The Industry Charity Picking Up the Pieces
NABS Head of L&D Katrina Urban on survivor's guilt, sexual harassment at Cannes, AI anxiety, and why the people who didn't get made redundant might need help just as much as those who did.
The advertising industry has spent the last two years restructuring, merging and cutting. Holding companies have shed thousands of jobs. Agencies have asked remaining staff to do more with less. And through it all, a small charity has been quietly handling the fallout.
NABS — which describes itself as the charity helping everyone in advertising, media and marketing move forward — recorded over 14,000 engagement points in 2024, a 20% increase on the previous year. Its advice line took more than 5,300 calls. Mental wellness was the number one reason people contacted, followed by redundancy and financial support.
Katrina Urban, Head of Learning and Development at NABS, has been at the organisation for 12 years. She joined as the office manager. She stayed because of the work. Speaking to The Media Stack, she was characteristically direct about what the industry is going through — and what it keeps failing to address.
The People Who Stayed
The conversation around redundancy tends to focus on those who left. Urban thinks that’s missing half the picture.
“The impact doesn’t stop with the people who leave. When teams shrink, people are expected to do more with less. That can stay there for months, even years; it’s like a barrier of trust that gets damaged.” - Katrina Urban
She describes what she sees as a ripple effect: uncertainty about further rounds of cuts, survivor’s guilt when colleagues disappear overnight, and a cultural shift within teams that leadership often underestimates. The Omnicom-IPG merger, WPP’s restructuring, and broader consolidation across the sector have amplified it all.
NABS has a redundancy guide on its website that has racked up thousands of downloads. Urban is careful to distinguish between engagement points and individual contacts; one person might access the advice line, attend a workshop, and go through therapy. That’s three touch points, one person. “We never turn anyone away,” she says. Given the demand, that’s not a small commitment.
What Managers Aren’t Being Taught
NABS runs a suite of training programmes, all free to access. The most attended is Managers Mindsets, a programme that grew out of the organisation’s All Ears community consultation, which made it clear that managers were being failed by their employers.
“They might be trained on how to run a PIP. But are they being trained on how to have mental wellness conversations with their teams? How to give feedback constructively? You get put straight into a one-to-one and expected to run the process.” - Katrina Urban
The programme covers managing pressure, leading through change, difficult conversations and giving feedback. Urban is clear that attending a session doesn’t automatically change behaviour — the sessions are designed to be practical and scenario-based, with people practising the skills in the room rather than absorbing theory they’ll never apply.
Organisations can buy in the same sessions available to individuals, sometimes with bespoke elements added. The uptake, she says, has been high and the informal feedback from managers who’ve attended tells its own story.
Cannes Lions: A Magnifying Glass
Urban wrote about the ongoing sexual harassment at Cannes Lions. The article published in Campaign, the advertising industry’s trade publication, was direct enough to generate attention in an industry that usually prefers to address these things quietly, if at all.
Her view is unambiguous. What happens at Cannes isn’t unique to Cannes — it’s a compression of what happens across the industry year-round. Working away from home and alcohol are the two factors most associated with increased harassment risk. Cannes provides both at full intensity for five days.
“People act like they’re on holiday. They’re actually working. Boundaries massively slip. And the people who speak openly about it are a very small portion of those who experience it.” - Katrina Urban
She credits the Cannes Lions team for taking it seriously. NABS worked with them last year to run training sessions in the weeks before the festival, but it is clear that the responsibility can’t rest solely with the festival organisers. Advertising, Media agencies, Hold Co’s and technology companies booking large spaces at Cannes need to take ownership of those environments. Zero tolerance can’t be a policy that applies in some places and not others.
NABS's bystander intervention training is built around five methods: Defuse, Distract, Challenge, Document, Check-In and Report. Each offers a different way to respond to harassment from creating a diversion to confronting the harasser outright. When asked which element people find hardest to use in the moment, Urban doesn't hesitate: Challenge. The misconception that confronting inappropriate behaviour means being aggressive runs deep. The training works through multiple scenarios drawn from real industry situations, showing that direct intervention doesn't have to mean a confrontation; it can be as simple as saying "that's not okay" if it feels safe to do so. The goal, she says, is getting people comfortable with being uncomfortable.
AI: Anxiety in the Margins
AI isn’t yet the primary reason people contact NABS. But it’s increasingly part of the wider context. Urban is careful to distinguish between the genuine opportunities and the anxiety that’s showing up in conversations with the support team.
Junior staff are worried their tasks will be automated first. Creatives are uncertain about what their work will look like in an industry that keeps telling them to embrace tools that can replicate their work. The pressure to upskill is real — but, as Urban notes, “where do you upskill when AI is moving at a pace that nothing can keep up with?”
She’s firm on one point: AI shouldn’t replace human insight, especially not management skills. When it does, the work becomes inauthentic and generic. Urban sees the downstream consequence clearly: you can’t become a senior if you were never allowed to be a junior.
Ageism: The Least-Discussed Problem
IPA Census data show that just 8% of agency staff are over 51, compared with 33% in the general working population. Urban doesn’t dress this up.
“The numbers speak for themselves. People tell NABS they feel like they’ve been put on the scrap heap. They’ve got decades of experience, they struggle to get callbacks, and finding new roles can take much longer. Many eventually leave the industry altogether.” - Katrina Urban
She acknowledges that it's sometimes framed as a cost issue; older, more experienced people are more expensive to hire. But the correlation with age is clear, and NABS's support team is having these conversations regularly. Coaching by referral can help people re-enter the industry, but Urban is under no illusions: coaching people back in is not the same as stopping them being pushed out.
The issue compounds. Women who took time out to care for children or elderly parents, and workers from minorities communities, face a harder road back. NABS works with organisations, including MEFA and Outvertising, to ensure its offer reaches all of them.
The Common Thread
Across mental health, ageism, harassment, AI anxiety and merger fallout, Urban sees one through line: people’s sense of security, confidence and their ability to feel they can thrive at work.
NABS has also just launched its Next Gen Board, for people aged 30 and under, with experienced mentors involved, designed to create the kind of career longevity support that’s becoming harder to find inside agencies themselves.
For an industry that has spent two years telling itself that disruption is just transformation in disguise, the demand for what NABS provides suggests something simpler: people are struggling, and the organisations employing them aren’t always equipped to help. “We’re in people’s corner,” Urban says. For a growing number of people in advertising, media and marketing, that corner is getting more crowded.
Katrina Urban is Head of L&D at NABS. nabs.org.uk
