Burnout in adland: What can you do to help?

Editor’s note: This article refers to mental health and suicide.

Posting on LinkedIn, and marking two years to the day that I was first signed off with exhaustion, I wrote about how debilitating burnout can feel, how easy it can lead to suicidal thoughts, and how hard it can be to find your way back again.

Since then, I have received hundreds of comments, messages, emails, phone calls and video calls, from people of all levels across the industry, each telling me of their own devastating experiences with burnout.

Across the harrowing stories, one common theme shone through: Everyone is terrified to speak publicly about it. What if people think they’re bad at their job? What if their current employers find out? What if a future employer reads it and they won’t be hired again?

A survey by NABS of 576 advertising employees before the pandemic found that “The UK advertising and media industry is at a risk of staff burnout as 63% say they’ve considered leaving the industry at some point due to work negatively impacting their wellbeing. The industry could lose a generation as 77% of those surveyed are aged under 40.”

I get it. As a country we’ve lurched from one crisis to the next. If it’s not Brexit it’s Covid, if it’s not Covid, it’s the cost-of-living crisis. The price of simply surviving in this country has never been higher and the demands put on us by our workplace, who all want more for less, means we either have to show up and suck it up, or risk losing everything. It’s terrifying.

The pressure. The delivery. The work. It creeps up. It adds up. But we mustn't ever fail...The common themes I hear and have experienced myself throughout my career:

Media’s booked, gotta deliver the work—we can’t miss the deadline. Gotta get the SLT to sign it off. Gotta find time in diaries. Gotta get feedback. Client satisfaction scores are in, they’re down on last year’s—gotta impress on the next one. Gotta come in four days a week now. Gotta work the weekend. Gotta win the next brief. There’s a new agency on the roster, gotta mark our territory. Gotta win the pitch. Gotta win the next pitch. Gotta miss the kids' bedtime—again. Gotta run through the final deck, can you stay late tonight?

It’s literally exhausting.

Samaritans reported 1,156 deaths by suicide in women aged 20-64, and 3,348 in men aged 20-64 in 2023 in England alone.

What’s more worrying, is that this doesn’t include suicide attempts. In September 2023, a peer-reviewed scientific paper published by Frontiers in Public Health, which examined the links between burnout and suicidal ideation across 12,083 participants aged 19 - 65 concluded ‘Exhaustion is linked with risk of suicidal ideation in employees regardless of depression status.’

The concluding part of the paper goes on to say: “Exhausted employees, particularly those having poor job resources, should be recognised as an ‘at-risk’ group.”

Who here has ever felt like you didn’t have the resource to get the job done?

But just get your head down and get on with it, yeah? If you don’t do the work, who will?

Problem is: you’ve convinced yourself of a lie. A lie that says: accepting you’ve burnt out, telling others you burnt out, is accepting failure. It’s like you’re saying “I am bad at my job”, but it’s not true. The job is what’s bad and to say “you haven’t been setup for success” feels like a monumental understatement.

But you haven’t been set up for success. Here’s how:

• Everyone is given too much work. You know it. I know it. Grinding up the bones of your staff in the pursuit of getting to the top of the Campaign billings feels sickening to write out. And yet here we are.
• How can we switch off when our leaders in the C-suite set examples such as “sending all agency Friday emails after 7pm” and those dreaded Sunday night emails?
• As a parent, you are expected to sacrifice time with your children to make advertising. Say that one out loud.
• As a woman, you are sold misleading dreams “women can have it all”—no, you can’t. Not without help. Not without money. Not without sacrificing something. Not in advertising.
• Who watches what and when? If people are logging 50-60 hour weeks, and this isn’t being flagged then who is actually responsible for the duty of care? Timesheets are either not checked or they are checked and ignored. Which is it?

Image: A drawing by my daughter aged five at the time. She drew this in my notebook, whilst I was on an urgent client call at 7pm on a Friday night. All she wanted to do was interact with me after a long day at school, followed by after-school club, and before her bedtime at 7.30pm

This is a multifaceted problem.

And no matter how many Linkedin posts people write, it is not an easy fix. And the types of fix you can apply, depends on what kind of job you have.

If you are an employee, and you are experiencing the symptoms of burnout, please know that you have options. You are not trapped. Help is out there. Please, please, please reach out to a loved one, your GP, a therapist, a coach, your manager, HR, NABS or the Samaritans. Thousands of people have experienced burnout—and still do every day. You are not alone. If you know someone who is experiencing signs of burnout, pass them this article.

If you are in human resources/talent/people management you have a duty of care. Pull timesheets. Ask why you have so many people off on mental health leave. Push back on why it’s always the same teams, accounts, or clients (you know the ones). Protect your people. They may not know how to protect themselves.

If you are an agency leader, you have the ability to prevent this from happening. Stop with the empty words, the “well-being washing”, and chasing that extra pitch even if you’re already struggling with staff.

If you have multiple members off sick on mental health leave in your agency right now—it is simply not good enough.

• Immediately learn the symptoms of burnout to watch out for them in yourself and others
• Encourage ALL managers to have mental first-aid training
• Monitor timesheets and intervene! Give employees immediate time off to rest and recover. Re-estimate budgets and timelines with clients.
• Limit the total number of pitches per year and ensure you have adequate freelance to support. Stop spreading resources so thinly.
• Set boundaries yourself and lead by example (eg. please schedule emails so they enter inboxes during working hours. The number of emails I received during my years in adland on Sunday nights were shocking. No wonder people have the dreaded “Sunday night fear”.

Wherever you are in the food chain, there is help available.

As for me? It’s taken me two years to talk about my story.

I was too ashamed and too scared. I tried to “have it all." I tried and I failed. I made choices. Ones that I felt I had to make in the spirit of creating the best work possible… And what have I got to show for it? I might’ve got Ad of the Day, once? A few awards under my name. But was it worth it? All that time I missed whilst my daughter was growing up? You tell me.

The most important part is I’m still here. And my beautiful eight-year-old daughter still has her mummy by her side.

But the sad, gut-wrenching reality is that this isn’t the case for some children who have lost a parent to suicide… and Adland continues to put so many individuals in incredibly vulnerable positions.

Employers can replace us. And they will—sooner or later. But they can’t replace our children’s parents.

We all need to know the signs of burnout so we can recognise what it looks like, in ourselves and in others. If you see it, or if you are experiencing it, do something about it.

Please.

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Annabelle Black is a senior account director with 15 years’ of experience in advertising agencies.