Why Feedback May Matter More Than Perks To Young Creatives
Feedback is the thing nobody budgets for. A junior art director once explained why she was leaving a shop with genuinely good benefits. The food was good, the chairs were good, the offsite was in Goa. She could not name a single thing she had learned to do better in eleven months.
That is the gap perks do not close, and it is almost always the one that matters.
What perks actually answer
Perks address comfort and they address it well. Nobody is arguing for worse chairs. The difficulty is that comfort is rarely why a young creative leaves, so the spend lands on a problem the person did not have.
What they leave over is the feeling of not getting better. That is a progress problem, and nothing in a benefits package touches it.
Nobody resigns because the coffee was average. They resign because eleven months went past and nothing got sharper.
Why feedback is rarer than it sounds
Most agencies believe they give feedback. What they mostly give is approval and rejection, which is a verdict rather than feedback. A verdict tells someone whether this piece worked. Feedback tells them what to do differently on the next one, which takes longer and requires the senior person to have actually thought about why.
Deloitte India's 2025 survey, covering Indian respondents, found 94% valuing hands-on learning and identified mentorship gaps alongside it. The appetite is not in doubt.
What good looks like
Specific, frequent and about the work rather than the person. Ninety seconds after a review explaining why the second option was chosen does more than a scheduled quarterly conversation, because it arrives while the decision is still live and the person can still feel the difference.
It is also free, which is the uncomfortable part. The cheapest intervention available is the one most departments have quietly decided they are too busy for.
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