From her decades-long experiences in the country's advertisement industry, president of the Advertising Association of Thailand On-Usa Lamliengpol ensures that working in this field is not the lap of luxury that people imagine it to be.
"It's not a bed of roses like what the younger generations seem to think," said On-Usa during an interview with Life. "Advertising agents, especially those in the old days have to know how to do everything. Basically you have to be versatile to survive in this industry."
On-Usa graduated with two degrees from Chulalongkorn University before advancing her studies abroad -- all in communication arts and business management. She started off in the advertisement industry as an agency executive known as AE. There, she had to do everything, from coming up with creative ideas for ads to delivering storyboards and so forth.
Having served as the president of the Advertising Association of Thailand for four years, she now is also a honorary chairman of the Leo Burnett Group Thailand, one of the country's leading advertising agencies.
Last year, she also worked as a member of the now-defunct National Reform Council Committee on media reform. Her mission then was to encourage the media to exercise its freedom with an awareness for social responsibilities. "Media is a vehicle, a tool, for improvement," she said.
"Therefore, media should be a school for society, serving as an archive, a centre for information, a campaign with practices to help improve humanity. It's to avoid situations whereby creativity overrides ethics and morality. Advertising is also a way of informing accurate and realistic information but with responsibility.
"There's a fine line [between social responsibilities and creativity] that we have to balance," she added.
As the Advertising Association of Thailand's president, her current mission is to enhance the media's creativity span.
"The media is like a coin. It has two sides -- one side is profitable and the other is destructible. We can use it as a school to teach new generations by gathering data and promoting the current interests that are positive to the public. But we have to renew the governmental policy regarding the issue on how to turn media into a positive teaching tool."
Speaking ahead of Adman Awards & Symposium 2015, an event organised to recognise people in the advertising industry, On-Usa said that the award this year aims to provoke and challenge people to have a new perspective towards commercials.
With the theme of "Prove Them Wrong", the event encourages ad people to source inspiration from society in all its diversity, from every era and every walk of life, so that commercials regain their value as works of creativity and relevance.
"It's basically to prove them [the audience] wrong in thinking that advertisements are boring, prove them wrong in thinking that advertising is about to die, and prove them wrong in thinking that digital world is about to take over the advertising industry."
According to On-Usa, the bigger hindrance for the advertising industry now is the threatened existence of mainstream media. Digitalised media is progressively growing, while mainstream media is deteriorating. This threat pulls away the attention from the advertising industry.
Also the younger generations have turned indifferent towards the industry. The crisis skims new talents and passion. The constant rise of digital media will ultimately strain the mainstream media into an unfashionable passé. And advertising will become the dying art.
"The media landscape these days has changed from the advertising industry to online digital era," On-Usa explained.
"The audience's attention span is quite short. That's why advertising people have to come up with ideas that will fit into a two-minute advertisement, which lacks depth in terms of understanding and connecting the media to the brand's essence for the digital era."
But On-Usa still sees such an obstacle as an opportunity. She believes coexisting with the threat will attract new passion and new talented individuals that will eventually revive the dying art.
"Digitalisation is a transformational change for the advertising industry. If we were to redefine advertising, I'd say we're doing advertising in the digital era so we have to renew everything."
And On-usa is confident in advertising's immortality. "Advertising in the future will redefine itself. It impossible to think it will die."
