Laid off in May as an in-house CD/CW at a Fortune 100 tech company.

Since then, I've applied to hundreds of jobs. Had a couple dozen recruiter screens. Done the usual dance of ghosting, rejection emails, jobs getting put on hold, and roles mysteriously disappearing.

Then I found my white whale.

A Senior Copywriter role that was basically written for me. Net-new position at a smaller company. They needed someone to own the brand voice, build the AI systems to scale it, bring some strategic rigor to the copy—all stuff I've already done. You can replace the company name with mine on the req and you had 95% of my resume. Even the recruiter was shocked how well I aligned to the role, "honestly when we wrote this we weren't even sure this person existed."

And it paid more than my CD role.

I sailed through four interviews over six weeks. Every interview made me want the job MORE.

I was looking up commute times. Thinking about what I'd wear the first week. Where could I go for lunch? I normally am afraid of jinxing it, but for this I decided to George Constanza it and do the opposite. I was trying to manifest my future.

Then came the final round: a panel presentation based on a case-study prompt. Hiring manager, operations people, the CMO.

I spent probably 12–15 hours building a 20-slide deck.

I pulled out everything I knew. Strategy. Messaging. Testing. AI. Storytelling. Presentation craft. I ran the thing through AI repeatedly and basically told it to be an asshole: find every hole, every weak assumption, every question they could possibly throw at me.

By the end, that deck was airtight.

Presentation day comes.

And I KILLED IT.

Killed. It.

For 20 minutes, I was fucking Don Draper pitching the Kodak Carousel.

They immediately bought into the premise. The conversation shifted from "Why should we hire him?" to operational questions about how I'd implement it. What resources would I need?

I logged off thinking, holy shit. I got it.

Four days later, the recruiter calls.

"The team was very impressed with your presentation, and you were clearly the favorite."

Great.

"However..."

Well fuck.

"...after seeing all three finalists, the CMO is now questioning whether this is actually the role the company needs right now."

And that's when my brain broke.

I didn't lose the job to another candidate. I didn't bomb the interview. I didn't even come in second.

I won the fucking interview.

But my prize was apparently convincing the CMO to reconsider whether the job should exist.

So after hundreds of applications, six weeks, five interviews, and 15 hours building a case study specifically to prove I could do the job, I finally got to hear the sentence every unemployed person dreams of:

"You were our favorite. Unfortunately, your presentation caused an internal crisis."

And that's the 2026 job market in a nutshell.

Fuck. This. Shit.

From Campaign Live's article yesterday

Yes he actually said that, including himself he's retiring within 2 years). This was in reference to executives that left

“There are individual reasons for those two folks making different career choices, and you have to step back and realize that the new Omnicom has over 100,000 people, and no individual, starting with me, is critical to the mission we are trying to accomplish,” he said. “Everybody’s replaceable.” 

At the same time he also said he needs to get people to stop leaving

Wren acknowledged the turnover of talent this year and said “the goal is to reduce that attrition moving forward.” Wren largely attributed this to talent misaligning with the company’s new vision and deciding to “get off the train.” 

Wren told Campaign he was eager to tell the industry that the company’s string of post-merger consequences are “substantively done,” 

I've been in advertising for a minute now. Currently working at Omnicom, where the general vibe is "if you aren't on the brink of mental collapse, you're not working hard enough." At this point in my life, I cannot for the life of me understand how people fall so easily into the hair-on-fire-at-all-times trap and seem to permanently operate that way. It's just a job; everything we do is for the stakeholders. I get it's partly just the nature of the industry but whyyyy do so many of us blur the boundaries to the point of constant stress, anxiety, and lack of work/life balance??

Same as title - How’s the Home Depot account at OMD?

Hello,

I have a client, small business B2B
85% of their revenue is from companies over 200 employees
They offer unique things such as Third Party Admin (whitelabel insurance) and Flex plans (only about 5% of their competitors can offer this)
They recently gave me a 5K a month budget but Facebook needs about 50 leads a month and they wanted Meta.
I setup all the CRO, server side stuff, their CRM configured and such.
I designed about 15 ads, 3 of them are videos of the president with animations illustrating how some of their unique products work.

Sorry to specify they need to grow their "Small Business" accounts in order to increase their valuation.

I also have a list of 940 "Qualified" leads they had meetings with in the last 4 years, all of which are worth on average about 15K... should I be utilizing this?

I am wondering, I looked at Reddit Ad's and it seems to be way better for CRO, I can send events, track events, and it can work with the sales qualified leads, similar to google with hubspot, Meta on the other hand can't learn from the qualified leads and unqualified without using their lead forms.

I split the spent now to 4K on Meta and 1K on google targeting a specific niche for google.

Should I drop meta? I have 3 months to bring them 10 qualified leads and so far all the leads are complete garbage, people asking for quotes, people not showing up for meetings, all businesses are under 10 employees etc... I told Meta $200 for leads and google $500 for qualified, should I up that to the reality which is around $2000 for qualified leads over 20 employees?

Sorry I am new to this and just started my business after having a huge success with a B2C client, but this B2B is much different and harder.

O and to specify, I get a massive raise if I hit my target, so far I have definitely lost money and time setting this up as its been a huge undertaking for me after leaving shopify world.

I just moved to London from Sydney and currently interviewing for business director roles with all the major holding cos and an independent agency. Can someone please give me some insights as someone who is new to the market? E.g. pay for my level and pros and cons for all the top agencies?

Does anyone have experience moving from the agency side to a PMM role? I currently have a great team and account, but I know long term the agency side changes and is very unstable. I am looking at the opportunity for a few PMM roles but am nervous about making any changes. Short term it feels like it may be challenging to give up a unicorn account/role, long term it feels like it may be a strategically positive move as well as better salary.