u/jplrosman

I was recently laid off, and it’s made me question something I’ve been feeling for a while.

I have 20+ years of experience in creative strategy, mostly across digital, branding, and content. I’ve worked with large brands and small companies, B2C and B2B, corporate communications, campaigns, sales-driven work, and pretty much every variation in between.

And right now, it feels like the market value of that kind of experience has changed dramatically.

Not necessarily because the work itself stopped mattering. Brands still need positioning, ideas, narratives, content, differentiation, and people who can connect business problems to creative solutions. But it feels like the perceived value of being someone with broad, senior strategic experience has fallen.

Sometimes it seems like companies would rather hire a much more specialized person, a cheaper executional profile, or distribute what used to be one senior strategic role across several functions. AI obviously adds another dimension to this, but I don’t think AI alone explains it.

I’m curious whether other people in advertising are feeling the same thing.

If you’ve been in the industry for 10, 15, 20+ years: do you feel your experience has become more valuable, less valuable, or simply valuable in a different way?

And more importantly, where do you think people with this kind of background go next?

Do we specialize? Move closer to business strategy? Become independent consultants? Move client-side? Build smaller operations around ourselves? Or is this just a particularly bad moment in the cycle?

I’m genuinely interested in how other people are reading the next 5–10 years of this industry.

I was recently laid off, and it’s made me question something I’ve been feeling for a while.

I have 20+ years of experience in creative strategy, mostly across digital, branding, and content. I’ve worked with large brands and small companies, B2C and B2B, corporate communications, campaigns, sales-driven work, and pretty much every variation in between.

And right now, it feels like the market value of that kind of experience has changed dramatically.

Not necessarily because the work itself stopped mattering. Brands still need positioning, ideas, narratives, content, differentiation, and people who can connect business problems to creative solutions. But it feels like the perceived value of being someone with broad, senior strategic experience has fallen.

Sometimes it seems like companies would rather hire a much more specialized person, a cheaper executional profile, or distribute what used to be one senior strategic role across several functions. AI obviously adds another dimension to this, but I don’t think AI alone explains it.

I’m curious whether other people in advertising are feeling the same thing.

If you’ve been in the industry for 10, 15, 20+ years: do you feel your experience has become more valuable, less valuable, or simply valuable in a different way?

And more importantly, where do you think people with this kind of background go next?

Do we specialize? Move closer to business strategy? Become independent consultants? Move client-side? Build smaller operations around ourselves? Or is this just a particularly bad moment in the cycle?

I’m genuinely interested in how other people are reading the next 5–10 years of this industry.

This was a fun one. It’s a surprisingly revealing way to understand how you actually work with ChatGPT and other AI tools—through the way you think, build, refine, and create with them.

I tried it as a personal workflow infographic, and the result felt like a map of my creative process.

Try it for yourself, then share your result below. I’d be curious to see how differently people collaborate with AI.

Prompt:

Act as a creative director, personal brand strategist, and information designer.

Your task is to create a complete infographic concept representing my day-to-day interactions and workflows with ChatGPT, using everything you remember about me, my projects, my style, my goals, and the way we collaborate.

The infographic should feel intimate, personal, and specific — like a visual portrait of our creative rhythm.

Structure it with these sections:

1. Title

Create a poetic title that captures our collaboration.

2. Core Relationship

Describe the dynamic between me and ChatGPT: how I think, ask, build, refine, and create with your help.

3. Daily Workflow Map

Visualize our process from first idea to final output:

idea spark → messy thoughts → clarification → strategy → execution → refinement → final asset.

4. Project Ecosystem

Show the kinds of projects we work on together, grouped by theme.

5. My Creative Patterns

Identify how I usually approach work, decisions, creativity, and problem-solving.

6. ChatGPT’s Role

Show how you support me: organizer, strategist, editor, creative partner, researcher, challenger, and builder.

7. Emotional Layer

Represent the human side of the workflow: momentum, uncertainty, curiosity, ambition, clarity, and confidence.

8. Visual Design Direction

Suggest the infographic layout, icons, colors, typography, illustration style, and hierarchy.

Important:

Only use information you genuinely know or can infer from our conversations. If something is missing, clearly mark it as “needs user input” rather than inventing it.

Output the final result as a full infographic brief that a designer or AI image generator could use.

https://preview.redd.it/j55sobbxu4yg1.png?width=1024&format=png&auto=webp&s=a83d2acfbdc92831a7683d9f7030a0ecebc9c7d3