‘Chronically understaffed’: Confessions of an agency exec on the cost of online advertising’s Covid growth

By Seb Joseph

For all its benefits, the much-vaunted surge in digital advertising has come at a cost. The people responsible for buying it are being overworked, underpaid and unappreciated. That’s the view of a senior agency exec who spoke to us, in this latest edition of our Confessions series in which we trade anonymity for candor, and laid out the human cost of digital advertising in 2021.

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you give an overview on what is actually happening here?

Overworking is nothing new, but the pandemic and, in particular, what it’s done to digital media has made it more intense. Agencies have to work to a revenue or margin goal, which depends on what the client has agreed to: they can either pay for a person’s time which is what comms planners get paid on usually, or the percentage of media, which is what buyers and people on the digital teams get paid on. But this revenue has to go up a lot before you get additional funds to hire people as agency CFOs manage their P&Ls tightly — everything comes down to very strict margin and revenue targets. Even if the volume of investment goes up there is a big lag between a CFO offering sign-off on a full-time employee to interviewing, to hiring, to making an offer and then for that person to get set up. In the meantime, a few people are going to be overburdened with multiple people’s work. In extreme cases, you can end up with a single person shouldering the burden of many hands — very unfair.

Underpaid?

Digital teams are paid on commissions, not a full-time equivalent model so the revenue is less stable or predictable — this puts any CFO or financial director on the defensive. Put it this way, everyone on my team who works on a number of high profile accounts, is owed a pay rise — and probably everyone else in the industry as well. We’ve all sat through the internal calls and been told “Promotions or pay rises are not not financially possible.”

Is your team understaffed?

In the main, we’re chronically understaffed on the digital side. It’s not uncommon to see one person doing several different campaigns on their own in any given agency. And the people we do bring in are junior so the quality of work slips. That gets compounded by the fact that the senior people on these teams get fed up and leave (you can see this on L2 — Scott Galloway’s firm which shows the number of people leaving WPP for Facebook and Google versus the people leaving Facebook and Google for agencies). Specialist teams are fun up until the account manager level and then you are negatively typecasted. Sadly, the reality is you will be treated like a second class citizen because there’s a view that what you do is somehow decoupled from reality. No one loses their job if the ads on Facebook or Google don’t work. I have actually …read more

Source:: Digiday