As economic turbulence adds to the financial pressures weighing on agencies, marketing leaders are facing difficult decisions around staffing. In just the past five months, the ad market has lost an average of 1,400 jobs each month. Yet even amidst these cutbacks, talent retention must remain a critical priority.
To begin with, as teams get leaner, holding onto experienced, high-performing employees is more important than ever. At the same time, voluntary turnover remains a concern: Over half of agency professionals say they are open to finding a new job within the next 12 months, a number that jumps to 79.5% among entry- to mid-level employees. While higher rates of job seeking are predictable for junior level talent, they also reflect agencies’ struggle to engage and retain Gen Z workers. And though economic volatility is likely encouraging many agency employees to prioritize professional stability and stay put in their current roles, it also puts all the more pressure on agency leaders to avoid the steep time and financial costs associated with turnover.
Talent retention starts with improving job satisfaction and fulfillment. With a growing majority of agency professionals (60.8%) saying digital advertising has gotten harder in just the past two years and 76.6% feeling their individual jobs have grown more challenging, agency leaders must first understand the root causes—and then find ways to help their employees feel supported and fulfilled amidst these mounting difficulties.
The increasingly difficult nature of agency work stems largely from the many challenges facing advertising agencies today.
To start, there’s the growing complexity of the media landscape. “We’ve seen a resurgence of fragmentation in the industry—take streaming services and retail media networks, for example,” says Michael Olson, EVP of Client Development at Basis. “At the same time, agencies are scrambling to figure out how they can bring unique partnerships and inventory sources to the forefront to show that they’re still power players in the industry.”
On top of media fragmentation, agencies are grappling with increased rates from media partners, decreased client budgets, and the rising cost of talent, all of which have resulted in shrinking margins. To cope, agencies are increasingly offshoring and outsourcing work to drive down costs, and can even end up overselling and underbidding to keep their businesses afloat. Unfortunately, these financial pressures and the strategies agencies are using to protect their margins are also adding to the rising difficulty of work for agency workers.
The many challenges agencies have grappled with in recent years have trickled down to their employees, making their daily tasks more difficult and less fulfilling, and reducing the quality of workplace culture at agencies.
A fragmented media landscape has led to inefficiency throughout the campaign process. Over half of agency professionals’ tech stacks consist of eight or more tools, with 40% of agency marketers relying on 10+ tools to manage campaigns. In this context, 45.1% of agency leaders name siloed and disconnected systems as one of the biggest challenges facing their organizations.
Many teams wind up doing repetitive tasks to connect these disparate systems—for example, manually standardizing and unifying data sets from multiple sources. “They’re stuck working off of antiquated software, juggling spreadsheets, and doing data entry work that’s completely unfulfilling,” says Olson.
And even as outsourcing certain types of work can free up agency employees to focus on more strategic and fulfilling tasks, it can add additional complexity as well. “It's not as simple as reassigning tasks to external teams and completely removing them from the internal team’s plate,” says Kelly Boyle, Group VP of Strategic Business Outcomes at Basis. “The internal agency team still needs to oversee and QA the outsourced work. And when you have teams working in silos, and possibly vastly different time zones, there can be breakdowns in communication and context that create complexity.”
In an effort to land clients in a highly competitive landscape, some agencies can also end up overselling and underbidding. While it may lead to new business, the practice can leave employees overextended and stretched thin. One VP-level agency veteran shared that “High workloads have a huge impact on workers’ mental health—I’ve worked at agencies where I’d see at least one of my coworkers crying on a weekly basis.”
The rise of remote work—and subsequent return-to-office (RTO) orders—has exacerbated many of these challenges, with agencies often struggling to establish strong workplace cultures in hybrid/remote-first environments. Indeed, a desire to revitalize workplace culture lies behind many agencies’ decisions to call their employees back into the office in the first place.
At the same time, those RTO mandates have been met with significant resistance. After WPP implemented a policy mandating that team members must work in-office four days per week, employees started a petition to reverse the decision, which has subsequently garnered over 20,000 signatures. And a 2024 study examining the impact of RTO mandates at Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple found that they led to an increase in attrition, especially among senior-level employees—an outcome that, in turn, likely had significant impact on productivity, innovation, and competitiveness at those companies. More broadly, the desire for flexibility is strong: 63% of workers across industries are willing to take a pay cut to work remotely, and 43% are more afraid of returning to the office than getting a divorce.
Luckily for agency leaders, there are strategies that can mitigate these challenges by fostering more fulfillment for employees. In meeting their teams’ desire for appreciation, efficiency, flexibility, and opportunities for growth, leaders can create workplace environments where employees want to stay for the long haul.
According to Gallup, appreciation and recognition “might be one of the greatest missed opportunities” for driving performance, engagement, and company loyalty amongst employees. Despite the impact of appreciation, Gallup’s survey found that it’s common for workers to feel that their best efforts are regularly ignored. Even more, workers who don’t get the appreciation and recognition they feel they deserve are twice as likely to say they’ll quit their jobs within the next year. Agencies that take the time to acknowledge their employees’ work and demonstrate their appreciation can have an easier time holding on to their top performers and keep morale high.
“People are willing to go above and beyond in their work, especially when they feel like that work is appreciated,” says Boyle. “It can be as simple as saying, ‘I know you’ve been putting in a lot of hours lately, and I really appreciate it.’”
Research indicates that the most effective way to recognize employees’ contributions is to provide positive honest, authentic, and individualized feedback, and for managers to show appreciation for their workers at least every seven days. Better still is when praise comes from “every direction”—i.e., from their manager, from their manager’s manager, from their peers, and from high-level leaders as well.
If showing appreciation via monetary compensation is in the budget, that can be impactful as well—particularly in situations where promotions aren’t available. “If you come to an employee you don’t want to lose and say, ‘You're doing a phenomenal job. We can’t offer you a new title right now, but we’re going to give you a raise,’ that can have a huge impact,” says Olson.
Ultimately, by creating team cultures rich with appreciation and praise, agency leaders can ensure their teams feel seen and celebrated for the difficult work they’re doing.
Agencies must also ensure they’re providing work environments that are both efficient and conducive to their employees’ best efforts. For example, to bolster efficiency, leaders can set regular check-ins with clients to get clear on what deliverables are necessary.
“Agency leaders should take a step back and ensure employees are focusing their effort on things that deliver value for their clients,” says Boyle. “It’s easy to get caught in the cycle of providing the same reports and deliverables without truly understanding if they’re being utilized to their full extent.”
Leaders can also foster efficiency for their teams by building their tech stacks with employees in mind. “People didn’t get into advertising to sit behind Excel spreadsheets and fix invoices all day,” says Olson “They got into advertising to be creative, smart, strategic, and impactful.” To allow their teams’ workloads to favor those kinds of tasks, agencies can consider investing in CDPs that facilitate the collection, standardization, and usage of first-party data, or in automation technologies that streamline processes and reduce manual labor.
To retain top talent, agency leaders must thoughtfully weigh the chemistry and creative benefits of in-person collaboration with existing research and employee sentiment around return-to-office mandates. Gauging their own workforce’s preferences can not only signal that leadership values employee input, but also help mitigate the costly risks of attrition among those who are unwilling or unable to RTO.
For agencies that do ask their teams to come back into the office, leaders should consider how to make that transition as smooth and conducive as possible. “Employees will be most effective in the office if they have the proper space and technology to work and collaborate, both with others in the office and remote employees.” says Boyle. Given many employees’ reluctance to return, agencies implementing RTO mandates should thoughtfully consider how to ensure their workplaces support productivity and wellbeing.
Lastly, agencies must find creative ways to offer their employees opportunities for professional growth. Mentorship is particularly valued by Gen Z, so setting up programs to match junior-level employees with senior colleagues is one way agency leaders can foster growth. This can also give senior-level employees the opportunity to feel they’re having an impact in their work—which goes a long way, given that burnout isn’t always a result of employees having too much work, but can also occur when employees feel they aren’t having enough impact.
Offering people opportunities to become subject matter experts is another powerful way to provide both professional growth and professional impact, according to Molly Marshall, Business Outcomes Partner at Basis. “Team members can become experts on specific types of clients, or specific types of audiences,” says Marshall. “Becoming a subject matter expert gives employees another way in which they can feel special and needed—it’s something they can take pride in and even talk about with their families and friends.”
Giving employees opportunities to lead by proposing new solutions is another effective way to support their professional growth. “Just because an agency has done something the same way for years doesn’t mean it can’t be improved,” says Olson. “Agencies should welcome employee input and encourage creativity. Your top talent wants to help shape the agency’s future, and their ideas can be a major asset to the business.”
Allowing employees opportunities to own specific projects can also be impactful. "Junior employees are often so focused on meeting the expectations of their manager or clients that they rarely get to put their own spin on a project,” says Boyle. “Ownership allows them to push boundaries and show their unique way of thinking—and it’s also a great way to assess their skills and encourage innovation.”
Of course, agencies must offer career advancement through more traditional routes like promotions as well, but finding other unique ways to make team members feel that there are many opportunities for growth and advancement at their jobs can further counteract some of the difficulties agency workers face today.
A definitive 87.9% of industry professionals believe that AI will radically transform digital advertising in the next 3-5 years. However, 67% of marketing and business professionals have identified insufficient education and training as the primary obstacle to adopting AI. By offering robust training during AI tool rollouts and providing continuing AI education to their teams, agencies can better harness the technology while equipping employees with new skills that serve their professional growth.
In the face of economic volatility and other financial pressures, adopting strategies that improve talent retention must be a top priority for agency leaders. By setting up systems that provide agency workers with regular praise and appreciation, adjusting their workplaces in service of efficiency and employee preferences, and developing a variety of ways for employees to grow, agency leaders can create the kinds of businesses where people want to stay for the long term.
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Want to learn more about how agency professionals feel about their jobs, their industry, and the trends shaping digital advertising today? Check out our 2025 Advertising Agency Report for all the top takeaways from our survey of agency professionals across the US.
