“Ad agencies are cutting staff as they ratchet down into a COVID-induced recession, and history suggests it will be a long slog to bring agency employment back to recent heights.”
That’s the led of a May 11 article in Ad Age, and above is the graphic that shows the decrease in U.S. agency employment (see red line) since August of 2018. The link to the complete article is below.
In a survey of a dozen of Seattle’s largest ad agencies, MARKETING found that the employment situation is surprisingly stable, comparing the May 1, 2020 figures with the same date in 2019—abetted, at least temporarily, by government PPP loans. But there clearly has been shrinkage in employment levels and a shift in product focus since the halcyon days of two decades ago.
In our survey, one veteran local agency exec had this sobering view: “I don’t think the industry fully recovered from the Great Recession, and I doubt that it’s ever coming back. The traditional ad-agency model, one that relies on big retainer accounts, is obsolete. In view of what clients need to execute for their “marketing” today, ad agencies are not as relevant, not as important and therefore expendable.”
If you google the word “atrophy,” you get these synonyms: taper off, tail off, dwindle, decline, wither, shrivel . . . Unfortunately, all seem apt today.
https://adage.com/article/datacenter/ad-business-cut-36400-jobs-april/2255426
The St.Helen piece by Rick was beautiful. Been there, seen the light from Harry’s place
as we climbed into a whiteout, 20 years before it blew.
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