A marketing director sent me a screenshot from The Drum at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night, no message attached, just three exclamation marks under the headline.

She runs marketing for a facilities business north of Birmingham and has used the same agency for six years, the kind of long, steady relationship most SMEs are quietly proud of.

The headline was about WPP. She wanted to know if she should be worried, and I wasn't entirely sure how to answer that in a single text back. WPP has confirmed it will cut close to 1,000 more roles before the year ends, on top of nearly 11,000 already gone since the start of 2025.

The Drum reported this week that total headcount now stands at 97,388, a fall of 6.4% year on year.

WPP has declined to say which teams will feel it hardest, though the noises coming out of the business point toward the roles AI can already partly cover.

And it isn't just WPP. Omnicom cut roughly 4,000 roles after completing its acquisition of IPG last year, with another 10,000 expected as it sells off parts of the combined business. Dentsu is working through cuts of about 3,400 roles outside Japan, close to 8% of its international workforce.

None of this is a one-off wobble.

It's a pattern across every major holding company at once, and it started well before this particular headline landed in my client's inbox.

So why now, and why all of them together? Gartner analyst Jay Wilson has a theory, and it comes down to money rather than mood. Marketing budgets have flattened out at around 7.8% of company revenue, he found, and the slice going to agency fees has slid to 19.2% as clients shift spend into working media instead of retainers.

Gartner's own forecast has that figure falling to as little as 15% by the end of the decade.

But the shape of the cuts matters as much as the size of them.

Wilson's read is that the losses are landing hardest at junior level, as AI tools absorb more of the execution work that used to justify a big bench of account executives. Agencies are getting leaner and more senior at the top while thinning out underneath. That sounds efficient right up until you ask who trains the next generation of account directors.

That's the bit nobody on the agency side says out loud, not in a pitch and not in a trade interview.

Why does a marketing agency's headcount matter if you're not in advertising?

Because your relationship with an agency runs through people, not a logo.

Every round of cuts means a decent chance the person who actually understands your brand, your customers and your quirks is gone within the year, replaced by someone starting cold from a briefing document. For a business that has outsourced its whole marketing function, that churn shows up in ordinary, unglamorous ways. Slower campaigns.

Onboarding you've already done twice.

A strategy document that keeps resetting to zero every time the account team turns over.

I hear a version of this from marketing directors and business owners fairly often, and it's rarely framed as a complaint about one agency in particular. More often it's a slow realisation that the model they built their marketing function around is less stable than it used to be. It's the in-house marketing team vs agency UK question again, except this time the agencies themselves are half-answering it for you.

What actually changes when marketing leadership sits inside the business?

When the people managing your account can turn over every twelve months, building marketing leadership inside the business starts to look less like a luxury and more like insurance.

A head of marketing or marketing director on the payroll reports to someone who cares about commercial outcomes, not billable hours, and that changes what gets prioritised day to day.

Institutional knowledge stops walking out of the door every time an agency reshuffles its accounts. It isn't automatic though. A poor in-house hire is far harder to unwind than a poor agency relationship, because there's no easy way to just switch supplier if the fit turns out to be wrong.

You're now carrying a salary, a notice period and a gap in cover, not a terminated retainer.

Or put another way, in-house buys you continuity, but only if the hire is right the first time.

It's a pattern we've seen more than once this year already. From where we sit placing marketing directors and heads of marketing across the UK, the businesses that make this move well usually do it for a specific trigger rather than a general mood. An account handler leaves mid-campaign.

A retainer gets renegotiated upward for less service than before, and the account team you originally signed off on has already changed twice.

Sometimes it's simply a restructuring announcement like this week's, landing in an inbox at eleven at night.

The decision rarely starts as a cost exercise. It starts as a trust one, and the cost argument only catches up afterwards. We wrote a while back about what separates a strong marketing director hire from one that quietly fails within a year, and the pattern holds here too.

Commercial fluency matters more than a beautiful portfolio, and it always has done.

Yet plenty of businesses still hire on the portfolio, because it's the easier thing to judge in an hour-long interview. It looks better in a pitch deck than a headcount plan does. If this week's headlines have you weighing up whether marketing needs to sit inside the business rather than outside it, that's a conversation worth having before the decision gets made for you by another round of agency cuts.

Our marketing recruitment team spends its time exclusively in this space and can talk through what a first in-house hire, or a replacement for one, actually looks like when you're ready.

And if you're the marketing director reading this and weighing your own next move rather than your employer's, our latest roles are worth a look too. Either way, that screenshot at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday isn't going away any time soon.