Analysis

Tuesdata: Job vacancies fall across the communications industry

BY Tim Burrowes

August 14, 2023 11:30

Tuesdata: Job vacancies fall across the communications industry

Welcome to Tuesdata, our weekly analysis for Unmade’s paying members.

Below, we examine the state of the job market in the communications and marketing industry.

Further down, a poor day for Domain on the Unmade Index.

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Whose job market is it?

The holdcos are finding it easier to fill jobs | Image: WPP

Seja Al Zaidi writes:

Almost exactly a year ago, we covered how to the holding companies were faring in terms of job vacancies and their struggle to fill them.

As we reported at the time, it was the equivalent of an entire holdco of vacancies.

As IPG Mediabrands CEO Mark Coad pointed out at Advertising Week, the vacancy levels were so large they had the unintended consequence of boosting profits through the savings on wages.

Since then, the market has changed radically, with he advertising economy slowing, and the disruption of AI becoming a factor. Last month, Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of WPP and now boss of S4 Capital told the MAD//Fest conference in the UK that he expected quarter of a million media jobs to disappear:

“Media planning and buying, revolutionised. Algorithms are going to replace 25-year-old media planners in fairly quick time. There won’t be 250,000 people at the holding companies running media planning and buying networks around the world.”

Analysis of job ads by Unmade suggests that this extraordinary exuberance has receded, with all but one of the holdcos advertising fewer roles than they were a year ago.

WPP continues to have the most openings of any holdco | Source: LinkedIn

While there are still significant amounts of local vacancies being advertised in creative and media roles, the number of LinkedIn vacancies currently listed locally by the six holdcos has fallen from 407 to 260, a fall of 36%.

There are 3,550 jobs on Seek right now in the ‘marketing and communications’ sector, and 751 jobs in the ‘advertising, arts and media’ sector. At the same time last year there were 5,025 listings in the marketing and comms sector, and 1,042 in advertising, arts and media.

WPP, which owns agencies including EssenceMediacom, WaveMaker, Mindshare, Ogilvy and VMLY&R still lists the most vacancies, but has 20% less than last year.

Omnicom, Dentsu and IPG’s level of vacancies have shrunk the most, while Havas remains almost the same as the previous year.

Publicis is the only group to buck the trend, with listed vacancies from 54 last year to 91 this year. Most of those roles are junior-mid level, like ‘Junior Integrated Producer’, a copywriting gig at Saatch & Saatchi requiring 1-3 years of experience, or a planning executive role at Spark Foundry asking for a minimum of 1-2 years of relevant experience.

According to Publicis’ Chief People Officer and APAC Head of People Strategy, Pauly Grant, the number of Gen Z employees in agencies is starting to become equal to Gen X.

“There’s still pressure and movement in that junior to mid level. They’re moving a lot more or at the same level that they were last year, whereas I think other levels, more senior levels have slowed,” Grant says.

The last time we came close to this level of vacancies was a little over a decade ago when the digital advertising ecosystem began to emerge. The circumstances just over a decade ago were different, with an industry-specific boom and more generous visa system offering easier paths to citizenship. Media agencies were gearing up to offer search, performance marketing and the beginnings of programmatic found the skills were lacking onshore and lacked the patience to develop their own people. As a result, there was a wave of imports from the UK. Grant notes that the wave is resuming all over again as borders definitively open up.

“There are a lot more people coming to Australia from overseas. So the borders have definitely opened up. I mean, they had last year, but it was slow. Whereas now there are a lot more people either returning to Australia and a lot more people interested in roles over here from Europe, especially, which is good for our talent pool because obviously the media and advertising industry relied on that quite a bit previously that didn’t exist for the last couple of years.”

Pay rise motivations remain ‘meritocratic’

The possibilities of a recession in the UK and US continue to loom. Australia seems likely to follow, albeit less dramatically.

However, the media sector itself is already in recession, with overall ad spend significantly down.

Despite inflation still sitting above 7%, existing staff still need to make a case for pay rises, Grant says. “I think staff are deserving of raises when they do a great job, when they’ve been here for a certain time, when they’re getting a promotion. That’s where we look to give people raises.

“We always have been an industry that has been a meritocracy.”

“We talk to all of our staff quarterly in a very open and transparent way. We try to educate on what’s happening and try to make the best decisions to create a sustainable business. We don’t know what’s happening, but I think to be too fearful of that, I think you just have to be conscious and cautious.”

Findings from Hassell’s The Magnetic Workplace: 2022 Workplace Futures Survey of 2500 white-collar workers across the UK, Asia, US and Australia, found that the hybrid or WFH work arrangements instigated by the pandemic were resulting in decreases in employee engagement.

Despite that, employees felt more emboldened to jump ship if their workplace wasn’t offering the desired level of flexibility in workplace policy.

On addressing the job-hopping habits of junior-mid level employees, Grant said retention “will also depend on what their organisation is offering them. Are they offering them flexibility? Are they not? I think all those types of things are coming into play as well.”