AUCKLAND, Monday: A picture is emerging of a NZ ad & comms sector in serious trouble – with M+AD’s ongoing coverage of redundancies at our bigger agencies revealing only the tip of an iceberg.
Several readers have pointed this out – but the agencies involved are so many and so small, it’s difficult to quantify the damage.
“Hey there, Ed,” writes Kiwi author & comms consultant Sarah Ritchie. “It’s not a small number
“What people tend to forget is that our industry is not just the networks and large indies.
“We are into hundreds of redundancies within the creative comms sector.”
“We have over 1000 creative comms companies in New Zealand, and almost all of those companies will have been hit by Covid in some measure.
“We are definitely into the hundreds of redundancies within the creative comms sector.
“I don’t have an actual figure, but it’s not hard to do some mental arithmetic when I add up the people we know of directly, plus what we read in the media, plus anecdotal reports.
“We have some amazing people out of work, and we are going to lose some great talent to client-side roles.
The brain-drain
“Our industry had a significant brain-drain going prior to Covid, and these redundancies have just exacerbated the problem.”
Sarah Ritchie runs NZ online creative comms industry directory Agency Who’s Who.
Share this Post
