Top agencies announce redundancies

Top agencies Abbott Mead Vickers.BBDO, M&C Saatchi and HHCL & Partners have together made up to 50 redundancies in response to the economic downturn.

Top agencies Abbott Mead Vickers.BBDO, M&C Saatchi and HHCL & Partners have together made up to 50 redundancies in response to the economic downturn.

AMV.BBDO, an agency renowned for not having made anyone redundant in the economic recession of the early Nineties, is laying off 18 people, mainly from creative services and support functions. The job cuts, which were predicted in Marketing Week last month (MW September 20), bring the number of employees down to 308.

M&C Saatchi is looking to make up to 15 people redundant over the next three weeks. The cuts will fall across all areas of the company.

All 380 M&C staff were put on a 30-day redundancy alert last week, as required by law. To compound matters, one of the agency’s key clients is British Airways which, like all airlines, has cut advertising spend following the hijackings in the US last month.

A spokesman for M&C Saatchi says: “Everybody will tell you that things were slowing, and they slowed even more after September 11.”

HHCL & Partners has made 12 middle and junior management staff redundant following a downturn in business this year.

The move coincides with the departure of managing director Ian Priest on a six-month unpaid sabbatical to Australia.

HHCL group chairman Simon Burridge says: “We won a lot of business last year which, for a variety of reasons such as the dot-com crash, has evaporated. We were left with the resources rather than the income.” The move follows the news last month that HHCL had resigned from the &£10m AA account due to a “breakdown in the relationship” according to Burridge.

All 197 staff at HHCL were put on redundancy alert by the company last month.