The news: The summer is typically a boom period for marketing and advertising internships, but a report from Live Data Technologies found that internships have steadily declined every year since 2022, including during the summer surge—mirroring a general decline in entry-level ad industry jobs.

• In 2022, June internships were 125% higher than in January of the same year. This year, June internships were only up 40% over January.
• Live Data Technologies also found that staff-level advertising jobs have declined 11% since 2022, while managerial and executive positions have remained relatively consistent.

Interns aren’t the only young workers with less opportunity. A recent Adweek analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data found that workers ages 20-24 only made up 6.5% of the advertising, PR, and related services industry. That’s down from 10.5% in 2019 and is the demographic’s lowest share since 2020.

Why the change? Macroeconomic uncertainty, mergers among leading agencies, and the rise of AI are all contributing to a slowdown in entry-level advertising job listings.

• The Trump administration’s ever-changing tariff policies and conflict with the Federal Reserve have triggered fears of a recession or economic downturn, causing advertisers to reduce budgets in kind. The trend is global: Over half of marketers worldwide expected budgets to shrink in a May 2025 Nielsen survey.
• Industry consolidation is also leading to job loss. Interpublic Group and Omnicom recently had their merger approved, and the companies project savings of $750 million in two years—in other words, there will likely be layoffs to come.
• AI is also to blame: Leading ad agencies are investing heavily in the technology, which is sometimes being used for processes that would normally be left to interns or entry-level employees. While those moves might help cut labor costs, they also mean the industry is not nurturing talent or hiring employees from the demographics they most want to reach.

Our take: Hiring and retaining young workers is crucial for agencies trying to build long-term relationships with talent, but conditions have clearly driven employers to deprioritize young hires. Once the dust around consolidation and economic uncertainty clear, hiring may climb again—but we have yet to see AI’s full impact on the labor market.

More broadly, young workers are struggling to find jobs across industries; the unemployment rate for US college graduates ages 22 to 27 has jumped to 5.8%, the highest in 12 years.