.png)
The MFA 2024 Census put regrettable loss across Australian media agencies at 26%, down from 32.6% the prior year. One in four people walked. The industry framed this as a win. A quarter of the workforce churning through the door every year is apparently what success looks like now.
IAB Australia’s 2024 Talent Review confirmed what the industry has been murmuring about. The “juniorisation” of the workforce. Over three-quarters of open positions now target people with one to five years’ experience. The most senior people are being shown the door. Entry-level recruitment is declining. The executive teams are getting leaner by the quarter.
Where did everyone go? More importantly, who’s left to actually teach the next generation how this industry works?
Consolidation Eats People First
Follow the restructures. The pattern is become clear. The Omnicom-IPG merger created the world’s largest holding group at the cost of roughly 23,000 fewer employees across the combined entity. Iconic brands like DDB, FCB and MullenLowe all retired. WPP is rebranded GroupM as “WPP Media,” sunsetting agency-specific titles across its 42,000-person global workforce while confirming redundancies in Australian investment teams. MFA member agencies employed 4,650 people in September 2024, down from 4,778 the year before.
Every restructure is presented as an evolution. Some kind of simplification or futureproofing. Yet every single one prioritises margin recovery over talent retention. The most experienced people carry the highest cost. They also carry the institutional memory, the client relationships and the understanding of what actually works. They go first.
Automating the Education Out of the Job
AI is being positioned as the solution to the grunt work. The manual campaign builds, the reporting and the QA checks. On paper, that’s progress. In practice, nobody’s reckoning with the reality that the grunt work was the education.
We’ve become so good at automating entry-level work that there’s no foundational understanding of how things actually work to carry people through into management roles. There are managers sitting in agencies right now who have never done the foundational work. How can they be the ones people look up to and more importantly who are they learning from? Forrester forecasts agencies will replace 7.5% of jobs with automation by 2030, with a third of all roles at risk. The industry is automating the very mechanism by which people learn the craft, while simultaneously making the experienced people who could teach them redundant.
Monkey Says, Monkey Does
I spent over fifteen years at GroupM and over half of it was doing the grunt work. I pulled the reports, built campaigns line by line, trafficked and learned what broke and why. That education was tedious, repetitive and occasionally soul-destroying. It’s also the reason I eventually understood the machinery well enough to challenge it. I had people around me who in their own way taught and guided me, I was lucky.
What I see now across the industry is a fundamental lack of understanding at the level that requires it most. Not at execution level as the platforms handle that. At the level of deeper thinking. Strategic guidance. Creativity. The ability to look at a media plan and ask “why” instead of just “how.” Too many people running campaigns today can operate the tools but don’t understand the system those tools sit inside. They don’t understand supply chains. They don’t understand how pricing actually works. They don’t understand what transparency means or why it matters. Its not just at the junior level, leadership is so far away from the day to day to care.
Who now gives a shit? Agencies aren’t incentivised to fix it. Leadership is measured on revenue, new business wins and margin targets. Not on how many people they developed or how much institutional knowledge they transferred. Industry events that used to serve as genuine forums for knowledge transfer have become vendor showcases. The learning has been replaced by selling. The community has gone and the people in it have had enough.
Principal-based trading has only accelerated the problem. When your agency is buying media as inventory and reselling it to clients at a markup, the craft of media planning becomes secondary to the commercial imperative. Former UM Global CMO Joshua Lowcock put it clearly: “It creates a model where clients devalue agency work.” When the agency’s recommendation is shaped by what it already owns rather than what’s best for the client, the strategists and planners who believe in the craft have no reason to stay. They’re not staying.
Who’s Taking Responsibility?
Average agency tenure in Australia has risen to 3.8 years, up from 2.8. That might be seen as loyalty. I actually think it's more fear of leaving. 68% of the broader Australian workforce is worried about redundancy. People are sitting tight and the age old ‘grass isn’t greener’ saying is abundant. Salary growth has slowed to 3.1%. Offshoring is increasing. The response from leadership is to restructure again, cut again, push harder on principal trading to make up the margin.
Someone has to take responsibility for educating the future of this industry. The holding companies have made it abundantly clear they’re optimising for profit, not people. That leaves the independents, the industry bodies and the individuals who still have a say in the future of the industry. It means structured management training, not a half-day workshop. It means deploying AI to free up experienced people to teach, not replacing the teaching entirely. It means industry bodies creating forums for genuine knowledge transfer instead of sponsored content sessions. It means agencies being measured on talent development alongside revenue by their clients.
The experienced people haven’t vanished. They’re in in-house roles, consulting gigs or entirely different industries. Places where they feel valued and respected. They left because the agency world stopped giving them a reason to stay. Giving the next generation a reason to never leave isn’t just good HR principles. It’s the only viable business strategy this industry has left.