Why Good People Leave Advertising
The people who leave advertising are usually not the ones who were struggling. They are frequently the ones who were good at it, promoted on schedule, and visibly fine right up to the week they handed in a notice nobody expected.
That pattern is the useful one to understand, because it rules out the comfortable explanations. It was not that they could not do the work. It was that the work stopped resembling the reason they took the job.
The real reasons people leave advertising
Drift is the first. You join to make things and are promoted until you mostly attend meetings about things. Nobody describes this as a career change but it is one, and it is usually presented as a reward.
The second is the ratio. The proportion of the week spent on work that will exist, against work that will be killed, reshaped or abandoned in round four. Everybody accepts some of that. There is a level beyond which good people quietly start counting.
Nobody leaves because the work got hard. They leave because so little of it survives.
What is not the reason
Money is the stated reason and rarely the deciding one, though it is the only reason that is socially acceptable to give in an exit interview. Hours are the same: people who love what they are making will absorb absurd hours, as every pitch in the industry demonstrates.
What it costs the industry
The IPA's Agency Census 2025 found only 8% of UK agency staff are over 51. That is not a retirement statistic. It is the visible end of a leak that starts around a decade earlier, and it means the industry keeps paying to learn things it has already learned.
The counterargument is that churn is healthy and advertising has always run on fresh intake. True in part. But an industry that loses people at the exact point they become most useful is not refreshing itself, it is being drained at the most expensive possible moment.
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