Marketing's Redundancy Crisis: CMOs Reveal the Hidden Truth Behind Job Cuts and How to Thrive

The Unseen Crisis in Marketing

Marketing professionals are facing a generational redundancy crisis. At a time when they should be wrapping up the year and enjoying the holidays, anxiety and uncertainty are at an all-time high.

The Stark Numbers

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. Major companies like Omnicom, Endeavour Group, Nine, Seven West Media, News Corp, and Menulog have all made significant cuts.

Causes include economic pressure, AI, automation, structural change, and new operating models. But regardless of the reason, the experience for those affected is deeply personal.

Insights from Industry Leaders

Several marketing professionals with decades of experience share their perspectives on redundancy, offering a guiding light for the industry.

Satya Upadhyaya, Marketing Technology Leader

Unpacking a Personal Experience

Redundancy rarely arrives with warning. In the last 24 months, I’ve experienced redundancy three times, and six times in my career overall. 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. Automation replaces tasks faster than organisations can communicate. Understanding these external forces helped me release the emotional burden.

Vulnerability Versus Availability

I found myself tired of explaining that I was “between roles.” 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.

Lessons from 100 Conversations

• The Australian market has 6000 to 8000 recruiters. Most are overwhelmed.
• 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, empathy, and reshaped my perspective. 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.

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.

Organisations 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.

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.

AI is 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. That is non-public data. That is unstructured, emotional, embodied experience.

Fabrizia Roberto, Fractional CMO, Founder

I’ve Lived This Twice

The first was during the GFC, when I was still very junior. The second time happened much later in my career. 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.

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.” 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.

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.

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 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.