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What Marketing Professionals Are Facing Right Now

What Marketing Professionals Are Facing Right Now

-Agency Probs

May 08, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

$3M For A Cannes Lions Booth

🌉 Background: Michael Kassan's 3CV Is Spending $3M on a Cannes Beach Takeover. Which, am not entirely sure what his company does, but this figure is insane.

🙈 Implications It’s just a slap in the face to the industry. As layoffs loom, people struggle to pay rent with low pay this happens. This is a broader economic issue vs. the marketing industry but it has to stop. w

Opportunity: ATTENTION HR- The first agency that decides to announce they won’t attend Cannes and use the money to give bonuses to employees will have everyone buzzing and people ready to go to war for them. It’s the biggest opportunity since sliced bread. If I was CEO of an agency would do this and as a joke give everyone a $1k bonus with a Starbucks give card and blast Kendrick Lamar “They not like us” at a happy hour.

Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter- Related to our story, we’re working on a Cannes Lions event in NYC (Details TBD) but we love all of you and promise no spam or BS on this so thank you for your patience while we figure out how to write a newsletter.

🗓️ Career Tips Amid Layoffs & The Advertising Job Market Landscape In 2025

Get Used To Job Market Volatility: Tariffs, inflation, priced strapped consumers, and expansion of Gen AI has many agencies in a stand still- how to maintain their client base by cutting costs (Lower non-working agency fees or crazy discounts on media etc.). The reality is many agencies will remain lean and agile to avoid layoffs or too heavy on headcount if a big client leaves.
Keep your resume up to date: Not trying to give the standard BS advice but one tip is adding any new software tools you use or applications you have experience with to check in every few months on your resume. It’s not fun but you will thank yourself later when you see an amazing opportunity and don’t have to spend a week updating your resume and lose out on first come first serve.
Network, Network, Network: You know that person at your company who stinks at their job but makes 2x your salary? That person networked. So try and stay connected to people. We’re working on this free NYC networking event you can sign-up here to stay updated on how that progresses.

When Will Debt Impact Consumption

The total debt balance hit $18 Trillion (With a “T” not a “B”)

What This Means: Eventually people will have to pay their credit card bills so would expect conversion rates on ads to drop in 2025 in walled gardens.
Impact: Marketing mix modeling, attribution will all become more difficult to showcase ROI on ads so just a heads up start thinking about this.

Student Debt

Only a little more than a third of the nearly 43 million people who have student loan debt have made regular payments, officials said.

What This Means: Your clients standard Gen Z and Millennial targets in briefs should further refined because wallets are getting smaller.
Impact: Boomers and Gen X share some of this debt but not even close to Millennials so this target age might become more important than ever before for brands.

Total US Debt Balance Household Debt Hits $18.04 Trillion

🚀 Walmart Is Becoming A Media GIANT

Walmart ad revenue totaled $4.4 Billion In 2024: Walmart media business grew 27% in 2024, and they’re just getting started. Whoever owns the most data makes the most money (Just as Lotam and Infosum).
Walmart Wants $200k Media Minimums for Vizio Ads: Walmart is flexing its power in media and is able to demand $200k investment for Vizio Ads. As linear TV continues its decline it will be interesting to see how quickly CTV and OTT can grow given the higher CPM’s vs. Linear TV.
Walmart Acquired Vizio In 2024 For $2.3 Billion: Similar to how Amazon dominates Thursday Night Football in the NFL and Google YouTube TV continues to grow, Walmart see growth in all those TV’s they sell in store to send consumers ads. This is a reminder of how big retailers are getting (And controlling) the advertising space. Check out this Vizio upfront overview posted on Adweek.

How Retail Media Is Impacting Media Agencies

The craziest part about retail media is some brands are now spending nearly half of their media dollars on these networks that makes it one of the most impactful channels shifting media this year with the exception being TikTok if that ever gets banned (It won’t too much $ to be made on it). Check out the below forecast from EMarketer, we’re just getting started and only a matter of time before this starts becoming a bigger issue for CPG client budgets.

Retail Media Projected Ad Spending

🦄 Would You Pick Advertising Or Marketing As A Career Again?

Look the grass is always browner- Investment bankers and lawyers make an insane amount of money but also never stop working and hardly see their families. The older you get the more you realize how much money you make is more based on the industry you’re in and who you know (see bullet on networking at the top).

It’s tough for everyone right now but especially in advertising because AI is not gunning for financial industry professionals (Yet) but I would do it all over again. Call it a crazy take but i see a brighter tomorrow for us. A tomorrow that groups of teams can easily start an agency on their own and make bank retaining clients that trust them. Whether you’re an SEO, GA4, AI wizard you should be able to make your own business at some point in the future or go client side where nobody knows anything related to media and creative.

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