Why agency talent might find more job opportunities with marketers

Agency executives looking for jobs might be better off prospecting at brands, where career opportunities are growing while agencies continue layoffs and restructurings. Amazon, for example, had 450 open marketing jobs as of March 17, data from executive search firm Taligence shows. And while Amazon is the world’s largest advertiser and marketing’s biggest employer, it’s far from the only major marketer investing heavily in in-house teams to gain firmer control of their operations. Amazon declined to comment for this story. See all of Ad Age’s 2025 Agency A-List winners here Several people interviewed, including consultants and headhunters, said they are seeing open client-side marketing jobs outpacing agency roles. Ad Age has also anecdotally observed in its Advertising Salary Guide series recently more open roles on the marketing side than at agencies. “Brands are building in-house teams at a rapid clip,” said Tony Stanol, president of Global Recruiters of Sarasota. He said that is due “partly for cost control, partly for speed and partly because of growing confidence that they can own more of their marketing destiny. On the agency side, hiring has been more cautious. Economic uncertainty, tighter client budgets and ongoing pressure on agency margins have led to fewer open roles, particularly in mid-to-senior-level positions.” Recent news: Early signs signal a recession may already have begun A particular sweet spot for hiring marketers is media. A Taligence 2024 U.S. Marketing Jobs Report released in January, which also showed CMO hiring to be on the rise, found that the marketing discipline showing the most growth year-over-year was media, with an increase of 55.9% of brands investing in some internal planning and buying functions. Taligence partners with Aspen Technology Labs to scrape live job postings daily from company sites. Several people interviewed for this story said marketers are looking to bulk up their in-house media buying capabilities because of agencies’ principal-based media buying, which has drummed up renewed scrutiny over possible markups and hidden fees. Drivers of the in-housing trend Some consultants and recruiters said that marketers are reluctant to speak about their in-house investments because economic uncertainty might force them to scale down at some point. These people said the same factors causing hiring caution among agencies are driving advertisers to bolster their in-house teams to rein in costs and control more of their marketing. This is a response to the tremendous pressure on chief marketing officers to adapt to a rapidly evolving industry shaped by new technologies such as generative AI, and the prospect of budget cuts ahead as marketers await the effects of tariffs and other policies of President Donald Trump’s administration. “Clients and brands are wanting to bring things into the heart of their business because those changes that are happening, those externalities that are pressuring them are not usually the ones that agencies think about,” said Kristi VandenBosch, CEO of Oliver North America, which designs, builds and runs in-house agencies for brands. VandenBosch said she anticipates the trend to accelerate, especially as there are now early signs pointing to a recession. The in-housing trend is causing marketers to bolster their teams more rapidly than agencies are staffing up, according to Taligence. Its data shows there were some seven times more marketing roles than agency roles available in the U.S. as of March 17 across various disciplines including media, product marketing and social media. The company found 36,769 open positions at marketers compared to 4,664 open agency positions. That marks a 4.3% increase in open jobs year-over-year on the marketer side and a 14% decrease year-over-year on the agency side. At first glance, there appears to be a wide disparity in the number of marketers Taligence tracks versus agencies—only 190 are agencies and 13,823 are marketers. However, holding companies are counted as a single “agency,” so the hundreds of agencies they house are not broken out as separate employers. Therefore, the numbers give a “reliable snapshot” of the hiring landscape, said Michael Wright, founder and managing partner of Taligence and former global head of talent acquisition innovation and operations at WPP. Ad Age Salary Guide The hottest ad industry jobs and what they’re paying Read more here New transparency issues behind the trend The in-housing trend is of course not new. Gregory Wright, senior VP of brand and media for the Association of National Advertisers, pointed to the ANA’s latest report on the in-housing trend, which is done every five years. The most recent research from 2023 showed that 82% of its marketing members had some sort of in-house operation, up from 78% in 2018. The ANA’s Wright said he’s “not sure” how much higher that number can get but “we’re still seeing a lot of new in-house agencies being created and those are growing … It’s across industries; 15, 20 years ago in-housing was really centered on insurance and financial services and, now, every industry is really bringing some services in-house.” The 2023 ANA report found that the biggest reason brands take certain functions in-house is to save money, although there isn’t any research available showing exactly how much cost savings companies get by bringing marketing in-house. Wright also said that transparency issues are “absolutely” factoring into brands taking media in-house, as they seek more control and therefore more “security.” “Especially when it comes to data ownership,” he said, “but then also if you’re in the programmatic supply chain, or really any supply chain, making sure that you’re not being subjected to fraud and you’re doing your due diligence to ensure that you’re spending your company’s money properly.” Helene DeVries, founder and CEO of industry headhunting firm HDV Talent, said she recently helped a marketing client build out its media team in-house. She said it’s “an efficiency story” for brands that can recruit talent directly from agencies to get that expertise in-house. “There is a plethora of great talent that has been looking for roles since the early days of 2024,” DeVries said. More news: CMO job moves and hiring trends to watch Top talent moving in-house The 2024 Taligence report found a “surge” in senior roles at client-side marketers last year—the total number of active job listings at the end of the year for director level and above reached 29,120 with 25,951 being new positions, a 7.8% increase in new job postings compared to 2023. That report found that there was a big focus on in-house talent specializing in “digital advertising, customer acquisition, pragmatic paid media investments and product-led growth strategies.” A recent LinkedIn “Skills on the Rise 2025” list the following areas in which brands are investing to stay ahead: performance measurement, AI literacy, growth strategy, campaign development and execution, innovative thinking, budget management, customer segmentation and strategy, cross-functional collaboration, stakeholder management and business-to-business marketing strategy. The ANA’s Wright said the influx of digital marketing and social media, with “brands creating social media war rooms so that they can really attack the culture at one time and be in the moment,” has led to growth in talent specializing in these areas, as well. Amazon’s open roles include a senior marketing manager of search marketing in New York (with a salary range of $128,600 to $212,600 a year, per a job listing) and a product marketing manager of North America Stores Marketing (with a salary range of $98,200 to $179,600 a year, per a job listing). 4A’s CEO Marla Kaplowitz said she is “currently seeing prudent hiring” on the agency side. “Notably, we have two holding companies dealing with a merger,” Kaplowitz added, referring to Omnicom Group’s proposed $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group of Cos., which shareholders voted last week to approve, “as well as the natural shifts that occur with client changes related to new business activity.” The holding companies have promised $750 million in synergies following the merger, which are widely anticipated to come from layoffs to reduce redundancies. Still, Kaplowitz said she is seeing agencies continuing to hire for roles in tech and AI, and “an increase in demand for mid-level talent." Agency job opportunities are also not being regarded as highly anymore, some people said. Ten years ago, the ANA’s Wright said, people wanted to work at an agency mainly because you got to work on different accounts and get more variety. But now brands are able to “hit those [concerns] head on and address them.” Pertaining to the diversity of work, for example, Wright said “a lot of these advertisers are houses of brands” so they started boasting to job candidates that “you get to work on all different kinds of brands as well as different types of content” while in-house. He said more marketers also offer remote working options compared to agencies, many of which started enforcing stricter return-to-office policies—holding company giant WPP was one of the latest, announcing in January a new mandate of four days in the office a week. Wright said many in-house agencies also started partnering with design schools to attract top creative talent. “In-house agencies have gotten a bit smarter about how to attract that talent,” he said. DeVries said she’s noticed many marketers hiring executives for fractional roles, which many job candidates prefer to give them more flexibility in their careers. Kathryn Strachan is a former agency executive—she founded her own shop Copy House where she served as CEO from October 2022 to August 2024—who transitioned to taking on fractional CMO roles for brands such as mental health solutions platform TriggerHub. Strachan said that while working on the agency side, she “loved the fast pace, working across industries and solving different challenges daily. It helped me to massively accelerate my career and go from being a copywriter to leading a successful business with 32 people,” but it also created “a lot of pressure and responsibility that led to burnout,” she said. “Moving in-house has been rewarding because I find it much easier to have a good work-life balance and boundaries,” Strachan said. The graph below from Taligence also gives a snapshot of median salaries for marketing roles based on seniority—C-suite executives make an average of $254,998 a year and those at the executive director, executive VP or senior VP level make $247,499 a year, on average. Ad Age also found in its Advertising Salary Guide research that brands sometimes at least offer higher salary ranges than agencies. In a recent search of open strategy jobs in New York, Ad Age found more job opportunities were within brand marketing teams than agencies and tech companies and social platforms such as Apple and TikTok were offering some of the most competitive salaries. An opening at the time for a director of marketing measurement strategy at fitness company Peloton offered the highest salary ceiling of $331,683 annually. VandenBosch said agencies are in part to blame for the in-housing trend because of what she sees as their inability to adapt to CMOs’ evolving needs. “The challenges and opportunities have just become so much greater because of this current environment in which we sit that I believe it will accelerate this internalizing of different kinds of ways of thinking about problem solving that are not the traditional ‘what do I budget for my marketing mix?’” she said. Agencies have not “had the capacity to step forward and recognize that we are in unprecedented times and being asked to solve unprecedented problems," VandenBosch added. Data-Driven Marketing Playbook Join us May 22 in NYC to explore how data powers marketing Learn more here

Why agency talent might find more job opportunities with marketers

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