pen, these newcomers are helping us to both broaden our own thinking and sell these ideas more effectively to our clients.
Needless to say, like many senior-level creatives, I am a “digital immigrant.” When I left college, the latest Mac was the “Classic” and we used the PMT, or photo mechanical transfer, to output artwork and communicate our ideas. For digital immigrants, our passion for digital has evolved on the job and we have essentially learned in real-time.
On the other hand, digital natives arrive fully formed, taught through an evolved curriculum that includes core design principles and a broad range of skills and technology know-how in video, audio, and interactive media. Inherent in their training is a focus on flexibility—the willingness to pick up new tools or devices to tackle any marketing problem that their faced with. They’re also very brand savvy, always paying close attention to creating a consistent tone across multiple channels. What’s most remarkable is that they think of design not just in terms of static images, but also of time and narrative. Motion is in their genes.
I don’t mean to imply that digital natives represent a new breed of superdesigners, or that they are destined to supplant their digital-immigrant cowork-ers. Digital facility can be both a blessing and a curse, and digital natives do have some challenges to work through. In college they are often pushed quickly into execution, and this tendency can sometimes short-circuit the design process in agency life. Like all rookies they need the
seasoning and judgment that comes only through firsthand, on-the-job experience. They have as much to learn from digital immigrants as we do from them.
ing landscape, there is a new group of creatives entering the workforce that already have digital in their DNA. Members of the millennial generation—or “digital natives”—have joined creative teams everywhere and are having a profound and wide-reaching impact on our business, not only in helping create prototypes, but also in providing fresh insight and creativity to fuel continued innovation in digital marketing.
For these young professionals, digital isn’t part of the mix—it is the mix. Armed with a deeply intuitive sense of what’s now possible and how to make it hap-
The presence of two distinct work cultures within an agency calls for a thoughtful approach to staffing. One scenario is all too familiar: An agency consists of teams who have, for the most part, worked together for several years, becoming close-knit in the process. Then a new generation arrives, and its members are assigned to new teams of their own. With no opportunity for assimilation, the two sides begin to see each other as rivals, healthy competition devolves into conflict, and the situation quickly becomes unproductive.
But this type of culture clash is not inevitable. The strongest creative teams usually include members from both generations, each bringing a different sensibility and skill set to the table. Digital-immigrant designers tend to focus more on conceptualization, whereas digital natives pay more attention to the breadth of what can be done with the concept. Senior creatives often feel a burst of energy in working with millennials, as they discover new tools for bringing their concepts to life. In return digital natives receive much-needed mentorship from their more seasoned colleagues for things that can’t be learned in a classroom—such as how to deal with that arbitrary “no” to a good idea, how to sell harder without crossing lines, and how to preserve the integrity of their
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