O.C. Ad Agency Slashes Work Force : Marketing: Recession, major client’s cutback hit Foote, Cone & Belding/Orange County, the county’s largest advertising firm.
Stung by the general recession and the downsizing of its principal client, Orange County’s largest advertising agency has laid off 24 employees, almost 10% of its work force.
Officials at Foote, Cone & Belding/Orange County said the layoff notices handed out Jan. 4 followed Irvine-based Mazda Motor of America’s decision in December to slash up to 200 positions from its 1,250-employee U.S. staff. Mazda is the biggest client of Chicago-based Foote, Cone & Belding Communications’ branch in Santa Ana.
“But this isn’t a story of an ad agency laying off because its biggest client has cut back” its advertising and marketing budgets, said Bill Hagelstein, executive vice president and managing director of the Santa Ana operation.
Mazda has “reallocated some of its marketing dollars to other areas,” he said, and that change did affect Foote, Cone & Belding. But the Orange County operation still will have 226 employees after the layoffs.
“We have added almost 100 employees in the past four years, and I don’t think any other Southern California agency can say that,” Hagelstein said. “But the economy finally caught up with us, and we had to let 24 people go,” he said.
While a few of the employees might find positions with Foote, Cone & Belding offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Hagelstein held out little hope that the company’s Brentwood office, which has just been awarded a $30-million account by MGM Studios, would be able to absorb the laid-off Orange County staff. The specialties needed in Brentwood don’t match those being eliminated in Santa Ana, he said.
The layoffs affected employees in various job categories, he said, but were concentrated in the creative and account management divisions--affecting copy writers, artists and business marketing specialists.
Foote, Cone & Belding is the latest in a string of local advertising and public relations agencies to cut overhead as the regional economy remains tightly in the grip of a stubborn recession that began almost 30 months ago.
“I think all the agencies around here have been hit,” said Dan Carlsson, owner of a one-man public relations firm in Laguna Niguel, as he rattled off a list of nearly a dozen advertising and public relations companies that have closed or trimmed their staffs in the past year.
“I think everyone in this business is worried about 1993 and is hunkering down. The big thing in this industry now to survive is minimum overhead and maximum production,” he said.
