In the face of declining revenues and a pull-back on ad spending, some of the world’s biggest tech and social media companies have spent the last half of the year making major cuts to their workforces.

After Snap laid off 20% of its workforce in the summer, Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees last week, with rumours beginning this week that Amazon plans to make its own five-figure staffing cut very soon.

While not as dramatic, Microsoft laid off under 1,000 staff in October. Even though it hasn’t had layoffs yet, Google has publicly “slowed down” hiring activities and even nixed some teams (though the company has said that staff that wanted jobs in other areas of the company had been able to find them).

And then there is Twitter. Shortly after Elon Musk acquired the company, nearly half of its staff globally was laid off (though some were later asked to return). That’s been followed by the departure of several senior executives, thousands of contractors and, reportedly, staff that had been publicly critical of Musk’s decision-making.

Regardless of the company or circumstances around the departures, with such a huge amount of talent headed out the door, media agencies are beginning to express concern for how this will impact ad capabilities and their abilities to work with platforms.

“I’m very concerned about the volume of layoffs and what this means for the industry at large here in Canada,” says Kevin Kivi, EVP and general manager at Horizon Media. “Entire teams were let go at one major tech giant, which therefore means that there is very little consistency and support for agencies and marketers.”

“The ability of these firms to service agencies and brands is certainly going to take a hit, despite the best efforts of the remaining team members,” adds Devon MacDonald, president of Cairns Oneil. “I am also worried about how these platforms will continue to innovate, improve transparency and add the exciting features that brands look for in the face of cuts too.”

Outside of simply servicing advertisers, Kivi adds that he is equally concerned for the environment on the platforms themselves. Other tech companies have not made the same degree of cuts to moderation teams that Twitter has following its acquisition by Elon Musk – but content moderation is a hard job, and any reduction in that capacity has the potential to open the floodgates of hateful, hurtful and unvalidated speech.

“We are mainly concerned about which departments are affected as it relates to both content moderation, as well as agency servicing,” says Brock Leeson, partner product and digital at Jungle Media. “Many of these platforms have been relatively brand safe because of walled gardens, but content moderation is a big part of that.”

Leeson says that while his agency is concerned about how its service will be affected, it is still “waiting to see how things shake out” before drawing any conclusions.

However, many are still taking an eye towards considering the long-term implication. “Of course, with reductions in staffing, we expect some impact – but we suspect this will primarily affect long-term and innovation planning, rather than regular operations,” says Axel Dumont, president of Cossette Media Canada.

Others, however, are more hopeful. Mike Sharma, president of Society etc., says he is not worried from a capabilities perspective because ad platforms are well stabilized and have been in market for a long time. 

“The dependency on employees is not as significant. The biggest concern is therefore on technical support if there are any issues,” he says. “I don’t think we are seeing a direct correlation on advertising as a result of the layoffs.”

Image by Joe Mabel.