As advertising growth slows, ad and media agencies have also cut hiring of new people.
A recent report by GroupM, the country’s largest media agency network, said the pace of growth in advertising in the second half of the current calendar year had slowed to 4.7 per cent from the 7.3 per cent indicated earlier.
This had pulled down 2013 advertising growth estimates to 8.5 per cent from the 9.9 per cent projected earlier.
The result is that most ad agencies have opted to freeze recruitment for new positions. Says Madhukar Kamath, managing director and chief executive officer, DDB Mudra Group, “You have recruitments at two levels. One is to replace people who have quit.
The second to hire for new positions altogether. There is certainly a slowdown when it comes to the latter.”
The DDB Mudra Group has 1,100 people on its rolls.
It has not increased this in the past year. Kamath says he has no immediate plans to increase this number.
According to Arvind Sharma, president of the Advertising Agencies Association of India, who stepped down as chairman & CEO of Leo Burnett recently, said net hiring in the Rs 30,000-crore (Rs 300-billion) advertising industry was flat this year.
“Staff strength across agencies hasn’t moved up,” he said.
The trend is no different with most other traditional ad and media agencies. They are hiring but only when the need arises.
For instance, Publicis Worldwide, flagship ad agency of the Publicis Groupe, had a few months earlier hired Bobby Pawar, an ex-JWT hand, as chief creative officer, Pratha Sinha as chief strategy officer and Ambika Srivastava as director, marketing &
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