Welcome to an end-of-week update from Unmade. Today, we ask the long term cost for the industry of the short term savings made by cutting senior staff. We also share the dates for next month’s Compass roadshow.
If you’ve been thinking about upgrading to an Unmade membership, this is the perfect time. Your membership includes:
A complimentary ticket to all of Unmade’s events, including next month’s Compass series, Unlock (31 October) HumAIn ( back in 2025), and REmade ( back in 2025).
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Compass calendar locked in for November
The dates have been confirmed for this year’s Unmade Compass series. Expanded for the first time to six states, Compass takes place across November.
Since Unmade began three years ago, it has become tradition to put on a networking event featuring a panel discussion recorded for podcast.
The first event was a prescient discussion of the at that stage yet-to-unfold topic of the impact of a cost of living crisis on marketing strategies, held in Sydney and Melbourne.
That expanded to annual end of year panels held in both Sydney and Melbourne under the Compass banner. Each Compass event features a panel of local speakers reflecting on the year just gone, and offering their projections for the year to come.
The audience is made up of Unmade’s paying members and VIP guests, with a limited number of tickets for sale. This year, the event has become a full six-state roadshow, kicking off in Hobart and ending in Melbourne.
The dates and venues are:
Hobart - Wednesday, November 6;
Brisbane, The Prince Consort - Tuesday, November 12;
Sydney, The Sporting Globe - Wednesday, November 13;
Perth, The Globe - Monday, November 18
Adelaide, The Elephant - Tuesday, November 19
Melbourne, Garden State Hotel - Wednesday, November 20
The series is taking place with the support of headline partner Boomtown and supporting partner News Corp.
Tickets, priced at $199, are on sale now. Unmade’s annual paying members are entitled to a complimentary ticket - the voucher code can be found beneath the paywall in any Tuesday members-only post from Unmade, or you can email us at events@unmade.media.
Speakers for the Compass series will be announced next week.
The first Unmade pub panel:
Hear last year’s Unmade Compass Melbourne panel:
And hear last year’s Unmade Compass Sydney panel:
The industry’s redundancies are because of cost and a lack of confidence; it’s burning out those left behind
Cat McGinn writes:
A wave of redundancies has left some of the most talented, senior professionals in the media and marketing industries searching for their next roles - some for months on end.
While there have been dark mutterings that AI is the culprit, the reality is far more nuanced.
Some organisations are seeing productivity gains, but the majority of media and marketing teams are still in the early stages of building out AI-powered workflows. While there is some evidence genAI can outperform human CEOs, for the majority of companies AI is deployed for lower-register, repetitive tasks. These very senior, highly skilled roles aren’t being outsourced to bots.
This lag in hiring isn’t caused by AI. The root of the problem is market confidence—or rather, the lack of it.
According to the IAB Digital Advertising and Ad Tech Talent Review 2024, there’s an upward trend in the availability of talent, coupled with a reduction in headcount. Companies have access to skilled professionals but are slow to hire, delaying decisions until there’s more certainty about the economy’s trajectory, or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.
There’s also an element of what borders on magical thinking from organisations: if they can just hold out until the new year somehow things will be better.
And while it's understandable that companies want to save their headcount budgets, this wait-and-see approach is becoming increasingly risky.
This could be a degree of projection on my part, because Team Unmade is in the middle of our busiest period to date, with eight events in as many weeks. But the majority of people I speak to are reporting the same thing: stress, exhaustion, and just hoping to “get through” the next few months. There’s often a sharp inhalation of breath when we stop to consider just how far away 2025 really is. (Fifty-three working days until Christmas, friends—that’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.)
When critical roles remain unfilled, teams are stretched beyond reason. The added weight on employees—especially during this, the most frenetic time of the marketing calendar —leads directly to burnout, a significant risk that many employers are ignoring.
As workloads pile up, businesses are gambling that holding off on hiring won’t cause long-term harm. But the reality is, it already has.
The hesitation to hire isn’t just stifling market growth; it’s pushing current employees to their breaking points. What may seem like a prudent financial decision now is costing businesses in terms of employee well-being and productivity. Burnout doesn’t just cause short-term absences or decreased performance—it can lead to long-term attrition, especially among highly skilled workers motivated by creative excellence who feel undervalued and overburdened. And once these employees leave, the costs of recovery—in terms of recruitment, lost expertise and disruption to client relationships—are even greater.
On Saturday we wrote about Nic Jones, who’s had some of the biggest jobs around, and has chosen to leave the industry entirely to drive buses. I know of somebody else who has become a landscape gardener.
Talented professionals, both those seeking new opportunities and those in existing roles, are left in a holding pattern. They’re unable to contribute at their peak, or have the mental space to grow and improve.
Another alarming consequence of delayed hiring is its impact on diversity within our industry. "Highly skilled" and "senior" professionals often translates to "older" and "more expensive."
A report from the Experience Advocacy Taskforce highlights the significant departure of adlanders over 40, citing age bias and structural barriers. Respondents spoke of being “ghosted” by recruiters, and of the 130 people surveyed about their reasons for leaving the industry, only one had retired.
Ageism is pervasive. I can’t recall ever attending a retirement party in my entire career. Instead, I’m hearing of accomplished candidates being offered salaries less than half of what they once earned and being told their “experience” might not be a good culture fit for younger teams.
This issue disproportionately affects senior women, who not only become too expensive but also, it seems, invisible. As one senior woman told me, “The space we once held disappears. We no longer have weight in conversations or presence in the room.”
If you’re old at 40, invisible at 45, but still have 20 years of working life ahead of you, well, the future isn’t looking rosy. EAT’s research found that seven out of 10 respondents would take more junior roles if offered, indicating a degree of distress. The stakes are high in this economy.
Ageism and discrimination aside, in purely pragmatic terms, staffing teams with juniors has other implications. When the majority of teams are hybrid and have limited time in the same space to learn through that incredible watercooler osmosis, or “sanctioned corporate eavesdropping” to give it its real name, what happens when you don’t have experienced talent in the Zoom room? Who are the juniors learning from?
The genAI bots outperformed CEOs by making data-informed decisions at speed. However, they also got fired by their synthetic boards much more frequently.
The reason? They were great at recommending a course of action within a predictable context, but failed miserably when faced with unexpected challenges—those “Black Swan” events that we’ve seen all too frequently in recent times.
If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that we should expect the unexpected. When those freak moments arise, it’s human experience and the muscle memory of having weathered previous storms that we’ll rely on. Now is the time for the industry to stop hesitating, and start investing in the talent we can’t afford to lose.
SCA sinks despite up day on the Unmade Index
Southern Cross Austereo and Seven West Media both had rough days on the Unmade Index yesterday, with SCA hitting yet another all time low.
SCA lost 3.2% to land on a market capitalisation just below $110m. SWM fell by 2.9%
Nine lifted by 1.6% while ARN Media improved by 1.4%, taking the Unmade Index up by 0.6%.
Time to leave you to your Friday.
I’ll be back tomorrow with Best of the Week.
Have a great day.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade
tim@unmade.media
Hear more on the Unmade podcast:
If you look at the broader jobs market - job ads have been dropping for the last 2 years: https://www.anz.com.au/newsroom/media/2024/september/anz-indeed-australian-job-ads-down-15-3-per-cent-in-2024/ (altho total employment has gone up)
We probably won’t see this change direction until interest rates drop.
As for ageism, it is present in all sectors but particularly acute in marketing. This obviously presents an opportunity for the canny recruiter. When you have incorrectly valued assets in the marketplace, someone can make a killing. I don’t believe in appealing to the better natures of people. My question to CMOs and MDs is: Are you greedy enough to let go of your presuppositions and hire some 50+ women?
It's the catch 22 of being a senior person in the industry; you are asked into interview rooms due to your experience without applying, but then told after five rounds (and the sharing of significant IP) that you're "too experienced" for the role.