Alessandra Bellini: We are tackling the industry’s ‘chicken and egg’ talent challenge
The Media Leader Interview
The AA president explains why the training hub is so important to tackle talent retention.
When asked what was the greatest challenge for a statesman, prime minister Harold Macmillan famously replied: “Events, dear boy, events.”
As president of the Advertising Association (AA), events have undeniably impacted the tenure of Alessandra Bellini, the former Tesco chief customer officer and Unilever marketer who is approaching the conclusion of her final year in the role.
Today’s launch of the AA Advertising & Marketing Training Hub, created by Adwanted UK (parent group of The Media Leader), simply would not have happened without Bellini and her president’s agenda to tackle the talent crisis in the industry.
The evidence for action was laid bare in last year’s AA talent report, Investing in our Talent’s Future, which highlighted talent shortages in two key areas: better attraction and recruitment of new talent, and increased development and retention of existing talent.
Impact of The Great Resignation
Speaking to The Media Leader, Bellini reflects on what she sees as the industry’s core challenge: while adspend continues to increase, salaries are generally going down.
She says: “When I took over the role in January 2022, we were in the middle of what we called ‘The Great Resignation’ — all companies, including all the companies in marketing and advertising, were suffering for what felt like a proper talent crisis.
“Not so much because we didn’t have the talent, but we were struggling to keep talent in any industry, particularly marketing and advertising.”
The Covid-19 disaster, which wrought so much death and despair worldwide, was also beginning to send shockwaves through the world of work for myriad reasons.
Credos, the ad industry think-tank that carried out the research, found that the number of people working in advertising and media had declined by 14% — more than one-seventh — between 2019 and 2022.
“We discovered that we had trouble as an industry to both recruit, retain and nurture the talent in our market,” Bellini reflects. “I felt it was a real crisis. The advertising industry is made up of people that sell ideas. We sell people’s ability to create ideas. And if we don’t nurture our talent, then we don’t have an industry.”
Realistic solutions
So Bellini, taking over from former Unilever colleague Keith Weed in 2023, set out to “really look into talent and see how we could learn what was wrong” and create realistic solutions in partnership with the UK government, the media and the industry’s many stakeholder businesses.
While providing a comprehensive training solution is not “the silver bullet”, Bellini admits, she is clear that it removes a massive obstacle to talent retention.
“There’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation where, because we need to upskill, we need digital skills. Everybody says ‘we need digital skills’ — it’s not exclusive to advertising and marketing, but is quite crucial. And what we kept hearing again and again is ‘we can’t create all the content for the training ourselves’.
From launch, the new hub showcases over 500 professional training courses and qualifications from AA members and industry stakeholders, including the Data & Marketing Association, the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the IPA, Isba and IAB UK.
As well as providing ease of access by showcasing all the stakeholders’ material in one place, the AA has hired a dedicated manager to oversee the hub’s development as it takes on new material that will be vetted for relevance.
The value of curation
Bellini describes the “value equation” of the hub: “It’s been curated, it’s been selected. It will be continually updated and refreshed to make sure it’s relevant and recognised by the industry. So it’s not ‘my friend at that agency — he said that’s very good’.
“It’s also about time. You know, our shortest currency at the moment is not money, it’s time — if you work in any organisation, it costs you a lot more to recruit someone new than to train someone that you have to that level.”
Moreover, Bellini is keen to stress that the hub is not just a way for big ad agencies and media owners to develop staff who are itching for a promotion. This is intended to be a resource for the entire industry and those connected to advertising and marketing services, which is estimated at 1.4m people in the UK.
Because there’s a key structural reason why adspend has gone up and salaries have gone down — the rise of small businesses being able to perform marketing services themselves. Many will operate without agency support and buy media directly, let alone invest in expensive training.
“[SMEs] don’t have the resources, the money; they don’t even have an HR person most of the time — you know, it’s seen as a luxury,” Bellini says.
“So having the opportunity to bring together all of the training that is already available and organised in nice, neat categories — depending on where you are, advertising, marketing, media, creative… it’s already available and it’s organised. And you know how to contact us and how to apply.
“I think it’s huge.”
A maturing industry
Bellini suspects the industry is also growing up as a sector relative to law, accountancy and medicine, which have ingrained professional development practices.
“Let’s be honest: while there are schools of marketing and universities, there isn’t anywhere else you can go to learn ‘how to get better’,” she explains.
“That was one of the reasons claimed for salaries and retention going backwards — because there were other industries that were more attractive in the way they were able to offer continuous training and development.
“What we can’t do is to create an awful lot of new stuff, but what we can certainly do really well as an industry association is to bring people together, to coalesce.
“At Unilever, we used to say: ‘If only Unilever knew what Unilever knows well.’ I think it perfectly applies to the industry — if only the industry knew what it knows.”
