When General Motors scaled back work from the Detroit offices of Commonwealth/McCann and Leo Burnett as part of an agency overhaul announced in June, the cuts sparked anxiety and anger in the Motor City creative community for which automotive has been a significant employment engine. Now a Detroit ad agency that works for a GM competitor is making a commitment to hire and nurture talent in the city.

Doner, which has long had Stellantis as a client, says it has established a $1 million incremental talent budget with a goal of hiring locally across key departments in the next 90 days.

Also read: How New York’s hot ad jobs market is hurting other cities

The program, branded #HireDetroit, includes other elements. The Stagwell-owned shop pledges to run a database of Detroit-based advertising talent at hiredetroit.doner.com and plans to share the data with clients, agencies and recruiters from across the country. Plus, Doner is providing LinkedIn Premium membership for 200 job seekers in Detroit and agency leaders will offer guidance via resume and portfolio reviews. It has also lined up Detroit-based personalized coaching platform Boon to provide complimentary career coaching to Detroit agency workers in need.

Commonwealth/McCann owner Interpublic Group and Leo Burnett owner Publicis Groupe have not confirmed the extent of potential layoffs resulting from GM’s decision. But the cuts are expected to be significant, according to industry professionals working in Detroit.

“The morale is very, very poor. People are finding it almost impossible to find jobs,” said Lianne Lyne, an executive/leadership coach in Detroit and formerly a cultural director for Team Detroit, a WPP agency dedicated to Ford that later rebranded to GTB.

In the wake of GM’s decision, Lyne bemoaned the move in a LinkedIn post that drew hundreds of comments, including one person who stated that “watching the Big 3 slowly and methodically pull advertising work out of the city they’ve depended on, is heart-wrenching.” (The Big 3 refers to GM, Ford and Stellantis; Ford in 2018 hired Wieden+Kennedy New York for creative, although WPP still has media and other duties it handles from Detroit.)

“We’ve heard about a lot of layoffs,” said David DeMuth, CEO of Doner Partners Network. “Hundreds and hundreds of people are losing their jobs.” Doner is “comfortable making the investment because I know we’ll find really great people. And I know, we have a very good new business pipeline right now,” he added. 

Another Detroit agency executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, estimated the job losses as likely to be more than 1,000—noting that the impact could be greater considering work done outside the agencies by editorial houses and post-production teams. “Freelancers are absolutely freaking out because there is no work anymore,” this person said.

Detroit’s agency community took another potential hit last week when Detroit-based Rocket Companies hired Publicis Groupe as its media agency of record, replacing Interpublic’s UM, which maintains a Detroit office. “UM’s offices in the U.S. service accounts all over the world, and we will continue to have a presence in Detroit,” said a UM spokesperson.

Publicis-owned Zenith, which was assigned day-to-day duties on the Rocket account, does not list a Detroit office on its website. Publicis Groupe Chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun in an interview last week said, “We are very pleased about this win for many reasons, but one that matters for me is that it’s also an [opportunity] for us to continue to invest and to grow our talent and our agencies in Detroit, which is a very important city for us.”

Publicis representatives did not provide details on how it is investing in those agencies. 

Lyne on LinkedIn asked Rocket Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Mildenhall if Publicis planned to open a Detroit office to service the account. He stated that "Publicis already have a big physical presence. We now just need to get them into one of our buildings…!"

GM’s agency transition is expected to take time, with Detroit agency job cuts likely to come in waves. 

The agency review, which was finalized on June 21, included moving Chevrolet creative from Commonwealth/McCann to Stagwell’s Anomaly, which has offices in New York and Los Angeles. Chicago-based Leo Burnett had long maintained a Detroit office to serve GM, including GMC, Buick and Cadillac creative as of late. That office took a hit when GM assigned GMC creative to Austin, Texas-based Preacher; Buick to Mother, which has offices in Los Angeles and New York; and Cadilac to Stagwell’s 72andSunny, which has offices in New York and L.A.

“We sought out the very best agencies possible, no matter where they were located, geographically speaking,” GM Global Chief Transformation Officer Molly Peck said in a June 21 interview. “That doesn’t mean that we’re moving away from a Detroit-based presence, though.”

While Publicis and Interpublic saw their scope reduced they are retaining some work, GM confirmed at the time.

GM did not provide additional comments for this story. 

Also read: Winners and losers from the GM review

Commonwealth/McCann is trying to help those affected by offering services such as free headshots, resume-building workshops and connecting employees to other opportunities within IPG, according to an agency representative.

Doner expects to hire 10 to 15 people with the $1 million fund. Of course, that won’t be nearly enough to absorb the GM-related agency job losses, which is why the agency established other programs to assist the unemployed. The new #HireDetroit talent database includes options for people to express interest in the LinkedIn membership and career coaching opportunities.

Doner has already hired eight people from GM agencies, including Matthew Milia, who worked on the GM account for Leo Burnett and landed a role as an associate creative director at Doner, marking a return to the agency he worked at for three years ending in 2022. Milia describes himself as a fourth-generation Detroiter on LinkedIn, noting that his great-grandfather “emigrated here from Greece, set up a small radiator shop in 1914 (that serviced The Big Three for over a hundred years).” He posted about his move on his last day at Leo Burnett about a month ago, saying, “to be leaving on my own terms for a better opportunity is a privilege I don’t take lightly—and one that many of my colleagues in this city-wide shakeup don’t currently have,” adding that “people need to understand the insane degree of ad talent in this town.”

DeMuth said Doner will not pigeonhole people with automotive experience into the Stellantis account, suggesting they could work on a wide range of clients. (Stellantis, whose brands include Jeep and Ram, is having a tough year, recently announcing a cost-cutting program that involves offering a voluntary separation program for its U.S. salaried workforce, according to Automotive News.)

Doner’s client roster includes Kenvue, The UPS Store, Meijer and Coca-Cola Co. (Fairlife and Core Power).

DeMuth is a New Jersey native who started at Doner in Cleveland but has been in Detroit for the past two decades. Detroit agency talent is underappreciated, he said, “because the people are kind of inside these agencies that exist for the sole purpose of serving a car company. So they don’t often get as much exposure.” But “the thing that’s great about working on a big car account is they spend a lot of money. So you get exposed to a lot of different things.”

Still, DeMuth said he has “no issue with [GM] looking outside of Detroit, they should hire the best agencies for their business that they think can move their business. So I am not parochial at all.”

But “I think there are a lot of good people inside these agencies in Detroit that have been doing really good work,” he added. “You know, GM is selling a lot of cars right now, so clearly the work has been having an impact. And we’d be crazy not to fully examine and try to meet as many of these people as possible because they could make a difference in our business.”

It’s not the first time Detroit agencies have suffered a blow, he said. “I think people understand these things go in cycles,” he added. “Detroit people are used to getting knocked down a bit and getting back up.”