Ad agencies face succession hurdles—inside the challenges in promoting employees

Succession planning at ad agencies has become increasingly more challenging as work-from-home and hybrid models have made it harder to identify and prepare junior and mid-level employees for promotions. But work-from-home models can only be blamed for so much, hiring experts said.

Three agency executives, including one from a top holding company, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the biggest element employees miss from working remotely is observing in person the way senior executives do their jobs, including running meetings with clients and managing people. They said they’re having trouble replicating those experiences for them.

“It is easier to develop talent from a learning and development perspective in the agency than remotely,” one global CEO of a holding company-owned agency said. “When you’re not working in an office, you don’t hear anything. If you can hear what your boss is saying, you’re learning on the job. At home, it’s very, very difficult to do that.”

Michael Haight, senior VP of client success for WorkReduce, which provides staffing services to the ad industry, said he’s seen the gaps his agency clients have between the executive and junior levels.

“In some places our team is able to step in and provide some of it, but in other places, the clients are really struggling to figure [it] out,” he said.

The problem, Haight said, is agencies need to provide more intentional programming around training in a remote environment, but executives are already so overworked because they’re dealing with staff shortages that they don’t have time to do it.

“In person, it’s just osmosis; follow me around, do what I do, listen to my conversations. In remote, that doesn’t work. You have to be a lot more intentional with teaching someone,” he said.

If ad agencies don’t figure it out, Haight said they will likely see higher turnover.

“Customer service is going to take a big knock if you have somebody running operations that doesn’t understand how to do it,” he said. “We’ve seen this; things will get missed, deadlines missed. And it will create a lot of friction internally at the agencies. Fingers get pointed when deadlines aren’t met or clients aren’t happy. You point those fingers at people who feel they are not equipped for the position or feel like they are overworked already. They’re not going to take it.”

Just an excuse?

Lauren Tucker, founder and CEO of inclusion management consultancy Do What Matters, which advises top ad shops such as TRG and The Martin Agency, has been increasingly helping agencies with succession planning.

What she tells the executives she advises is not to place the blame on remote work.

Tucker said ad agencies have always struggled to prepare their talent for the next steps in their careers, which has disproportionately affected diverse talent from being promoted. Ad agency executives, who are still mainly white and male, blaming remote work for their inability to promote people is another excuse for them to continue to discriminate against people who don’t look or think exactly like them, she said.

The latest annual report from She Runs It, which measures inclusion and diversity across marketing, media and tech, found that only 35% of the employees in these industries in 2022 were women; down from 46% in 2021 and 50% in 2020.

The report found that while the representation of Black employees in 2022 improved to 14%, only 6% of managers and 4% of corporate executives were Black. Approximately 17% of employees were promoted last year; 63% of them were white while only 8% were Black and 9% were LatinX. Only 8% of the entire workforce across marketing, media and tech in 2022 was LatinX, according to the report.

She Runs It President and CEO Lynn Branigan said recent return-to-office mandates by companies in the marketing, media and tech space have notably led to a decrease in female representation, many of whom are caretakers and need to work from home. She Runs It had a 60-person event last year with working mothers, Branigan said, and when they were asked if they were worried about being called back to the office and specifically it affecting their career growth if they weren’t able to return, almost every person in the room raised their hands.

Branigan said what she’s found is companies in the marketing, media and tech space do not have formal programs to promote women and people of color; only 43% of the companies She Runs It surveyed have succession planning for gender and diversity.

“It’s really important that companies are intentional about having support systems [for] women and underrepresented groups and have internal slates for vetting diverse promotions,” Branigan said.

Be intentional

WorkReduce CEO and Founder Brian Dolan said part of the reason agencies have always been particularly bad at succession planning is because of the way they’re structured.

“This is the nature of agencies,” Dolan said. “If you’re a marketer at a brand, you’re working with a much more hierarchical structure. Agencies are a lot more like a federation of people. A lot of the people are working primarily at the direction of their client. So that idea of somebody being there to do training or succession planning, it’s not there to the same degree it is in a traditional business structure.”

Agencies can overcome this if they dedicate the time to do it, Tucker said. She said ad agencies must have programs in place that ensure executives are not favoring employees who come into the office over remote workers.

Lauren Lotka, founder of ad industry talent firm Lotka&Co, said she’s been working with a number of clients on how best to evaluate talent on an equal basis. “We’re seeing a lot of younger talent not being invited to meetings, not around the conversations they need to be,” she said.

Lotka said the issue comes down to just having good company culture. Creating that culture ultimately falls on the shoulders of executives.

Clare Smith, chief experience officer of FutureBrand said all of the Interpublic Group of Cos. agency’s executives have been promoted from within. Smith herself has risen through the ranks since first joining as an account director in 2013.

FutureBrand is now on a mostly hybrid schedule where the majority of employees come in around two days a week, but the agency has promoted people who work entirely remote, too, Smith said. 

She said the agency has created clear action plans around over-communicating responsibilities to remote workers so it’s clear what they need to do to succeed and providing a “like-for-like” experience for them as their in-office employees are getting.

“We give constant job feedback,” Smith said. “The amount of time you spend with [remote] people has to be the same as in-person. We’ve matched and replicated the experiences people have in-person [and] the exposures they have with the leadership team.”

Amanda Forgione, CEO of Atlanta-based Morrison Agency, said her shop, too, has been more communicative and implemented more training for employees working remotely to manage the issue.

“There’s more explanations of why things are being done the way they are being done,” Forgione said. “Rather than saying, ‘do this thing, we need it by 5 p.m.,’ we’re explaining the rationale for why we need it by 5 p.m. It’s about giving context.”

These extra steps do take more effort and may mean more scheduled meetings with employees for executives like Smith and Forgione, but it’s also just part of the job now.

“It is more tiring but it is our responsibility,” Smith said.