NEW YORK: Talent recruitment and management practices in the advertising and marketing industries are “either broken or breaking”, Bob Liodice, President/CEO of the Association of National Advertisers, has warned.

Liodice discussed this topic during an “Evolution of the Talent Landscape” seminar held as part of Advertising Week 2017 in New York.

“The system is either broken or is breaking,” he asserted. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: ANA brings talent “crisis” to annual conference.)

“And it extends from the academic pipeline all the way to our executions of, and management of, talent in our respective business units.”

Building on that theme, the CEO of the ANA – which is holding its Masters of Marketing event in Orlando, Florida this week – suggested that educational establishments are often failing to keep pace with the day-to-day marketing reality.

“The academic profile is very strained, because you have a student base that doesn't understand what our field is all about. And the reason they don't understand [it is that marketing, media, and advertising] have, in fact, totally morphed in the past five to seven years,” Liodice said.

“We have a focus on data and analytics, and technology, and digital research that the academic institutions don't truly understand, that they do not know how to deal with. They simply have not evolved appropriately.”

To help address this issue, the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF)’s Pathways 2020 program will implement various initiatives aimed at forging closer bonds between practitioners, academics and students.

“Our ecosystem has not placed enough emphasis on training and development by going back to the academic institutions with enough critical force, and critical clout, to allow them to be able to understand the marketing ecosystem,” Liodice said.

“We're not investing enough time giving back and paying it forward, developing a level of talent at the academic communities.”

An obvious result of that trend, he continued, is that many promising students “are taking jobs in the high-tech arena or more attractive arenas, such as the Apples and the Googles and the Facebooks.

“They better understand what's going on in those companies because they deal with them every day.”

Data sourced from WARC