{"id":847,"date":"2016-11-01T07:34:28","date_gmt":"2016-11-01T07:34:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/?p=847"},"modified":"2016-11-01T07:34:28","modified_gmt":"2016-11-01T07:34:28","slug":"agency-misery-levels-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/agency-misery-levels-rise\/","title":{"rendered":"Agency Misery Levels Rise"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are indications that working in advertising agencies\/media agencies isn\u2019t as much fun as it used to be. Whilst it\u2019s easy to say that that applies to almost any endeavour, there are reasons for those of us who care at all for the future of the industry to be concerned.<\/p>\n

\u2018Campaign\u2019<\/a> in the US reports that their own annual \u2018morale survey\u2019 indicates that 47% of agency employees consider their morale to be \u2018low\u2019 or \u2018dangerously low\u2019. In the same survey in 2015 the equivalent number was 34%.<\/p>\n

The \u2018dangerously low\u2019 number doubled year on year from 8% to 16%.<\/p>\n

The key reason? 73% of 2016 respondents quote \u2018company leadership\u2019 as the reason for their low morale.<\/p>\n

Amongst the 53% who seem to be pretty happy with life \u2013 no-one (or no significant number) quotes \u2018company leadership\u2019 as a reason for their positive outlook.<\/p>\n

To give some context this is a small scale study (about 300 respondents), plus it\u2019s been conducted in the US only. And around 60% or respondents were from creative as opposed to media agencies.<\/p>\n

But anecdotal evidence supports the survey\u2019s overall findings.<\/p>\n

\u2018Campaign\u2019 in the UK on 21st<\/sup> October carried a feature on the current trend towards in-house agencies. Gerry Moira, a fixture in our industry for well over 40 years and most recently ex-Chairman at Havas London is quoted as saying: \u201cIf I were starting out now, I\u2019d much rather be client-side. It\u2019s the future. Agencies have had their day. They are sweatshops.\u201d<\/p>\n

ID Comms\u2019 David Indo and Tom Denford in one of their excellent podcast series MediaSnack<\/a> both said they would rather be client side today if they were starting off (both have agency backgrounds).<\/p>\n

At a Mediatel event on the future of planning earlier this year, several of the panellists when asked said they wouldn\u2019t advise their children to pursue a career as an agency planner.<\/p>\n

As to leadership, ever since agencies went public via holding companies there has been the predicted tension between the requirements of shareholders and the needs of clients. There shouldn\u2019t be, after all both are interested in creating successful businesses, but how you get there is open to debate.<\/p>\n

The old (private) agency ownership model was based on a belief that great advertising leads to successful business results for their clients. Happy clients tended to lead to more clients \u2013 and thus a successful agency.<\/p>\n

Nowadays the rise of the mathmen over the madmen (I suspect Sir Martin might be regretting that quip) means that great advertising has taken a backseat amongst our chattering classes to all the algorithms, the bots, the fraud and the transparency issues.<\/p>\n

Writing as a card-carrying member of the National Union of Media Troublemakers and International Egotists (NUMTIE) I do think the industry would face a rosier future if we all got back to worrying about how to produce great ideas as opposed to obsessing about where to put them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are indications that working in advertising agencies\/media agencies isn\u2019t as much fun as it used to be. Whilst it\u2019s easy to say that that applies to almost any endeavour, there are reasons for those of us who care at all for the future of the industry to be concerned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":849,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions\/849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bjanda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}