CMOs speak out on marketing’s redundancy crisis

Industry professionals are facing a generational redundancy crisis. At a time where professionals should be looking forward to wrapping up the year, taking a break and spending time with their families over the holidays, anxiety and uncertainty are at an all-time high.

 

The Advertising Council of Australia’s 2025 Salary Survey revealed a redundancy rate of 11 per cent in the 12 months to March 2025, compared to the usual range of 5 to 7 per cent. Omnicom’s global CEO has flagged 4,000 job cuts by year’s end as the IPG merger takes shape. Endeavour Group, Nine, Seven West Media, News Corp and Menulog have all made significant cuts.

The causes are varied: economic pressure, AI, automation, structural change and new operating models are all playing a role. But regardless of the reason on the letter, the experience for those affected is deeply personal.

Several marketing professionals with collective experience spanning multiple decades have provided their thoughts on redundancy, from the structural forces reshaping the industry to the emotional reality of losing a role, from the hidden value of experience in an AI-driven world to practical strategies for rebuilding. Their perspectives offer a guiding light for the industry in a darker time.

Satya Upadhyaya, Marketing Technology Leader

Unpacking a personal experience

Redundancy rarely arrives with warning. It comes abruptly, sometimes wrapped in polite language, other times delivered with an air of corporate inevitability. Regardless of how gently the message is delivered, it lands with the same emotional weight: a subtle but unmistakable shift in the ground beneath your feet.

In the last 24 months, I’ve experienced redundancy three times, and six times in my career overall. Each role was built around solving significant marketing technology challenges: modernising ecosystems, aligning people and processes, integrating data to drive customer engagement. I was brought in to lead transformative change. I was performing exceptionally well. Yet strategic shifts, restructures or leadership changes swept the role away.

This is the paradox of modern work: you can perform exceptionally and still find yourself without a role. Not because of failure, but because of change.

Understanding why redundancy happens

Companies pivot strategy frequently. Market pressures force cost-cutting. Boards rethink priorities. New leaders bring new directions and stop existing initiatives to make way for their strategy. Automation replaces tasks faster than organisations can communicate. You can be exceptional at your job and still be impacted.
Understanding these external forces helped me release the emotional burden. Redundancy did not mean I had miscalculated or underperformed. It simply meant the organisation was undergoing its own transition, and I was no longer part of that chapter.

Vulnerability versus availability

There was a moment when something shifted. I found myself tired of explaining that I was “between roles” or “in transition.” Those phrases felt like apologies.

Then a thought emerged: I am not vulnerable. I am available.

That one word altered everything. Vulnerability felt like a state of loss. But availability felt expansive, open, alive with possibility. Suddenly, conversations with recruiters changed. I stopped presenting myself as someone trying to recover, and instead as someone ready to contribute.

Lessons from 100 conversations

In the weeks that followed, I spoke with many people: colleagues, senior leaders, recruiters, HR professionals, and peers navigating redundancy. Here is what I learned:

The Australian market has 6000 to 8000 recruiters. Most are overwhelmed. Executive search firms are the most structured. Many recruiters are generalists who don’t fully understand MarTech, AI, automation or transformation functions. You may end up educating them, and that’s okay, because it positions you as an expert.

This is not a slow market. It’s a transitional one. Companies are hiring differently: niche skills, industry specialists. Internal referrals and network connections will open more doors than job boards.

What redundancy teaches about leadership

Redundancy taught me humility, because no one is immune from structural change. It awakened empathy, because I now truly understand what others go through. It reshaped my perspective, because I learned to detach worth from positions.

Most of all, it taught me that leadership is defined by your ability to guide, support and uplift others, especially when you yourself are navigating uncertainty.

Redundancy does not diminish you. It frees you.

Pip Stocks, Director, Pip Stocks Consulting

Australia’s marketing sector is experiencing its largest wave of redundancies in decades

When experienced people leave, tacit knowledge disappears, organisational history is erased, pattern recognition weakens, and decision quality can decline. You can automate tasks, but you cannot automate judgment.

As Nassim Taleb highlights, systems without old wisdom become fragile and they stop recognising risk until it’s too late.

The rise of “fractional wisdom”

As companies cut senior roles but still need senior brains, we can expect fractional chiefs, portfolio experts, interim leadership, advisory boards, and on-demand coach and mentor networks. Experience will become modular, but organisations need to build this into their governance plans.

When thinking about their redundancy plans, organisations also need to treat knowledge as an asset: build internal knowledge bases, use AI to codify past learnings, pair juniors with senior advisors, bring back the wise as experienced guides, and invest in teaching Gen Zs about curiosity, critical thinking and systems thinking.

A people-light organisation is not a human-light organisation. It’s one that uses AI to remove friction while elevating human judgment, one that accelerates the capability of its youngest workers while designing smart pathways for wisdom to stay in the system.

The future belongs to organisations that understand this dual mandate: grow the next generation faster, and hold onto the experience that keeps the whole system steady. Those that get the balance right will redefine what effective, resilient work looks like.

Dr Anna Harrison, Founder, RAMMP

Identifying AI ‘workslop’

Redundancy at 40 or 50 feels brutal. But strategically? You’re not obsolete. AI can pump out 100 options. You can instantly see which two are worth betting on. That’s the difference between work and winning.

Under the hood, systems like ChatGPT are massive pattern-recognition engines doing sophisticated inductive reasoning: learning patterns from an obscene amount of past data, then predicting what’s likely to come next. Think of AI as ridiculously fast, generalised pattern-matching with no childhood, no context, no skin in the game. And now we have a name for that stupidity: AI-generated workslop.

But there is exactly one category of data your AI does not have access to: the deals you’ve watched fall over for invisible reasons, the campaign that “should” have worked but tanked, the founder meltdown you navigated, the dozens of “this smells off” moments you cannot fully quantify but know are real.

That is non-public data. That is unstructured, emotional, embodied experience. That is the stuff no crawler can scrape.

Fabrizia Roberto, Fractional CMO, Founder, fabriziaroberto.com

I’ve lived this twice

The first was during the GFC, when I was still very junior. I had just settled on my first apartment in Sydney. I was on a 457 Skilled Visa and had 28 days to find another valid visa or leave the country. It was terrifying but in hindsight, formative. That redundancy pushed me into roles that expanded my skills, my resilience and ultimately my ambition.

The second time happened much later in my career, at a point where I’d built something I was genuinely proud of. This time, it was the weight of realising that the role I had grown into and the environment around it were evolving in ways that no longer aligned with the impact I wanted to have. Stepping away was difficult and demanded deep, often painful reflection, but ultimately it created the space I needed to pursue the next chapter on my own terms.

Both times, I ended up in a significantly better place. Both times, the catalyst was the same: recognising that redundancy is not a verdict on your talent; it’s a signal of misalignment.

A business either no longer has demand for what you do, or it has shifting priorities, constraints or directions that change the nature of the role itself. Either way, it’s not a statement about your capability. Your value does not disappear because an organisation cannot or will not use it in its current form.

Redundancy shakes your confidence long before it ever touches your competence.

Experience compounds

You’ve seen cycles. You’ve watched technologies rise and fall. You know what creates real growth and what is simply noise. Where early-career marketers see tactics, later-career marketers see patterns. And patterns are what help businesses avoid expensive mistakes.

In this new era, with AI accelerating everything except wisdom, marketers with depth, perspective and adaptability hold an advantage that no algorithm can replicate.

Geoff Main, Marketing Director/Founder, Passionberry Marketing

The Redundancy Mirage: Why Cutting Capability Is Killing the Growth You Think You’re Protecting

We’re in a cycle of marketing redundancies that are being framed as “necessary efficiency.” For many leaders, this feels rational. Your job is to deal with the now: profit pressure, investor sentiment, operational discipline. The future can wait.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: when you cut marketing capability, you’re often cutting the very systems that are generating the revenue you’re trying to protect today. Not tomorrow. Now.

The problem is that most businesses don’t have a clear understanding of the growth mechanisms that drive their current results: the engine beneath the revenue line.

Every company has a growth loop. For example: content leads to engagement leads to sales enablement leads to pipeline velocity leads to referrals. It’s usually invisible. It rarely sits on a dashboard. But it powers everything.

When redundancies break that loop, the impact starts quickly: softer inbound, slower deal cycles, shrinking win rates, reduced mental availability, increased reliance on discounting and trade spend.

I once watched a company cut $1.2 million to protect profit. Three months later, sales were still down, trade spend was smashed, and the cut had directly created a $6 million revenue gap. Not next year: that same year. The profit impact ended up neutral. The capability damage was not.

This is the redundancy mirage: you see the saving immediately; you feel the loss when it’s too late to reverse.

If cuts are unavoidable, protect the capabilities that directly support revenue now: your reach, your distinctiveness and the core parts of your growth loop. These are not marketing luxuries. They are revenue infrastructure.

And if you’re a leader focused on short-term outcomes, here’s the message: don’t cut the parts of the system you don’t fully understand. You may be removing the growth you’re counting on this quarter.

And to the CMOs out there: it’s our responsibility to clearly articulate the impact embedded in both the art (systems, brand, purchasing triggers) and the science (the metrics that matter) of marketing for our C-Suite teams.

 

 

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