Workers aged 20 to 24 held 6.5 percent of US jobs in advertising, PR and related services in 2024, according to Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics data reported by Adweek. In 2019 that share was 10.5 percent.
Those figures mostly predate the current wave of generative tools, so I will not pin the whole drop on AI. Budgets tightened and remote work changed how agencies staff. The direction since then is hard to miss, though. Resizes, versioning, first-pass comps, mood boards, the forty banner variants due Friday: generative tools now handle exactly this work well, and it is the same work agencies used to hand to twenty-three-year-olds.
My first five years were agency jobs in the mid-nineties, and very little of what I made in that stretch would survive a portfolio review today. What those jobs gave me was proximity: a desk close enough to hear senior people explain why they killed a layout, and a front-row view of a creative director defending a concept to a client who hated it. Along the way came the hundred small calls that never make it into a process document because nobody thinks of them as decisions. The production work paid for my seat in the room. The room did the teaching.
Take the production work away and the seat goes with it. A team that can generate forty banners in an hour has no business case for hiring someone to build them by hand, so that hire disappears, and with it the apprenticeship the industry never formally ran but always depended on.
Some agencies are trying to rebuild the seat on purpose. Ad Age talked to 18 agency leaders for a piece the 4As republished in April. Salt XC, an experiential commerce agency, had just hired 100 people in two months, most of them entry-level. The 4As is turning The Face of Talent, its annual summer week of talent programming, into year-round training meant to keep agencies hiring juniors. Allen & Gerritsen CEO Andrew Graff told them "AI is in its infancy" and that the industry will need "a whole new set of skills."
The junior job that survives looks different. When the model does the making, the junior's work becomes judging: reviewing machine output against the brief, catching the off-brand variant before a senior sees it, writing down why it was rejected. That is harder to teach and harder to bill, and it is also the only version of the job that turns into a creative director ten years later.
My own practice is a solo one. There is no junior seat in it, which puts me on the wrong side of my own argument, and a good answer for how a one-person studio helps fix this has not shown up yet. Anyone in my position who claims to have one deserves some suspicion.
The bill comes due around 2035, when agencies go looking for art directors with ten years of taste and find a cohort that never got its first three.