In just over a week, 15,000 media, technology and creativity professionals will descend upon the south of France for the Cannes Festival of Creativity.
If you are one of them, then perhaps at a moment when you are trying to get your elbow to a bar, or hunting that elusive Spotify wristband or (gasp) queueing to see an important debate, know this: In the last year, the 6 main holding companies have reduced their workforce by twice the total number of people at the Cannes festival.
My estimate is that there will be twice that amount lost in the next year. At least there should be, I'm sorry to say. Why? Because the holdcos overall have missed a devastating truth: the platforms already cut deeper, faster, and smarter two years ago.
And the platforms have an average revenue per employee of $1.75m, while the same measure in the holdcos is a paltry $155k. An 11.7x delta. Even with that cushion they have faced the reality of the rise of the machines and acted.
Yep, read that again. For every dollar an employee generates in a holdco, an employee in a platform generates $11.70 - and still they have cut deeper, earlier.
What follows isn't just data—it's the story of an industry facing its most profound transformation since the digital revolution. The numbers tell a stark story.
The advertising industry's six largest holding companies employed approximately 447,000 people at peak levels in 2022-2023. By mid-2025, that number has contracted by roughly 25,000 positions—a 5.6% decline that understates the human impact of continuous restructuring announcements.
WPP peaked at 114,732 employees in 2023 before cutting 6,688 positions (5.8% reduction) through 2024. The company's ongoing GroupM consolidation could eliminate another 6,000 roles, with CEO Mark Read calling 2025 a "year of transition" focused on AI-driven efficiency rather than human capital expansion. Speaking at the inaugural SXSW London yesterday, he told the audience "there is no doubt that to do the work we do today there will be fewer people involved." No shit.
Interpublic Group reached its apex earlier, employing 58,400 people in 2022. By 2024, IPG had shed 5,100 positions (8.7% reduction), with particularly deep cuts at digital agencies. The pending Omnicom merger promises further "synergies"—Wall Street's euphemism for an expected 20,000+ additional layoffs between them and Omnicom as they merge. Omnicom briefly hit 77,900 employees in January 2024 after acquiring Flywheel Digital, only to cut 3,000 positions throughout the year.
The smaller two? Dentsu peaked at 71,127 employees in 2023, subsequently reducing headcount by 4.4% through targeted restructuring in China and consolidation of its global operations under the "One Dentsu" model. Havas, the smallest of the six, saw its workforce decline from approximately 23,000 to 22,610, with restructuring costs rising 53% year-over-year to €29 million.
The outlier? Publicis Groupe, which grew from 98,022 employees in 2022 to over 108,000 by 2024—overtaking WPP as the world's largest advertising company by both revenue and headcount. This has come as they delivered industry-leading 18% operating margins and 5.8% organic growth underpinned by excellent leadership that is likely to take the most sober view of what now needs to be done. CEO Arthur Sadoun's pre-Cannes comments acknowledge this uncomfortable reality: "With clients being challenged and our industry facing an unrelenting newsflow of restructurings and layoffs, this year's Cannes will have a different tone."
The Platforms Already Saw What's Coming
While advertising agencies reached peak headcount in 2023, the tech platforms that increasingly control the marketing ecosystem had already begun their workforce reckonings a year earlier:
Meta eliminated 21,000+ positions (25% of its workforce) in 2022-2023, with Mark Zuckerberg declaring 2023 "the year of efficiency" long before agencies acknowledged their own inefficiencies
Google cut 12,000+ roles (6% of staff) in January 2023, focusing on consolidating AI capabilities while eliminating duplication
Amazon reduced its advertising and Alexa divisions by 18,000+ positions while simultaneously increasing its generative AI investments by $4 billion
Snap executed three rounds of cuts totaling 25% of its workforce while delivering revenue growth
The contrast is striking: while platforms were strategically restructuring around AI capabilities, agencies were still protecting headcount under outdated labor-intensive models.
The Perfect Storm: Three Forces Driving Industry Contraction
The advertising workforce reckoning isn't just about technology disruption—it's a perfect storm of three converging forces that suggest we're nowhere near the bottom:
1. Delayed Digital Transformation: While platforms built API-first, data-centric operations, agencies maintained labor-intensive service models until forced to change.
2. Macroeconomic Pressure: Client marketing budgets face unprecedented scrutiny, with the 2024 Gartner CMO Survey showing 62% of marketing leaders expect budget cuts in 2025-2026.
3. AI Acceleration: The capabilities gap between 2022's generative AI and today's agentic systems represents a 10x leap in what machines can accomplish without human intervention.
The full impact of this perfect storm remains unrealised. While agencies celebrate 5.6% workforce reductions as "transformation," the platforms that better understand AI's potential have already cut 15-25% of their workforces—suggesting agencies are only beginning their painful adjustment.
AI's True Impact Has Barely Begun
Recent research underscores how dramatically AI will transform knowledge work:
Anthropic's April 2025 paper "The Economic Impact of Advanced AI Systems" projects that 19% of current marketing jobs could be fully automated within 36 months, with another 37% substantially transformed.
Google's internal assessment leaked in May 2025 concludes that approximately 40% of current marketing tasks will be AI-assisted or AI-replaced by 2027, with creative production seeing the most dramatic displacement (62%).
MIT and Stanford's collaborative study on professional services automation found that mid-tier creative professionals face the highest displacement risk—precisely the group that currently comprises 65% of agency headcount.
Even more telling: when The Economist asked 60 AI experts to project the timeline for generative AI to match human performance across key marketing functions, the median estimate was just 3.7 years—roughly the length of a typical agency-client relationship.
Peak headcount wasn't just a number—it was the high-water mark of an era. The tide that is going out will not return. It's instead revealing a fundamentally altered shoreline upon which we must build. What emerges will be smaller, smarter, and fundamentally different from the industry celebrating on the Croisette.
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 5 June 2025 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.