What you need to know:

• The MFA and ACA-run Advertising Industry Labour Agreement, a visa program negotiated over 18 months by the industry bodies with the Department of Home Affairs, has granted fewer than 62 visas since 2019.
• The 2021/22 financial year was the biggest year, with 46 visas granted. Eight agencies had signed agreements with the Department. The Monkeys and TBWA Melbourne have since joined that list.
• No Australian independent agencies are listed – though any member of either the MFA or ACA can access the list. The IMAA is not party to the agreement.
• MFA CEO Sophie Madden and Tony Hale, CEO of ACA, insisted the program has been a success given Covid disruption and border closures.
• But with the most recent MFA census showing a 12 per cent vacancy rate, Media i industry survey data revealing 41 per cent of media agency staffers have been in their job less than 12 months along with record churn and high levels of poaching, it begs the question – why aren’t more agencies taking advantage of the scheme?

A groundbreaking advertising industry visa program designed to attract top talent to Australia from overseas has hardly been used, leaving 254 out of 300 spots empty last financial year despite an unprecedented shortage of people and rampant poaching among agencies. 

The Advertising Industry Labour Agreement (AILA), negotiated by the Media Federation of Australia (MFA) and Advertising Council Australia (ACA) to take some heat out of the agency talent crisis and provide up to 300 people a year with a visa that gave a pathway to permanent residency, has not been used for even 50 visas in any year so far, data from the Department of Home Affairs released through a freedom of information request has revealed.

Over the three years between 2019, when AILA began, and June 2022, there have been just eight agency groups that signed up to the program: Bohemia Group, CHE Proximity, GroupM Communications, Mediabrands, Omnicom Media Group, Publicis Communications, Publicis Media and Whybin\TBWA. There are no Australian independent agencies. The Monkeys and TBWA Melbourne signed agreements this past June.

Between those initial eight, the AILA has been used to grant fewer than five visas in 2019/20, fewer than 11 visas in 2020/21 and fewer than 46 in 2021/22. 

Department of Home Affairs data showed "<5" for all agencies listed in both visa applications and visas granted since 2019, but most had not yet signed an agreement. They have been removed in the data below. Whybin\TBWA successfully argued sharing these figures would "unreasonably affect [the] organisation adversely in respect of its lawful business, commercial or financial affairs". 

AILA agreements last five years and can be used by agencies to bring in talent with at least three years’ experience, a minimum salary of $85,000 and who fit into five categories – advertising specialist, graphic designer, copywriter, multimedia designer and web developer. Agencies must ensure 75 per cent of their workforce is Australian.

“That 300 is not a target, that's a cap. That's what we're allowed to bring in,” said Tony Hale, CEO of Advertising Council Australia. “We've never really been targeting 300 visas or anything like that. It's just to make sure that there's enough there for members who want to use them… even if there were only 20 or 30 visas filled a year, it's a great success because they are visas that couldn't have otherwise been achieved.”

Asked if it had been a successful scheme so far, Sophie Madden, CEO of the MFA, said it was – though she would like to see greater take-up. “Calling it a failure is absolutely wrong. But certainly, if next year we have double the amount of visas used on AILA, I don't think either of us would be unhappy at all,” she said.

Covid chaos 

An obvious major factor in the lack of take-up is the pandemic. Borders were effectively shut to non-citizens and non-permanent residents about nine months after the AILA kicked off, and between March 2020 and late 2021 it was extremely difficult to enter the country. Likewise, the time for the Department of Home Affairs to process new visas blew out, and the government introduced a temporary ‘Pandemic event’ visa for those in Australia to continue working. AILA also doesn't cover all roles agencies might need, and there are also limitations on who can enter Australia on a visa granted under AILA. Similarly, not every agency will go through the process to sign an agreement with the Department, and it can be an expensive and complex process.

“If you're a larger organisation, you can amortise the cost of developing a labour agreement over 10 visas a year. If you're a small agency and you've only got one visa a year, it's more costly on a per head basis,” Hale said. “It's not prohibitive. Small agencies can do it. But I think it would probably be fair to say that visas in general are easier for larger organisations to handle. Because visas, even outside the labour agreement, visas are bloody expensive things.”

Since Australia opened up, Madden has been outspoken about not relying on international talent to fill the gaps in the local market. She pointed to a recent report from the Grattan Institute that found boosting immigration would do little to tackle widespread skills shortages. “There's a real problem at the moment around the attractiveness of our market, not just for our industry, but actually just in general. Our appeal has been significantly impacted by Covid and there's a great fear of people coming down and getting stuck here,” she said.  

“At the time, I said we can't look to that as being this magic solution or holy grail, because there are other issues. People don't want to come here. There's not this queue of people waiting at the gate with the government not letting them in. That's just not how it's working at the moment.”

High vacancy, poaching

The MFA’s census data from earlier in 2022 showed that despite record headcount of more than 4,400 people across its members, there was a 12 per cent vacancy rate – a gap of about 500 people. The most recent Media i survey, released in June, found a staggering 41 per cent of agency employees had been in their role for less than 12 months, suggesting an even higher churn. In the same survey six months earlier, just 20 per cent of those surveyed said they were “actively looking for a job”, which may suggest many had been tempted by offers they weren’t actively looking for – i.e., poaching.

“I'm not sure it's a realistic expectation to expect the vacancy rate of the industry to be solved – that 12 per cent – by bringing in that many overseas workers to fill those holes, because there's obviously a lot of things that underpin that 12 per cent,” Madden said. “I don't think that you could just look at AILA being the solution. It's obviously part of the solution. But it's not the solution.”

Not a migration program

The AILA was negotiated by the MFA and ACA over 18 months after the government replaced 457 visas with Temporary Skills Shortages visas. It took a lot of data, salary surveys and proof of shortages to get it across the line, Madden and Hale said, and the MFA and ACA take their responsibility as gatekeepers seriously – any suggestion of misuse could jeopardise the agreement.

The upshot of losing 457 visas in 2017 was that the ad industry could only bring people in on ‘two plus two’ year visas with no pathway to permanent residency. Agencies “were obviously pretty up in arms,” Hale said. “We were in a real quandary because it was threatening our overall ability to attract work from overseas to really do good work from here … If you're trying to compete for skills on an international basis … for them to come out on two plus two and then be kicked out of the country is not very attractive when compared to, say, New Zealand, Canada or other parts of Europe.”

AILA is “a skilled shortage program, not an immigration program”, Hale added. It was not meant to bring waves of people, but rather hire those with key skills that couldn't be found locally. The challenges are not unique to Australia, Hale, who sits on the board of VoxComm – the global voice for 36 national trade associations from around the world, said. 

“We're certainly not the only country experiencing [talent shortages],” he said. “It's all around the world. You try and get people to go and work in Brazil. They don't do it. So it's not just Australia.”

Asked whether the associations could do more to market the agreement, Madden said the MFA had promoted the scheme to all members, though one indie MFA member told Mi3 that they were unaware of the scheme. "We'll have to look into it," they said.

Hale thinks there is broad awareness: "I don't think it need to be marketed to be members," he said. "All of our members know it is there if they want it."