How Ad Executives Cope With an Industry Recession

The largest advertising agencies have already cut more than 18,000 jobs this year. And as the ranks of Madison Avenue’s unemployed swell, the job of finding relevant work has become a big challenge for ad executives.

“People are getting desperate,” says Amy Hoover, a vice president at Talent Zoo, an executive-recruiting firm that specializes in ad-industry placements. “Job candidates are asking me to submit them for jobs that offer less pay and less responsibility — just so they can be employed again.”

Ad people are used to jobs being eliminated when accounts shift from one agency to another. But rarely has the industry’s foundation seemed so shaky. Even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, agencies of all sizes and shapes were already facing a bleak environment because of the slowing economy. The attacks have only exacerbated the problem. On Oct. 19, Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners let go 10 of its 50 employees at its West Cost office. On the same day, Omnicom Group’s TBWA\Chiat\Day disclosed that it had laid off 15 people from its work force of about 800. Other ad firms that have also issued pink slips recently include Interpublic Group’s Mullen/LHC, and Wieden & Kennedy.

Here are a few stories that highlight the difficult job environment in the ad world these days:

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Linda Mueller was one month shy of her five-year anniversary as an account executive at the Chicago office of Omnicom Group’s DDB Worldwide when she was let go in June. Until then, Ms. Mueller, 34 years old, felt secure about her job because of good performance reviews. But after DDB lost its Energizer account in May, she felt vulnerable and her fears came true soon after.

Ms. Mueller decided to “play” for the first four weeks after being fired. “When else am I going to get a chance to have the summer off?,” she says. “I played golf and traveled, and then I put my nose to the ground.” She looked at a host of agencies, including Omnicom’s BBDO Worldwide; Interpublic Group’s FCB; WPP Group’s J. Walter Thompson, and WPP’s Young & Rubicam. Ms. Mueller also contacted marketing departments at several companies, including Boeing Co. “Every agency said they have a hiring and salary freeze, and that they are trying to hold on to the employees they have,” she recalls.

Ms. Mueller now spends her days at an outplacement office and still hopes to find a solid job lead. But the room is fuller than when she first started her search. And leads have been scarce. She has started taking baking and pastry-making classes, and has even considered turning that hobby into a permanent career change. “Unless you go through this experience you can’t imagine how bad it is,” she says.

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Noelle Bibrowski, 28, joined the San Francisco office of Interpublic Group’s Foote, Cone & Belding in July 2000 and felt secure in having landed at a shop that had garnered the lucrative $300 million Compaq Computer account a year earlier. An account executive, Ms. Bibrowski was also relieved to land the job because her previous employer, Interpublic’s Lowe Lintas & Partners, was in trouble. That agency, also based in San Francisco, later closed.

Within six months at her new post, Ms. Bibrowski began to see that FCB, too, was having problems. Rumors of layoffs began to circulate, she recalls. Then, in February, the Amazon.com account was put up for review and eventually lost. Ms. Bibrowski, who had worked on the account, was shifted to Microsoft’s Ultimate TV business. A few months later, that business was also lost. “It was a weird feeling,” says Ms. Bibrowski. “Everyone in the city was getting laid off.”

Ms. Bibrowski was let go in May. Faced with the high cost of living in the Bay Area and little chance of landing ad work locally, Ms. Bibrowski and her husband moved to Atlanta. “We heard the market was better — but it was not,” she says.

Ms. Bibrowski hails from Toccoa, Ga., a 90-minute commute from Atlanta. Since August, she has attended almost a dozen interviews at firms such as WestWayne, Omnicom Group’s BBDO and Austin Kelly. So far, no luck. As industry layoffs mount, so have her concerns. “It’s hard enough without more people out there looking for work,” she says.

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During his tenure at Siegelgale, an independent branding firm based in New York, Matthew Bass helped clients such as J.P. Morgan Chase, American Express and Dow Chemical create brand strategies as a senior consultant. Then he was let go in April, just as he returned from a ski vacation. “I didn’t like it, but this is a business and I understood it,” says Mr. Bass, 50.

He immediately began looking for work, scouring job-board sites on the Internet. Mr. Bass also called friends at the big ad firms where he had contacts. These included DDB and Ogilvy & Mather, where he hoped to find a job in business development or as an account manager. “It was pretty bleak, ” he says.

Since April, Mr. Bass, a father of two, has depended on his unemployment insurance and money from a home-equity loan. Making matters worse, his wife lost her job recently. He is now focusing his attention on starting up a consulting business with an old friend that focuses on sales and marketing. Meanwhile, he has taken to spending plenty of time at the gym. One upside: he has lost 40 pounds and says he’s “in the best physical shape of my life.”

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Until June of this year, Mark Arnold was a heavy hitter in ad land, negotiating global media purchases on behalf of Ford Motor’s Jaguar brand. But as the economy slowed in the early months of 2001, Mr. Arnold, a managing partner in the London office of WPP’s MindShare, grew increasingly concerned about keeping his job. “Three months from now they will fire me,” Mr. Arnold thought in April.

Rather than wait for the ax to fall, the 53-year-old Mr. Arnold resigned in June and headed home to Atlanta with a severance package. It was a risky move, since colleagues had warned him not to return home without a job. They turned out to be right. Mr. Arnold hasn’t even landed a single job interview since then. “Every time I talk to somebody they say there is nothing out there,” he says. “For the rest of this year most agencies will be lucky if they get to spend half of what is left of their ad budgets,” he says.

Mr. Arnold is now living on savings while keeping his expenses low. He stays at his father’s house, and spends his days singing liturgical classical church music in choir groups and poring over trade publications. He thinks he has little chance of finding a job in the next nine months.