Eighty People a Day

The Q1 results season starts in a few weeks, and the leaders of the world's five largest holding companies will stand at their podiums and brief investors on "structural optimisation progress." They will use phrases like "labour-related savings," "deduplication of roles," and "headcount efficiencies." Analysts will nod. Models will update. Some stock prices will move.

Between them, they've announced so far somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 role reductions in 2026. This is on the back of a greater number in 2025. Omnicom doubled its 'synergy target' to $1.5 billion in February, with $650 million of those savings coming specifically from "labour-related costs." WPP's CFO Joanne Wilson said plainly on results day: "In a business where most of our cost savings are people, that will mean a reduction of certain heads." WPP's headcount had already fallen 8.7% in 2025, nearly 9,400 people. Dentsu is cutting 3,400 overseas roles.

It adds up to eighty people. Every working day.

Losing their jobs in our industry.

Eighty people today, deciding how long they can delay telling their partner.

Eighty people tonight, running a different kind of calculation at the kitchen table. Not the ones in the analyst deck. The one that asks: how many months of runway do we have? When does the school fee direct debit go out? What do we tell the kids?

Eighty people not opening the banking app. Not yet. As long as you don't look at it, the number is theoretical.

Eighty people whose LinkedIn is suddenly too prominent in their minds. Who wonder whether to change their status now or wait. Who are aware, for the first time in years, how thin their external profile is, because for the last decade, the badge did the talking.

Eighty people who will sit in a meeting today that they are no longer part of, with colleagues who are not quite sure how to look at them. Eighty people performing normality, which is the most exhausting performance in professional life.

I know every single one of those moments and not from observation.

Before I share my own story, I want to name something that I think explains why redundancy in this industry carries a specific weight that the financial exposure alone doesn't account for.

Most of us did not join for the money. We joined for the problems. And for the people who solved them.

Genuinely hard, externally pointed problems like brand crises, market entries, campaigns that had to move culture, launches that had to change behaviour. Problems that existed outside the building. And the only way to solve them was to put an extraordinary collision of people in the same room: strategists and creatives and analysts and producers, from different backgrounds and different instincts, pointed at something none of them could crack alone. That collision, that specific electricity, was the deal. It was why the hours were acceptable and the politics were tolerable and the pay was frequently not enough. Because the work faced outward. Because the enemy was the brief, not the org chart.

What has happened, gradually and then quickly, is that the problems have turned inward.

The daily challenge inside most holding companies is no longer the client's impossible question. It is the internal one. The restructure. The merger integration. The budget defence. The headcount justification. The navigation of three layers of leadership that are themselves uncertain. The talent is still there the extraordinary, diverse, collision-ready talent that drew us all in. But it is pointed at itself now, not at the world outside.

So when the redundancy comes, there are two griefs at once. The loss of the role. And the quieter recognition that the work, the version of the work that made you stay, that made the hours make sense, had already started changing before you did. You weren't only losing a job. You were losing the last version of the thing you came here for.

That is the grief the CFO briefings don't have a line item for.

And it is shared. By the eighty people in the HR conversation today. And by the people who will be in the office tomorrow, navigating the same inward-facing world, wondering when they last felt that electricity.

Years before I lost my job, it was my dad who told me one day: "No one ever seems to retire from advertising. At some point you will lose your job, and when you do, remember that I'm here and we will work it out."

Between this level of love, and being more senior at the time, there were some aspects that were made easier. But it still didn't protect me from what followed. Seniority made some aspects more complicated as there is a greater risk that your professional identity has fused with your role. The title wasn't something I did. It was, in ways I hadn't examined until that moment, something I was.

The journey back from that is the same journey for everyone. And it follows, roughly and non-linearly, a path that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross first described for a different kind of loss. It applies here with uncomfortable accuracy.

This is the first and most misunderstood stage. It is not delusional. It is protective. The mind quite sensibly refuses to absorb something too large all at once. In the days after, you find yourself thinking: "They'll realise they need me." You look at your phone expecting a follow-up call. You revisit conversations, searching for signals that were missed or misread. You prepare arguments you will never make, to people who have already moved on. Denial is nature giving you time to pace the impact. Don't fight it. Do not confuse it with a plan.

It comes next, and it is useful. More useful than it is given credit for. Kübler-Ross herself wrote that anger gives you something to hold onto when everything else has dissolved. In this industry, the anger has legitimate targets: decisions made in boardrooms by people who will not feel the consequences, language engineered to make human removal sound like process improvement, a structural crisis you did not create being resolved at your personal expense. Feel it. Don't permanently park your career inside it. Anger as orientation is healthy. Anger as identity becomes the thing that closes doors.

This is the quietest and most private of the stages. It is the 2am negotiation with yourself. If I had been more visible. If I had handled that client situation differently. If I had built a stronger relationship with the person who made the decision. The "if onlys" come in waves. Guilt is bargaining's frequent companion. Here is what I can tell you from the other side: most of this story is false. The conditions that led to your redundancy were set before most of the things you are bargaining over. You are negotiating with a decision that was already made.

When bargaining exhausts itself, reality lands. Properly. This is the stage that requires the most honest attention and the one most people in our industry try hardest to skip. In a world that celebrates resilience and "bouncing back," sitting with the genuine weight of what has happened feels like failure. It is not. It is processing. The withdrawal, the fogginess, the mornings where the lack of structure is suffocating, these are appropriate responses to actual loss. The loss of income is real. The loss of identity is real. The loss of the daily rhythm that told you who you were is real. Trying to sprint through this stage into LinkedIn optimism is the reason so many people carry unprocessed grief from job losses into the next role, and the one after that.

Not happiness. Not closure. Not "everything happens for a reason." Acceptance is the quieter thing: the moment when the loss stops feeling like an emergency and starts feeling like territory. You are still here. Your skills are unchanged. What you know is unchanged. The structure that validated them has changed. Those are different things, and when you can feel the difference, you are through the worst of it.

These stages are not linear. You will revisit anger when acceptance felt close. You will find denial reappearing three weeks in. That is not regression. That is grief functioning normally.

There is no shortage of generic advice for job loss. Update your CV. Tap your network. Stay positive. It is not wrong. It is just not built for this industry, at this moment, in this structural context.

Here is what I have found genuinely useful, from my own experience, and from watching others navigate it:

The concealment is not protecting them. It is isolating you at the moment when isolation is most costly. The people closest to you are also most capable of absorbing this without it meaning what you fear it means. The longer you carry this alone, the heavier the secondary weight of managing the secret becomes. The conversation will be difficult. Not as difficult as the one where they find out you've been carrying it alone for three weeks.

The financial pressure is real. The answer to it is almost never the next job you apply to on day four. Give yourself two weeks (if you can) before converting grief into job search. Not because the market will wait, but because the version of you that applies from clarity is more effective than the one that applies from fear. This is counterintuitive. It is also consistently true.

Your network is primarily adland. Your instinct will be to work it hard. But this is a structural shift, not a cyclical one, meaning the roles being cut are not returning in their current form. The organisations currently hiring including technology companies, brands building in-house capability, growth-stage businesses and consultancies speak a different language to holding company job titles. Understanding what you are in that language is the highest-leverage thing you can do early in your search. You managed £50 million client portfolios through transformation. You influenced C-suite decisions in complex stakeholder environments. You built commercial propositions under pressure. None of that disappears with the title.

Sleep. Movement. The discipline of a daily structure that is not job searching. The morning routine you had when you had somewhere to be is more valuable now than it was then. The professional world will not notice you took a week to stabilise. You will notice if you don't.

Not on LinkedIn. With the people who deserve to know. The idea that senior professionals should process redundancy privately and return to the market projecting unbroken confidence is one of the more damaging myths in our industry. It is why so many people in this position feel uniquely isolated, even when the numbers above make it mathematically impossible for this to be unique.

The hardest reframe, and the most important one, is this.

What is happening is not a downturn you wait out. The roles being eliminated are not returning when the next budget cycle turns. AI is permanently reducing the labour requirement for certain agency functions. Merger synergies eliminate duplication that will not be rebuilt. Platform consolidation has permanently changed how many intermediary roles the system needs.

The holding companies will not say this in their Q1 briefings. They will talk about "right-sizing for the future." The future they are right-sizing for is one with structurally fewer roles of the type currently being cut.

This is not pessimism. It is the most useful thing I can offer. Because the person who understands they are in structural disruption prepares differently to the person waiting for the cycle to turn. They ask different questions. They build different things. They find the paths that are genuinely open rather than waiting at the doors of the ones that are genuinely closing.

I want to end with the thing that has stayed with me since I started writing this.

The redundancies are real. The grief is real. But so is this: the talent being released into the market right now is some of the most capable this industry has ever produced. People who know how to hold complexity, move culture, build propositions, navigate ambiguity, influence rooms. People who came to this industry because they wanted to point their abilities at something hard and external and worth solving. Those problems still exist. They are everywhere. And the people carrying the skills to solve them are not diminished by the structure that no longer needs them in the same form.

To the eighty today: you are not alone. The journey has a shape, and people come through it. And the thing that made you good at this, well that was never the company's to take.

To everyone else reading this: someone in your network is having the kitchen table conversation tonight. You probably know who. Reach out. Not with job leads. Not with advice. Just reach out. That was always what this industry was best at, when it remembered to point outward.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 30 March 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.