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Digiday Research: Employees at indie agencies are happier than their holding company peers
This research is based on unique data collected from our proprietary audience of publisher, agency, brand and tech insiders. It’s available to Digiday+ members. More from the series →
Ask any agency employee how satisfied they are at work, and a litany of complaints is bound to come your way. There are plenty of reasons to grumble: The ad agency world tends to pay little (especially at junior levels), have very long hours and often feels unstable.
According to a new Digiday poll, just under half — 49% — of agency staffers say they’re happy at work. About 15% claim to be “extremely” happy, while 35% say they’re happy. About 17% said they’re unhappy. The rest were neutral.
That is less than the 54% of Americans who said they were “satisfied” with their jobs in an August 2019 Conference Board report.
The same poll last year found that 63% of agency professionals said they were happy.
Here’s where things get interesting: Those who said they worked at holding company-owned agencies were less likely to say they were happy than those at independent agencies. About 33% of them claimed to be happy, while a whopping 57% of those who worked at independent agencies said they were.
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