What you need to know:

• Media agencies held job losses to a 5.1% industry population decline through Covid.
• The UK market just released its figures over night – a 13% slump in media agency staff in 2020 was more than double Australia’s.
• The MFA’s Industry Census for 2020 shows agency staff turnover reduced by 3.9 percentage points and a vacancy rate of 4.1%, pointing to a potential recovery this year.
• A gender pay gap of 3% has emerged through 2020 but this is mostly due to high-demand, higher paying roles in search, data and analytics being occupied by men. Women are not taking the types of university courses or showing interest in subjects that lead to such roles in media and advertising.
• The IPA’s UK figures show a gender pay gap now of 14.3% in 2020.
• Burnout risk is on the rise this year as clients expect Covid service levels to remain the new norm.
• There are early signs that burnout pressure is also on the rise among client marketing teams.    

Australia’s media agency sector was hit with a 5.1% decline in the number of people working across the industry through 2020 and is facing a stark shortage of women in high demand areas such as data, analytics and search related roles.

But compared to a far more troubled UK agency sector, which saw 2020 agency census data released overnight showing a 13% decline in the media agency population - Australia has traversed Covid with less fallout to its people.

With media spend down $1.1bn, or 15% in 2020, holding net industry job losses to 5.1% among media agencies was a relatively good result.

The UK’s IPA has just released its Agency Census results in which media agency employees fell by 12.1% in 2020 to 9,980 people. Creative agencies fared better in the UK, with a smaller decline of 9% to 12,298.   

Anecdotally, however, Australian agency leaders in recent weeks have told Mi3 the risk of staff burnout has increased markedly this year as client marketing teams put pressure on agency partners to continue on-demand service standards at peak Covid-crisis levels.

Some agencies have now resorted to creating documents for clients that outline acceptable terms of engagement and treatment of agency staff. There are numerous reports among agencies of aggressive, unreasonable and demanding client behaviour. But it is also part of an upstream problem as more pressured and smaller client marketing teams pass on the demands they are getting from their company leadership.

“That’s something at a leadership level we’ve had a lot of discussion about,” said Media Federation of Australia (MFA) CEO, Sophie Madden. “It’s definitely a concern.” Agency leadership, she said, were already worried last year about client workload and service expectations bleeding into 2021 and that has played out. There was a broad effort now underway among media agencies about “resetting the norm” with clients.

The MFA’s Industry Census was conducted in September last year hand showed the first net decline in people for more than a decade. Staff turnover was also down nearly 4% as people stuck with their existing jobs. That too was changing quickly in 2020 as recruitment firms were now seeing more roles hit the market, Madden said.

“This time a year ago we were nervous that losses were going to be a lot more significant, particularly when you overlay the declines in spend that we were predicting and what we were seeing in other markets,” Madden told Mi3. “So it’s absolutely a more positive outcome than we were expecting. Difficult and challenging yes but more positive that we anticipated.”

Overall, industry experience was on the rise with the average age of media agency staff increasing from 8.1 years to 8.7 years and 28% of agency employees notching more than 11 years experience.  

MFA chairman Peter Horgan said the Australian numbers were hard but “encouraging” versus other international markets. “This was due to our industry pulling together to reduce hours and salaries at the peak of the crisis in a bid to save as many jobs as possible,” he said. It’s clear this approach worked. Even better, the vacancy rate indicates we’re on the path to regain the majority of those lost jobs.”