Nathalie Tadena reports in the Wall Street Journal:
“Unlike most businesses, all we have is talent. That is everything.”
When Sean Burpee went to advertising school at VCU Brandcenter in Richmond, Va., his initial plan was to come back to his career in the ad agency business and move up the ranks to make TV commercials.
But when it came time for a summer fellowship midway through the program, he was drawn to BuzzFeed, where he helped advertisers create content for the site. He enjoyed the creative independence so much that he dropped out of school to accept a full-time job.
“I was looking at agencies as well, but BuzzFeed was my No. 1,” said Mr. Burpee, now 29, who joined BuzzFeed in 2013. “There was absolutely no question.”
The advertising agencies born of the Mad Men era have always put a premium on recruiting top creative talent. These days, the task is getting tougher as hiring competition intensifies with companies outside the agency world. Silicon Valley’s juggernauts and new media startups like BuzzFeed are courting young people with similar skill sets, offering more creative freedom, flexible schedules and often more money.
“We are no longer competing just with other advertising agencies like Crispin Porter and BBDO, but now it’s also Facebook, Google, Vice, Maker Studios and other content players,” said Bob Jeffrey, non-executive chairman of J. Walter Thompson, an ad agency owned by WPP PLC. The competition, he says, has stepped up over the past year and is “growing.”
Almost 50% of creative jobs available today—including copywriters, designers, creative directors and content creators—aren’t at agencies, compared with 30% in 2010, estimates Amy Hoover, the president of Talent Zoo, a recruiting firm that specializes in the advertising, marketing and media fields.Advertisement
BuzzFeed has a unit that works with marketers to produce “branded content,” articles and videos that are paid for and are designed to be highly shareable on social media. Facebook Inc. has an in-house creative unit that works with advertisers on their Facebook campaigns, and is starting an “Anthology” program that will help marketers produce branded videos for Facebook. Google Inc. offers similar opportunities.
“There’s never been a better time to be a great craftsman of words or images,” said Eric Schnabel, North American lead of Facebook’s in-house creative team, Creative Shop. More than 50% of the unit’s employees come from an agency background, he said.More
The war for talent is one dimension of the broader struggle for ad agencies as the digital revolution in marketing disrupts their businesses. Advertising no longer consists of just a splashy TV commercial that took months to produce. Marketers also need a strategy for Twitter, Facebook and branded content.
Tech companies aren’t just poaching ad agency executives midcareer. They are recruiting at the same educational institutions that have long been a source of talent for the major agencies. Graduates who may have taken jobs as agency copywriters are now considering roles writing branded content for media companies, and digital-savvy storytellers are eyeing jobs at tech companies.
At the Creative Circus, an advertising school in Atlanta, representatives from Microsoft Corp. , Apple Inc. and Google have come to campus to look at students’ portfolios, said David Haan, the school’s executive director. At Miami Ad School, grads in recent years have been getting hired by companies including Twitter Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Apple and Vice Media, which previously weren’t going after people in the agency mold, said Pippa Seichrist, the school’s cofounder and head of innovation and development.
Five to six years ago, during the recession, annual turnover among junior-level staffers at ad agencies was about 10%, but in recent years it has been as high as 35%, estimates Tom Finneran, the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ executive vice president of agency management services, based on conversations with agency talent directors. That is because of more competition for digitally savvy talent and because an improving economy gives employees more confidence to change jobs, he said.
Advertising agencies are notorious for their low starting salaries, which are between $25,000 and $28,000 for an entry-level position, according to a survey conducted last year by the 4As. While tech companies typically offer higher salaries, wordsmith and graphics jobs hardly come with fat Wall Street-sized paychecks.
Still, money isn’t what draws the younger set to new creative destinations, ad executives said. There is “pop-culture cachet that some of these new players can offer, which is attractive to people in their 20s and 30s,” said Mr. Jeffrey of J. Walter Thompson.
After a few years working at big agencies in Los Angeles, Ren Toner said she wanted to work somewhere with a more nimble structure.
“Working for a startup is all the things I loved about ad school,” said Ms. Toner, 28, a graduate of the VCU Brandcenter, part of Virginia Commonwealth University, who now works as the content director for the GIF-like photo app Phhhoto. “I wanted something where I could be really close to the creative, really loose and really real-time, and I could just create.”
Hiring competition from Facebook, BuzzFeed and others has been ramping up, said Debbie Bougdanos, director of talent acquisition at Leo Burnett, an ad agency owned by Publicis Groupe SA . She said several Chicago ad agencies, including Leo Burnett, have seen some of their creative talent leave to join the Onion, which produces branded content for advertisers.
Mike Sheldon, CEO of ad agency Deutsch North America, owned by the Interpublic Group of Cos., says the key for agencies in recruiting is to convince strong job candidates they will get a chance to work with buzzy brands.
“Unlike most businesses, all we have is talent,” Mr. Sheldon said. “That is everything.”
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