Over the last year there has been an uptick in "B Team” sightings, attributed to the brain drain from marketing departments and ad agencies. In the last month alone, I’ve learned of 3 likely causes.

1. Hitting “Pause”:  At the recent NY Times conference, “Women, Leadership and a Playbook for Change”, a VP of marketing told me she was leaving her job for a year-long fellowship in marketing at Harvard. I took that to mean she was stepping off the treadmill of her job for some perspective. I’ve often wondered about some of my own clients, seeing their workload increase, their staff get a little greener, their budgets getting tighter, all while learning new existential skills, vocabulary and measures of success - very reasonable to want to step back for a little breather.

1. Better Options.  My conference-friend also told me about the brain drain facing “Marketing” as a whole – that new graduates were not coming into marketing departments or agencies as they once were.  In fact, the ANA had issued a report last year saying the talent crisis was due to:

“a lack of common vision, vocabulary, and perceived relevance among marketers, young professionals, and the schools that are expected to educate them.” The study also found that students are unclear about career paths in marketing and advertising, and whether or not they constitute “meaningful” work.”  Also “as marketers and agencies increasingly seek graduates with expertise in data analytics and digital capabilities, they’re finding that many of the people who are actually qualified for these positions would rather work for tech giants and consultancies instead.”  Mindy Smiley, The Drum 

1. Follow The Money. The quality of management is draining as well.

“The industry doesn't have the cultural caché it once did, nor does it present a more fun counterpoint to other professional services beyond the trappings of ping-pong tables and getting to wear sneakers,” Faris Yakob, founder of the nomadic consultancy Genius Steals, said. “The hours are long, the perks are gone, and the salaries are small except for the most senior staff – but only 5% of people in agencies are over 50, so most agency folk won't ever get there.

“Some 2,000 of former [WPP] employees have migrated to Facebook or Google,” says Scott Galloway. “By comparison, only 124 former Facebook or Google peeps left to go work at WPP. Consider the reverse migrants –124 that went back to WPP. Many of them, it turns out, had only interned at Facebook or Google and went to WPP when they weren’t extended offers in Palo Alto or Mountainside. The ad world today is increasingly run by the leftovers.”  Sam Scott, The Drum

Though that last point has some merit, it is far from the whole truth.  [Note: we are conflating marketing and marketing services because the brain drain affects them both].

This is the perfect storm: Most brands have brought agency capabilities in-house, just as agencies brought production in-house in the late 90’s.  That didn’t kill the production business.  In fact, there is more demand now for (brand) content production than ever before. Agencies however are slower to respond – they have more fixed overhead, their cultures are more tied to an antiquated command-and-control process, and their market (and revenue, presumably) has diminished significantly as 78% of ANA members have launched in-house agencies with 79% of survey respondents expressing ‘high’ levels of satisfaction from in-house teams.”  Bennett Bennett, The Drum

Legacy agency and marketing managers are following the money to Facebook, Google, to in-house agencies or other options more promising (even if less certain).  In their absence, less experienced colleagues are creating, presenting and managing their work directly with clients, perhaps before they are fully qualified to.

Also, these agency teams are quite possibly less experienced than their own clients, another reason they draw the B Team foul and further accelerate the churn of those clients.  Feeling the B Team means clients have to work harder.  They have to be more vigilant for roads not taken, tactical errors or other omissions of inexperience. Maybe they are underwhelmed by the depth or quality of work, or have lost trust for any number of reasons and have to compensate with more effort to direct their agency when of course it should be the other way around.

But in my experience, the B Team are not leftovers – far from it.  In fact, if you are not on the B Team somewhere, you’re just not curious enough, not adventurous enough, not willing to learn-by-doing (and often, failing).  Rather, most on the B Team are the same hopeful, ambitious people who have always been drawn to the entrepreneurial culture of agencies and marketing, excited to learn but now more often left to find their own way – an inelegant process that, to clients, must be concerning.

The B Team is less experienced, but always willing to do more for less, hungry to learn and prove themselves, and imbuing their work with passion – wonderfully durable characteristics of our industry and those it attracts.  What has changed is the winnowing of happy experienced people to teach, focus and lead their newer colleagues and to embody the qualifications clients need to have confidence. Without the gravity of expertise, an agency team is more likely to miss the mark, make mistakes or under-deliver – sparking the momentum of client discontent.

For The B Team, marketing (digital and otherwise) is still a good place to learn: a wide range of responsibilities, quickly learning/working the process of client management, strategy, campaign development, presentations, execution and analysis. Though without close management, it is harrowing for everyone, “like being thrown into the deep end of the pool while the adults walk away” is how it was described to me -- by someone who learned to swim very well and went on to do great things in her career.