One sad reality of 2020 was the negative impact of COVID-19 on U.S. employment. Simply stated, the loss of jobs resulting from shelter in-place regulations negatively impacted business sectors ranging from travel and hospitality to retail and yes, advertising.
According to a recent report from Forrester, 35,000 U.S. ad agency jobs were cut this year. The principal reason for this contraction, agency expense reduction moves tied to drops in revenue related to marketing spend reductions by advertisers.
However, the loss of ad agency jobs, which accelerated in 2Q20 was actually part of a broader trend tied to the ad industries adoption of technology. This according to Jay Pattisal and J.P. Gownder of Forrester Research, authors of a blog post entitled; “The Smaller, Smarter Future of Agencies.”
According to the authors, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation (IA) to agency workflows “will yield a long-term reduction in the size of agencies as measured by the number of human employees.” By their estimation, creative and media agencies will lose 11% of their jobs to automation by 2023. Their recommendation to agencies is to embrace this change and accelerate their transformations, becoming more “streamlined, intelligent providers” by harnessing the power of “intelligent creativity.”
Many within the industry have prognosticated on how the ad agency model might evolve and the perspective advanced by Forrester certainly has merit. However, for an industry with over 57,000 ad agencies operating in the U.S. alone (source: Manta Media), there is no “size nine shoe” solution that can be applied to each individual agency’s quest to remain relevant.
One thing is certain, many of the jobs lost in 2020 will not return, regardless of the course of the pandemic or the resumption of client marketing spend. Process innovation, automation and consolidation will have rendered many of those positions as obsolete.