Tuesdata: Job vacancies fall across the communications industry
Welcome to Tuesdata, our weekly analysis for Unmade’s paying members.
Below, we examine the state of the job market in the communications and marketing industry.
Further down, a poor day for Domain on the Unmade Index.
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Whose job market is it?
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
Almost exactly a year ago, we covered how to the holding companies were faring in terms of job vacancies and their struggle to fill them.
As we reported at the time, it was the equivalent of an entire holdco of vacancies.
As IPG Mediabrands CEO Mark Coad pointed out at Advertising Week, the vacancy levels were so large they had the unintended consequence of boosting profits through the savings on wages.
Since then, the market has changed radically, with he advertising economy slowing, and the disruption of AI becoming a factor. Last month, Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of WPP and now boss of S4 Capital told the MAD//Fest conference in the UK that he expected quarter of a million media jobs to disappear:
“Media planning and buying, revolutionised. Algorithms are going to replace 25-year-old media planners in fairly quick time. There won’t be 250,000 people at the holding companies running media planning and buying networks around the world.”
Analysis of job ads by Unmade suggests that this extraordinary exuberance has receded, with all but one of the holdcos advertising fewer roles than they were a year ago.