“We’re in the dark ages” - GroupM president, Dominic Proctor, admits underpaying graduate talent is a big problem
GroupM president, Dominic Proctor, has said that one of the biggest issues he is facing is the lack of graduate talent coming through his doors, and that's largely to do with how much he can afford to pay them.
Speaking at the Festival of Media in Rome, Proctor was asked if he could compete with the likes of Google in attracting millenials. He responded: “To be candid, at the moment, no. And it’s a really really big issue for us. If you take entry level surrogates for how we value people financially, we’re in the dark ages, whichever country you look at in the world. We are paying our entry graduate talent far far lower than certainly a Google, or Goldman Sachs.
“But certainly less than even a traditional legacy advertising agency. We haven’t yet found a way, as a media investment business to reengineer the finances in such a way that we can track those kind of people. We are not the first option for most of those people and that is a really big problem.”
He said the solution lay in reengineering the senior and middle management in such a way that the agency could attract and reward people at a much younger age.
“We’re not good enough as a business at taking the risk at giving much more responsibility to people at a much lower age,” he admitted before continuing on to discuss whether GroupM would ever reduce the number of staff it had as the company adapts to become more data driven.
“It’s rather surprising that a whole industry that turns over hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars isn’t much more automated already. I definitely see far more automation in the business which would hopefully make us more efficient and if we’re more efficient we can invest more in areas we see client demand,” explained Proctor.
“These tend to be more in the strategic and digital areas than the straightforward transactional areas. I don’t know wither that will mean less staff, but certainly it will mean different kinds of staff.”
The Festival of Media is currently taking place this week.
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