Media Buying Briefing: ‘There’s a real strain’ on media agencies as they try to staff up after mediapalooza gains

December 06, 2021

By Michael Bürgi

As the dust settles on 2021’s mediapalooza, in which several massive advertisers chose new agencies to handle their media duties, it’s time for those winning agencies to figure out how to deliver the agreed-upon KPIs and results.

Arguably the most important element of those plans is the need to staff up. And in the age of The Great Resignation, during which thousands of media agency staffers are being lured away by marketers, adtech and martech firms — or simply fed up with insanely long hours and insufficient compensation — that is proving to be harder than ever.

It’s clear the media agency giants face major staffing issues when one scans the clients they’ve landed. Arguably, Publicis emerged the biggest winner of all the holding companies, landing all or significant chunks of Facebook, Walmart, Stellantis, Inspire Brands, L’Oréal and most recently Eli Lilly. But WPP also scored with the lion’s share of Coca-Cola’s media, and Omnicom secured Mercedes-Benz’s media business. The other giant media account in mediapalooza ’21 was Unilever, which was split among WPP, Omnicom, Havas and IPG.

So what are they to do? Talent search firms are seeing desperation in their dealings with media agencies.

“We have a lot of holding companies calling us with the pressure of, ‘Can you guarantee us 50 to 100 new hires by the end of Q1? And if you can’t guarantee it, we’re not going to secure the business. We will have an even bigger exit of our existing talent that are going to get burned out’,” said Camille Fetter, founder/CEO of Talentpool, which works with all the major holding companies as well as independents to help with staffing needs. “It does make me nervous with these holding companies taking on such significant additional work without a significant talent pipeline in place.”

To Fetter’s thinking, the combination of burnout-if-I-stay and the lure of bigger paychecks at brands looking to set up in-house media operations has put more power in the hands of existing talent in those media agencies. “Agency talent is starting to realize, ‘I can actually go [to the] brand side more easily than I may have in the past.’ So that’s a general trend — the business landscape has changed and digital media talent is at the forefront of helping these businesses scale.”

To make matters even worse, many of these clients are looking for digital-first solutions in their marketing efforts, said Brian Dolan, CEO of WorkReduce, a remote staffing platform that specializes in outsourcing for both holding companies and independents. Agencies’ “digital [workload] has gotten bigger than ever,” said Dolan. “In addition to the churn and the accounts moving, there is more money in digital both from legacy analog budgets and investment moving into digital that wasn’t there before. So the the amount of work has increased at the same time there’s a real strain in the traditional agency model.”

For its part, Publicis is turning to its internal, AI-driven Marcel connective tissue to connect employees across agencies, disciplines, timezones …read more

Source:: Digiday

      

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