We must fight media’s education gap (Column)

There has always been a gap between the skills academia teaches and the “real world” demands of the media industry. But when the IAB kicked off its Seminar Series in July, the issue of talent training and retention quickly emerged as a major, growing concern as client demands push this gap wider than ever before. And the risk to advertisers is increasing.

At our first seminar, Veronica Holmes, president of digital at ZenithOptimedia, laid out the huge struggle that the media industry faces with new talent: a lack of technical know-how and critical thinking. Holmes hit the nail on the head when she said that clients now require real-time data expertise that juniors lack coming out of school.

“[Agencies] train, but in the lean agency organization, it takes a toll on our resources. We are starting to look for talent beyond the traditional media background, looking for talent that already has the critical thinking skills,” Holmes explained.

One of the biggest draws to the digital industry is its promise of a fast-paced, well-paid and, for the most part, automated work experience. While all this remains mostly true, the truth is that digital media planning, buying and selling has become increasingly similar to financial planning and trading. It is a complex, real-time, micro-decision-making process that requires strategic thinking, analytical aptitude and technical proficiency across a wide range of platforms.

Real dollars are being spent in the blink of an eye and junior talent is under a lot of pressure to spend wisely without the experience to make the right decisions.

So, getting juniors up to speed falls squarely on the shoulders of the media agencies. They train new hires to use dashboards, follow processes and, increasingly, to do strategic thinking. This training represents a major growing investment to media agencies. With the proliferation of newer and more sophisticated ad tech and bigger budgets in this space, the costs have soared.

Where a new media recruit would have been pulling their own weight within a few weeks in a more traditional environment, the new levels of complexity for the same role has created a new norm of about a three-month ramp up. This includes the cost of a more senior resource dedicating time to training instead of working on client business. Additional and perhaps less tangible costs include the client frustration associated with the on-boarding process.

(It’s important to note that this ramp-up only covers technical knowledge. Learning junior strategic planning skills can take up to a year.)

For employees, learning the ropes at their first job makes them appealing candidates for their next agency. It’s attractive to “start fresh” after being trained up, so media agencies are faced with a dramatically shortened cycle of new talent.

While some would argue that this is completely acceptable and natural, the real problem is that training for success has become undervalued.

The quick jumps from agency to agency mean that the employee has never experienced an end-to-end success or failure as a result of their work. This general lack of experience and tenure creates a vacuum of real talent and leadership in our industry. While IAB Canada continues to report significant growth in the digital advertising sector year-over-year, this talent issue hinders real long-term success. Continued investment in digital media necessitates better planning, flawless execution and solid results.

IAB Canada has committed to addressing this challenge at the source by partnering with agencies and publishers to develop up-to-date curricula that reflect what is happening on the ground in our industry and helping with implementation across the post-secondary education system. Issues like viewability, non-human traffic and advanced data analytics represent only a few of the areas requiring attention in today’s landscape.

The goal of these curricula will be to help learning institutions better prepare their students with the tools they’ll need for the exciting career that awaits them while alleviating some of the pressure from agencies to have them hit the ground running.

The bottom line is that the industry as a whole needs to acknowledge and validate this new reality. Agencies, and their clients, will need to factor in costs of training while education is addressed at an industry level. It will take collaboration among agencies, ad tech, marketers and educational institutions to course correct and create scaleable learning solutions for the industry to depend on. While it is clear that we need to demand a higher standard from post secondary education, it’s up to all of us to help define and shape it.

Sonia Carreno is the president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada