Some of us may have worked in the golden days of advertising.

Marvelous days when creativity was triumphant, when teams of copywriters and art directors ruled and the work was good. When creative directors and agency heads would inspire scared clients to do amazing campaigns that shifted culture and market share. And sometimes made a little history.

On a good day it was like writing poetry with multi-million dollar budgets. On a bad day it was still a good day.

If we were ambitious we became executive creative directors and finally got the corner offices. We continued to push clients to do more, achieve more. We pushed creative teams to excel and create more than they thought possible. We thought we were gods.

What we didn’t realize was that the world was rapidly shifting under our feet. Digital advertising was rushing towards us at the speed of light promising clients personalization and targeted advertising that required no real creative because the message could be algorithmically-tuned to exactly what the audience wanted. At least that was the theory.

The promise of no more waste sounded too good to be true. But that didn’t stop clients buying it lock, stock and barrel. (Of course, clients don’t understand how advertising works. What they saw as waste with their ads being seen by so many people was actually what made the ads work. And as it turns out, personalization is impossible and doesn’t work.)

As advertising agencies merged into huge transnational holding conglomerates that only made money by onselling digital media, senior creatives were seen as an expensive and unnecessary burden.

Many of us were made redundant and eliminated after giving the best years of our lives to an industry we loved. Many of us were told that younger, cheaper workers could do the job faster and better and without any aggravation or pushback.

Most of us were told by management that we’d lost it, that we weren’t that creative anymore.

Little did management know that we were just getting started.