Last November the state told teenagers to consider advertising. The industry had already stopped hiring them.

On 31 October last year the Department for Culture, Media and Sport launched a campaign to demystify creative jobs for young people.

Discover! Creative Careers ran through November, aimed at 13 to 17 year olds and their parents, with employer-led experiences for 11 to 18 year olds. It picked four sectors to show off: film and television, music, video games, and advertising and marketing.

The department's own research said why it was needed. Nearly a third of 11 to 18 year olds, 31 per cent, said they were interested in a creative career. Nearly half, 49 per cent, did not know what skills or qualifications they would need. And 32 per cent of their parents thought creative jobs were insecure, a belief the campaign set out to counter.

Three months later the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising published its annual census of member agencies. Measured at 1 September 2025, they employed 24,963 people, down 6.8 per cent on the year. Creative and other non-media agencies were down 14.3 per cent. Employees aged 25 and under were down 19.2 per cent, from 3,632 to 2,936. The share of agencies employing a graduate trainee, an apprentice or a school leaver had fallen from 56 per cent to 43.4 per cent. Eight per cent of agencies said they had already cut staff as a direct result of AI, and 24 per cent expected to within the year.

On the evidence, the parents were reading the market correctly. The campaign was countering a belief that turned out to be true.

The part I keep turning over is who helped build it. The IPA sat on the campaign's steering group. So did the Advertising Association. So did WPP, which cut its own permanent headcount by 8.7 per cent last year, and which donated advertising space to help the campaign run.

The fair version of that matters, so let me put it in myself. The census was not published until February, so nobody in that room was sitting on it. But the IPA's previous census, published in January 2025, nine months before the campaign, already carried a heading saying the number of under-25s working in the industry continues to decline. The direction was known, and it was published by one of the bodies helping to build the campaign.

There is no party in this and I will not pretend there is. The Sector Plan the campaign belongs to is a serious document with 380 million pounds behind it, and encouraging a fifteen year old in Sunderland to think about a creative career is a good thing to do. The failure is not intent. It is joinery. Four parts of one government and one industry were writing about the same trade inside eighteen months, and none of them read each other.

That is the charge this paper keeps making and it is a charge about competence, not politics. It would look the same under any party, and it has.

James has the money against the people below. Ada has what happens to an entry level when nobody has to announce anything. Owen has where the 46.7 billion pounds goes, and how little of it now reaches anything British-owned.

The Playbook.

If you are seventeen and being told advertising is a growth sector, the growth is real and it is in the money rather than in the headcount. Ask any agency you apply to how many people under twenty-five they took on last year. It is a fair question and they have the number, because they reported it.

The date to watch is the next IPA census. It measures at 1 September and normally publishes in the new year. That is when we find out whether the 24 per cent who told their own trade body they expected to cut staff because of AI went on to do it.

— M.

*This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.*