The industry is at risk of imploding if it continues to gut the talent who connect leadership to juniors, argues Fixer & Future CEO and founder Venessa Hunt.
Australia is a unique market. It’s the imperfect storm of global expectations and local realities. We’re part of global tenders competing under commercial models built for billion-dollar US budgets, and yet, expected to deliver on a fraction of the spend.
Most clients still work on a percentage-of-media model, which means when budgets shrink, so do agency fees. Layer on top of that the highest cost of living in the developed world and a talent market that’s both expensive and exhausted, and you have an industry under relentless pressure to do more with less.
Then add the short tenure of CMOs. Many CMOs arrive with the same first mandate: save money, find efficiencies, make an impact fast. The quickest way to do that? Call a pitch.
And so, begins another round of competitive tension. Agencies slash fees to win business, cutting muscle to stay afloat. The result is a system that forces everyone to chase efficiencies at any cost. And often the media partners are then left to pick up the slack and subsidise the gaps.
This in turn means that media companies are now under the same relentless pressure to deliver more with less. Their cost bases are high, their revenue models are under strain, and automation is reshaping their operations just as aggressively.
What started as client-driven cost cutting has rippled through the entire value chain. Agencies are stretched, media owners are stripped, and the very ecosystem built to create growth for clients is eating itself alive.
I have been at the frontier of mobile and digital transformation for over two decades. I watched the invention of the iPhone, saw the first apps rewire how we live, and built businesses through every wave of disruption since. But what I’m seeing now is more structural and more dangerous. And it is not the technology.
The danger is that we are cutting out the body of our industry. Across Australia and beyond, agencies and media companies are shedding the experienced thinkers, strategists and cultural translators, the people who connect the vision at the top to the work at ground level. What’s left is an industry made up of heads and feet. Leaders making decisions up high, doers sprinting below, and no body to connect them.
And here is the irony: if futurists are right, the “people on the tools” will soon just be the tools. AI will automate the grunt work faster than we can imagine. The scarce skill will not be in doing the work but in directing the machines. It will be in knowing what to ask, when to ask it, and why.
The winners will be the thinkers who can prompt AI with clarity, imagination and cultural intelligence (and the ones that can spot the errors before it becomes a public embarrassment). And those are exactly the people we have cut out of the body of this industry.
‘Juniorisation’ of advertising
Look at the data. IAB Australia’s 2024 Talent Report shows three quarters of open roles are for juniors. Senior roles are disappearing. The “juniorisation” of the workforce might look good for a quarterly financial report, but it is a long-term disaster. You cannot run an industry with only heads and feet. Without a body, nothing moves forward. It just collapses under its own weight.
Automation is not the problem; it is the opportunity. As Andrew Ng famously said, “AI is the new electricity”. But electricity doesn’t power anything on its own.
Without the grid, without the engineers, designers and system architects who know how to channel it, electricity is just raw energy. AI is the same. Without people who can translate vision into prompt and strategy into execution, all you get is sparks in the dark.
Even those who helped build the tools warn us. Tom Gruber, co-creator of Siri, once said in a TED Talk that “critical thinking philosophers may replace coders in the future.” That’s a powerful admission from someone who helped bring voice assistants into every pocket.
We are standing at a crossroads. Cost cutting is inevitable for business to survive. Automation is inevitable for business to adapt. But cutting the body out of our industry is a choice, and it is the wrong one. We need the connection between head and feet: the body that carries knowledge, memory, insight, curiosity and craftsmanship.
What this means
When the body is removed, the impact is not felt just inside agencies, it ripples straight to clients. Without the middle, the work becomes more fragile, more generic, more reactive. For CMOs and clients this means:
- Less strategic guarding, campaigns drift into lowest common denominator thinking.
- Reduced ability to adapt, no one in the structure to challenge bad ideas or spot nuance.
- Efficiency override, ideas are squeezed prematurely in pursuit of cost metrics, not brand outcomes.
- Loss of trust, clients end up with transactional work, not partnership.
- At worst, campaigns that do less, move less, and feel more mechanical.
We, as an industry exist to sell stuff for our clients, to grow their business, change behaviours, or sometimes (occasionally) save the world. If we remove the very people who make those missions possible, who inject culture, context, purpose, then we end up delivering faster, but hollow and shallow.
Agencies, media owners and clients all have a stake in this. The future demands that we co-champion the body as the engine of value.
So here is the real call to action: automate faster. Strip out every repeatable task, every low-value process. Let the machines take what they are built for.
But rebuild the body. Protect the thinkers who bridge vision and execution. Invest in the people who can prompt, steer and imagine. Those who can also train future prompt engineers who will become our new workforce.
We can’t expect to deliver transformational work for clients if we keep hollowing out the very people who make transformation possible.
Because an industry made of only heads and feet cannot walk into the future. It just falls apart.
Venessa Hunt is the CEO & founder of Fixer & Future.
