New York once again seems to be the mecca for the advertising industry, recovering from a shift during the pandemic outbreak of 2020 that saw talent move out of the city. But the Big Apple’s resurgence may be coming at the expense of other cities, including Chicago and San Francisco.

There are several concurrent trends causing this gravitational shift back to New York, according to 10 agency executives, recruiters and other experts who spoke with Ad Age. Among them are a rising population of creative and advertising talent moving back to New York and a rise in ad professionals opening their own agencies in the city. New independent agencies that have opened in New York within the last 18 months include Powers Creativity, Flower Shop, Quality Experience and Creyentes.

Another factor is major holding companies and their agencies consolidating leadership in New York, while offshoring certain jobs across creative, media and production to offices and operations in places such as India and South America to drive down costs, some insiders said. With return to office mandates becoming stricter, there is a need for executives to physically be located in New York, which has a preponderance of clients and is where most holding companies have a strong presence. 

“New York has had a resurgence of holding company growth and independents popping up,” said Owen Williams, founder and managing partner of ad recruiting firm Outside Lines. “That’s where the jobs seem to be at the moment. I have clients [job candidates] who have been inside the Atlanta market who got laid off and I tell them, ‘You better be ready to move to New York.’”

Look back: The last major agency to leave Madison Avenue

According to LinkedIn talent data shared with Ad Age, the total talent pool in marketing and advertising is just over 3 million, with 43,500 job postings as of this writing. The most postings are in the following cities, in order: New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas.

San Francisco was not listed as one of the leading cities with open advertising jobs—it’s a major tech advertising hub that is now experiencing the most inactivity in the sector, according to recruiters and agency executives. That’s partly due to client cutbacks in the tech sector, which has lessened the need for a robust agency presence in the market.

“I was so involved there for years,” said Serena Wolf, industry headhunter and founder of recruiting firm Wolf Creative Co. “There’s a lot of talent in the Bay waiting and wondering. I’m so sad about the Bay. I hope it comes back.”

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While it’s nice to see New York thriving again, some people said there are concerns around how this monumental shift back to the Big Apple could negatively impact diversity in the industry, which is already experiencing recent setbacks.

If agencies have people “working throughout the country, you get more diverse thinking. If everyone is centralized in New York, it eliminates a lot of opportunity” to diversify, said a former holding company executive, who essentially “stopped looking” for a full-time position in San Francisco due to a lack of open jobs in the area.

Top-level momentum in New York

Within the past year, there has been a flurry of big new hires at most of the major holding companies and their agencies in New York. 

Publicis Creative U.S. hired a trio of New York-based executives at ad hoc creative service Le Truc: Tiffany Edwards, as executive VP of integrated growth and business acceleration, and Ramon Jimenez and Dylan Viner as co-chief strategy officers and partners. Publicis New York hired Joe Mongognia as chief creative officer in April; New York-based Julia Neumann became partner and chief creative officer of Le Truc last September; and Susie Nam, also based in New York, was named CEO of Publicis Creative U.S. The holding company also hired Renato Fernandez, who is located in Los Angeles, in June to the newly created position of chief creative officer for Publicis Creative U.S.

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WPP’s GroupM recently announced its new global CEO, Brian Lesser, to replace Christian Juhl—several people close to the business had told Ad Age that Lesser’s New York base was one factor, among many others, in his hiring. Juhl was based in San Francisco, which had become an issue because he was not close enough to the majority of the executive leadership team, these people had said. WPP declined to comment.

Mindshare, a GroupM media agency, recently eliminated some regional city leaders and consolidated certain leadership in New York. Scott Wensman, Mindshare’s former Atlanta office lead, was let go in the shift in June. Wensman did not immediately return a request for comment and Mindshare declined comment.

Over at Omnicom, Jeff Adkins, president and CEO of Chicago-based Energy BBDO, is leaving the agency. The agency did not confirm if he would be replaced in the role, drumming up speculation that the shop could consolidate its New York and Chicago office leadership. That came after New York-based Nancy Reyes was named BBDO’s CEO of the Americas in October.

The leadership shuffle at Energy BBDO follows an Ad Age report last year that Omnicom Group was making moves to significantly pare real estate costs in markets including San Francisco, Dallas and Chicago—in Chicago, the holding company consolidated staff across different agencies including BBDO and DDB into one office, as a means to utilize space that had remained empty following COVID-driven closures.

BBDO declined to comment on the speculation around its leadership consolidation.

Omnicom, Publicis and WPP declined to comment on their hiring strategies.

Concurrently, there have been layoffs and closures in cities outside New York.

WPP shut down its San Francisco campus; the opening of which was announced in 2019 to better serve tech clients such as Amazon, Google and Meta. At the time, the campus was described as having the capacity to house more than 1,000 employees. WPP declined to comment on why the San Francisco campus was closed, but one person close to the business said teams in the Bay Area were moved to a different office; it’s unclear how many employees are based there.

Interpublic Group of Cos.-owned ​​FCB Chicago laid off 9% of its 800-person staff as a result of the holding company losing the Pfizer creative account, Ad Age reported in May. 

IPG did not respond to a request for comment.

The New York pull also extends to indies. Some insiders said Wieden+Kennedy’s New York office has seemingly been outpacing its flagship Portland, Oregon shop—the New York shop rose from its sibling’s shadows in 2019 when it was named lead U.S. creative agency for McDonald’s.

In February, W+K Portland laid off about 90 members of its 440 staff, with Portland President Jason White blaming the cuts at the time on a need to better align with client work. Although both offices have had some client losses over the past year—Portland lost TurboTax and New York lost Duracell)—the layoffs made Wieden’s New York office the largest by a wider margin within the independent network, with its current headcount at 479.

W+K declined comment.

Why the Big Apple is so dominant

Talent who fled the Big Apple during COVID-related closures are once again returning, causing part of agencies’ investments in New York. It’s simply where a lot of top professionals are gravitating.

“Talented people took to remote work during the pandemic, but as the pandemic has ebbed, we have gone back to more of normal,” said Richard Florida, an urban studies theorist focusing on social and economic theory and professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. “Companies have called people back to work. But even more so, people have wanted to get back in the swing of things. New York, of course, has the largest labor market for educated and talented people.”

There is also a growing need for holding companies to get employees to return to the office to justify the real estate costs of their massive office spaces in major city centers, some insiders said. Many agencies follow a three-day in-office hybrid schedule. This has agencies reversing remote work policies adopted during the early stages of COVID and mandating people relocate to the cities in which their respective office is located. For a lot of agencies, the focus is on repopulating their New York offices.

“Especially leadership, they need to be in the office,” Wolf said.

Holding companies in general are looking to consolidate leadership in one place and New York is by far the prime spot, said Brian Wieser, principal of the consultancy Madison and Wall. 

“New York, London and Paris are the centers of the world for the global advertising industry,” said Wieser, who is based in Portland, Oregon. “In general, 20 years ago the agency business was much more conservative. New York was far and away the biggest. San Francisco was a fairly important city. L.A. a strong No. 2.; Chicago was a diminishing No. 3 but still important. Everyone else came after.”

Wieser said not only is talent gravitating back to New York, but many executive leadership teams are based there so it makes sense why agencies are prioritizing hiring in the Big Apple once again.

“It’s America’s largest city,” Florida said. “It is the world’s most economically powerful city. It has the largest concentration of corporate headquarters. And it’s a magnet for talented young people who fuel the industry. If you want to make a career in advertising, you should go to New York.”

Florida said that’s never been truer today as New York’s dominance in the U.S. and world has “only increased.”

Meanwhile, holding companies are also offshoring certain jobs across disciplines to places such as India and South America to reduce costs. This may be eliminating job opportunities in some of the secondary markets such as Chicago and San Francisco, some people said. The move to offshore certain jobs comes as industry professionals also increasingly fear that some of their roles will be eliminated by AI.

One former holding company agency CEO told Ad Age that he saw a young creative professional produce around 30 pieces of creative—including copy, concept and visuals—in three days with the help of ChatGPT. This person said that type of output would normally take a full agency team four weeks to complete.

“Was it great work? Absolutely not,” the former holding company agency CEO said. “But for a lot of categories in marketing, I’m betting eight to nine clients will say ‘sign me up for that.’ It’s coming and people haven’t quite figured out what to do.”

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The need to be close to clients

Florida, the urban studies theorist, said the reason New York has always been so important for agencies is because it is home to most clients.

“It has far and away the largest number of corporate headquarters and enormous concentrations of the technology and entertainment industries, along with finance, insurance, real estate and others,” he said. “It’s the place advertising agencies need to be to be close to their client base.”

That is why a lot of these secondary markets exist: proximity to clients. When agencies started acquiring more auto clients, they set up massive offices in Detroit. When shops started working on the Silicon Valley tech titans, they set up offices in San Francisco.

But the tech sector has been in decline, leading to less investment in hubs in San Francisco, especially.

In terms of tech, those clients in general cut back on marketing last year, leading to layoffs at agencies such as IPG’s Huge, while companies including Microsoft, Google, and Paypal went through massive layoffs, as well.

Florida said New York’s tech sector growth is actually outpacing San Francisco right now.

New York has “seen the largest increase in its relative share of high-tech startups” in the U.S., he said. “It’s No. 2 to San Francisco Bay, but its rate of growth has been faster.”

Meanwhile, as professionals increasingly work remotely, having key leaders near a client’s headquarters while servicing most of the account from another office in a different city—such as New York—suffices for many marketers. This arrangement eliminates the need for agencies to build robust hubs in secondary markets, according to some insiders, including agency executives.

Nissan, for example, relocated its U.S. headquarters to Tennessee from Los Angeles in 2005, yet the account is still largely serviced by TBWA in L.A. General Motors also recently appointed a roster of new creative and CRM agencies, including Stagwell’s Anomaly and 72andSunny and independents Mother and Preacher—none of which have Detroit offices.

The impact on diversity

This gravitational pull back to New York does have its downsides; in particular, it could have a devastating impact on diversity in the industry. The mandate that people physically be in New York is a reversal from the mindset of many ad leaders during COVID-related closures. At the time, they praised the ability to hire from anywhere due to the remote work environment, which they said helped them recruit diverse talent.

Limiting hiring to New York, especially, automatically eliminates people who can’t afford to relocate there, some people said.

New York was ranked the fifth most expensive place to live in the U.S. in 2024-25, according to the U.S. News & World Report. It has a home price of $834,096 and median monthly rent of $1,852.

Agency leaders need to be more flexible in their hiring strategies and continue to offer remote working options in order “to manage and engage a talent force profoundly changed by technology and the disruption of the pandemic,” said Lauren Tucker, founder and CEO of inclusion management consultancy Do What Matters.

“For visionary leaders, flexible work strategies offer game-changing ways to access the fresh talent needed to bring a diverse and truly global aesthetic to an industry that hasn’t covered itself in creative glory during the last 20 years,” Tucker said. “Most holding company executives still live in the last century of the man in the gray flannel suit and ‘Madmen.’”

Although WPP’s VML is primarily back on a hybrid schedule of three days in the office and two days working from home, the network continues to hire across various U.S. offices to access diverse talent, according to Aimee Pagano, the global head of talent acquisition at WPP’s VML. This includes some of its largest offices such as Kansas City, Missouri.

“We have a large office in New York City, but we’re not necessarily only hiring talent in that place,” Pagano said. “We have 26 offices across North America which puts us in this very unique position where we're able to actively look for talent in that footprint … But, if you just look at the data, it does show that for other companies and just in general in this industry, the talent flows where people are leaving and moving; New York City is one of those places.”

For the many agencies that do want talent in New York, Williams said he’s already seeing working parents who are not in the city, in particular, being negatively impacted.

“When you have kids and you make it out of New York, you don’t want to go back to New York,” he said. “It’s a huge problem. You’re talking about schools, space for your family … New York is New York for a reason. It’s just regaining its dominance. Companies are saying ‘Hey if you want to work for us, come here.’”

Pockets of opportunities elsewhere

While it seems New York is offering the most job opportunities in the ad industry right now, talent living outside of the Big Apple shouldn’t be entirely discouraged.

Wolf said a lot of independent agencies outside of New York are growing and continuing to hire. “Atlanta is hiring and t​​here are pockets of opportunities there for diverse talent,” she said.

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Florida added that he wouldn’t characterize cities such as Chicago or San Francisco as having “declining” ad sectors. He said Chicago and San Francisco still have two of the largest concentrations of corporate headquarters, so “we will always see a relatively large concentration of the advertising industry in those cities.”

“There are vibrant economies and lots of headquarters in even Sunbelt cities like Miami, which is a center for Latin American advertising and media, or Houston or Dallas or West Coast cities like Seattle, all of which have large concentrations of corporate headquarters of companies,” Florida said.

Contributing: Bradley Johnson