A 100% accurate accounting of how sacking decisions are made in advertising
A 100% accurate accounting of how #sacking decisions are made in #advertising. From someone who has been in the booting room.
The mystical decision to unjob rarely comes at the hashtag#agency level. Nobody who uses the same restroom as you wants to see you go. And as much as they seem indifferent, belligerent, with no professional boundaries, your local hashtag#leaders see themselves as semi-toxic parental figures and are surprisingly fond of you.
No, the enigmatical call to throw a sacking party comes from a different floor, in a different building, in a faraway state with much more permissive tax laws.
These decisions are typically made by exalted and spectacular beings you have never met and who have no idea of your value. As they studiously examine goat entrails, looking into the inscrutable future, if they mildly suspect the slightest woe or measliest whammy, they pronounce a season of joyous rightsizing to commence, to generate quick hashtag#profits.
The time of canning will typically happen at the end or beginning of the year.
Un-onboard occurs in the 4th quarter to bury losses in a mountain of otherwise end-of-year good news.
While de-gigging in the 1st quarter creates a fun “recovery” narrative.
Each agency is given a cost-cutting number that they MUST meet.
The number is always big. And some big cheeses and bananas try to make a dent in it BEFORE defenestrating. Pizza Fridays? now pizza no days. Holiday party? now just spray cheese and saltines. But even after rebudgeting for the world's least absorbent toilet paper and the most caustic soviet era hand soap, we will still need triumphant sackings.
The actual canning decisions tend to follow the Star Trekkian ethic of, “sacrifice the few, to save the many.” So, if you can cut two people who make as much as five others, you cut the two to save the five. The fact that the two being sacrificed are responsible for 3-5x the business as the other five is very rightfully never considered.
Typically those who have stupidly chosen to lead and support others, offering hashtag#guidance and hashtag#strategies, also tend to get paid a bit more. And as such, are the first to be given a box of mostly broken personal effects and shown the door by Daryl from security.
There's no ephemeral spreadsheet that accounts for your radiant talents or golden experience. With no column or row documenting the precise resources that drive hashtag#profit. You.
Thus 2023-2024 problem. Many agencies were made far weaker, with their overworked remnants having less leadership and support with far less resilience.
It has also made clients feel as though they have been left with the least expensive players rather than the best suited, further damaging the hashtag#reputation of our agencies, our industry, and the hashtag#value of what we make.
It should surprise no one in the business of communication that an obsession with numerical over human value has resulted in vigorous disinterest.