'Wide-eyed innocence and blind terror': ‪Why haven't advertising professionals unionised?

Long hours without overtime pay, the increasing amount of mergers, the inevitable layoffs that follow, the not-so-slow creep towards the gigification of roles with no benefits or stability, the very real threat of AI replacing jobs... are these enough reasons for advertising professionals to unionise?

 

Apparently not. Unlike other creative industries, as it stands, advertising is an industry that hasn’t been unionised traditionally.

 

But why? 

 

"Wide-eyed innocence and blind terror," says Steve Walls, lead strategist at Moon Rabbit. "Agencies sell young people coming into the business the idea that this is fun. So much fun it barely qualifies as work."

 

Walls says that young advertising professionals in particular, are often sold the idea that they'll get to exercise their creative muscles, pick up awards and have fun doing it—in colourful offices filled with pool tables, shiny trophies and all manner of perks (free pizza?).

 

"Who needs protection when you're pretty much working for Willy Wonka?" says Walls. "The older people who have cottoned on to the long hours without overtime pay, expectation of repeated weekend work and lack of job security, are so aware that they can and will be replaced by a kid who'll take half the money that they try to blend into the background so as not to be noticed."

 

"Given that the culture is 'work long, work for free, work for pizza' organising for better conditions is hard," adds Walls.

 

The age of precarious work

 

For the majority of workers today, these are precarious times. According to a recent survey by tech giant Fiverr, the majority of marketing leaders (54%) have more freelancers on their team this year compared to previous years. Meanwhile, 80% of marketing leaders know of marketing professionals who have become freelancers as a result of either layoffs or return-to-office policies. 

 

Goodbye job security, benefits, stability. Hello routine contract talks that typically go in the financial provider's benefit, and no legal defence if someone shortens your contract, demands unpaid overtime, or requests you to lower your day rate. Not forgetting the freelancer's favourite task of endlessly chasing up overdue invoices. 

 

And then of course there's AI—the emergence that industry folk can't tell you enough is just a work enhancer, assistant, collaborator... basically any other word but a job replacer. Yet a report from Forrester Research predicts some 32,000 ad agency jobs could be replaced by automation as soon as 2030. Clearly, someone's going to lose out.

 

 

Advertising's first union

 

Not content with the precariousness of agency life in the industry today, Thom Binding, a strategist at a London agency, set about co-founding what appears to be one of the first unions of advertising agency workers globally.

 

Called Creative Communications Workers (CCW), the union comprises advertising, digital, PR, design, media and production employees—with a mission to improve working conditions, secure a pay rise, paid overtime, job security and long-term career development prospects. Conditions that "will not come about out of the sheer good will of senior management", says a statement on the union's website. 

 

"Workers are facing increasingly precarious environments, which is the precise reason they need to unionise to ensure greater protections and support for times of crisis," says Binding. "Workers have shorter lifespans within individual agencies than in previous decades, with older workers managed out. The traditional agency business models are creating tighter and tighter margins, leading to cost cutting and a lack of investment in workers. This being despite workers being the only credible point of difference that agencies offer."

 

Similarly, earlier this year in Canada, independent agency Point Blank Creative, which employs 50 full-time employees across offices in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa, voted in favour of the agency’s first collective bargaining agreement.

 

“The idea of an ad agency being unionised sounds completely foreign in our industry, but we did it,” said executive creative director Pierre Chan, a member of the agency’s management team, in an email to Campaign's sister site The Message. “So often people are overworked in the ad industry and feel undervalued—we hear about people burning out all the time.

 

“So this collective agreement is groundbreaking for our industry, and it’ll hopefully set the stage for other agencies to set similarly high standards.”

 

Chief strategy officer Natasha Madison, also a member of the agency’s management team, told The Message: “Being unionised offers fair and transparent wages; equity across all departments; fairness, including a formal process to resolve any grievances with your employer; the security of a full-time permanent job, and the ability to bargain collectively instead of negotiating 1:1."

 

The creative sector, she said, has become “over-reliant” on the gig economy, with many of these employees not afforded protections around fair wages, job security, etc.

 

"Agencies should be playing a role in helping more creatives move out of the gig economy and into good permanent jobs where they’re fairly paid and respected for that work,” said Madison. “I’d ask other agencies to consider, if you’re not open to unionising, why?” she added.

 

While trade unions like CCW and agencies like Point Blank might hold promise, they remain in a minority when it comes to unions in advertising. Campaign reached out to all the main agency groups to ask if they support the right of their people to join trade unions and to bargain collectively. Publicis Groupe, Ogilvy, Havas, Dentsu, BBDO, and Omnicom did not respond. 

 

WPP referred us to their Annual Report on p.76 that says: We support the rights of our people to join trade unions and to bargain collectively, although trade union membership is not particularly widespread in our industry. In 2022, around 4% of our employees were either members of a trade union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement (2021: 4%). We held 220 consultations with works councils, mainly in Europe.

 

Similarly, IPG responded to say: Since 2015, IPG has been a signatory of the UN Global Compact, which means (among other things) that we commit to “uphold the freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining.”

 

Moreover, even though there are examples like CCW and Point Blank, some in the industry question if unionising now is too late? With the gig economy and AI already pervasive, perhaps a union would have been more effective a decade or two ago.

 

People in agencies really haven't acknowledged what's coming

 

In recent times, union organised strike action has been common in countries like the US. Back in September, the Writers Guild of America, who went five months without work in order to hold the line, won the first major union contract that creates a real, enforceable standard governing the use of AI. And just this month, the SAG-AFTRA union's deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers secured big wins for actors, including higher wages, streaming bonuses, and protections on artificial intelligence.

 

 

Above everything, these recent wins prove that strikes, and ultimately unions, are still a force to be reckoned with. Will the advertising industry ever follow? And could unions bring benefits to both agency employees and agencies at large?

 

"The agency world is in flux and we could use the experience, intellect, honest opinions and wider perspective of the union movement," says Walls. "Unions could help build a better framework—if only employers stopped treating them as a threat and started seeing them as a partner, interested in solving the most pressing problems we're all facing."

 

And Walls adds that now would be an especially good time for a union movement, given that agencies and their staff are trying to figure out work from home, hybrid work, side hustles, sabbaticals, ongoing training and retraining, how to bring more diversity into the workplace, cross industry collaborations, the best use and implementation of new technologies, better policies around gender, sexuality and safe workplaces. The list goes on and on.

 

There's also the very real prospect of artificial intelligence replacing jobs, that both the writers' and actors' strikes in the US won protections against and are now set to form the front line of better AI regulation. This could prove to be a lifeline. 

 

"AI is being ticketed as a silver bullet for cost cutting to the C-Suite," says Binding. "Both on agency and client side, leaders will look to AI in order to reduce headcount and costs in the short term, with the hope of signalling value to shareholders. Again, workers need to unionise to force better regulation and commitments within client and agency teams on the use of AI in order to safeguard jobs longer term."

 

While ad agencies are pushing the idea that AI will be an additive to the creative process, Walls says "it's being sold internally as just another tool even as the accountants look at it and greedily start to recalculate headcount."

 

"Wishful thinking still prevails," adds Wall. "The people on the floor in agencies really haven't acknowledged what's coming."

 

Unionising more difficult in some parts of the world

 

Unionisation in the UK and US is simple in terms of grouping workers together and deciding to unionise. This is not the case in other parts of the world, including in many Asian countries where unions are not common or subject to significant regulation or legal restrictions on union activity and violations of trade union rights, such as the right to organise and bargain collectively for all workers, which typically results in low trade union membership. 

 

Binding points out that what often makes unionising more difficult, even in the UK, is the perception within workers that their roles may be at risk if they are seen to be seeking union membership. 

 

"However, unfair dismissal is exactly the kind of case work that we would be very happy to support with from a legal point of view should any worker experience such a thing," says Binding. "At CCW, we have been sitting in disciplinary and redundancy sessions with members in the industry. We have received very positive feedback from individuals who felt calmer and more supported throughout these processes due to the presence of a union representative in the room. The very presence of the union in these contexts was new for the companies involved and clearly ensured their behaviour was more thoughtful and empathetic to the individuals."

 

Unions as an agency partner 

 

Most agencies like to talk about how they are great places to work and even include awards to say so in their credentials. They create internal support groups and safe spaces to make work enjoyable and stress free. All these initiatives are proof that agencies want their workers to be happy. So, if that were truly the case, surely agencies would gladly welcome unionisation as it would be putting such initiatives to the test?

 

"Workers feel more confident, more supported, and more secure when they are backed by a union," says Binding. "How could that possibly be a bad thing if agencies are serious about their workers long term happiness?"

 

"Unions could help build a better framework—if only employers stopped treating them as a threat and started seeing them as a partner, interested in solving the most pressing problems we're all facing."