Advertising, in all its forms, has been around for a long, long time.
And if you look hard enough, you'll always find remnants of old ideas in today's new concepts. The trick is to avoid using a library of knowledge to shoot down good ideas. And it doesn't take long to find someone in an agency, usually a grizzled ACD or CD (wait, before you can say anything, guilty as charged. But only on occasion), who uses their memory to make you feel, well, like a schmuck. You don't want to become one of those insufferable ad people who looks at every concept and says something like, "so-and-so did that at DDB in 1986. It's in the 15th edition of CA!"
There’s an inherent danger in recalling the past too much. Your brain begins to resemble a file cabinet where large chunks of memories and history are stored, gathering dust and cobwebs, gradually leaving less and less room for new ideas and thoughts.
Yeah, advertising is a young person's industry, and we live in a short-term memory society as it is.
But history should serve as lessons for us. Not to discourage experimentation and innovation, but as a building block to always consider the possibilities and prepare for contingencies.
Ultimately, we can use the past to avoid costly mistakes—and sell better work to our clients who can then sell more of their own products and services. So it's a good idea to know a bit about the past. But even once you know it, you have to focus on living in the present and creating ideas for the future. And now, with the rapid expansion of new media and all its various and at times maddening acronyms, you have to concede that, "okay, I know a lot, but I don't know everything."
One needs to step back, take a deep breath and recognize that you can learn an awful lot from co-workers who have no clue, nor care, about how we did it back in the day.
Because if you're not forward-thinking, your career in advertising will soon be history.