning, crucially, isn’t age-bound.

I’m like a sponge. I want the masterclasses in craft from those who’ve spent decades refining it. I want to understand what lasts. To learn from mistakes I haven’t made yet.

In the same way, I want to learn from the younger generation. What’s in, what’s out, and how taste is evolving. Not just in trends, but in how people engage and how brands are expected to behave.

That doesn’t make one generation superior. It makes the overlap powerful.

The younger generation doesn’t “advertise” in the traditional sense. They expect brands to participate. The older generation understands how to build something that lasts. One brings instinctive cultural relevance. The other brings structural endurance.

Advertising needs both.

But readiness isn’t about time served. It’s about openness. To learn. To fail. To collaborate across generations. It’s about whether you intend to build something sustainable rather than simply impressive.

Age is context. Curiosity is capability.

So when people ask, “Are you ready for this?”, my answer is yes. Not because I’ve finished learning, quite the opposite. But because I intend to stay. To keep absorbing. To keep adapting. To support the team, and to prove that possibility isn’t reserved for a certain number.

If you’re debating whether you’re ready for your next stage, in your career, your craft, or even your brand, the industry will have an opinion. It usually does.

But only you can decide whether you’re prepared to do the long work once you get there. And that’s the only readiness that really counts.

Charlotte Prince is the deputy executive creative director of McCann London