I'm being Laid Off June 30 company outsourcing Marketing/Media to unpaid college interns

This can't be the whole story.

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/how-to-guides/pages/volunteer-or-employee.aspx

Serious answer: Just take some courses on search engine marketing and programmatic channels and spin yourself as a performance marketer if you already have marketing experience. If you were doing TV buys or branding before for a certain brand, just add in on your resume that you were also doing display buys through programmatic and lead generation through SEM. There's tens of thousands of jobs for people who know how to do search ads and if you already have marketing experience you're light years ahead of everyone else.

Don't become a code monkey because your job will be automated by generative AI in less than 12 months, and as has already been said, everyone is doing it now. Even as the machine learning that drives digital ads gets better and better, there will always need to be someone behind the screen adjusting the knobs to make sure ad spend is allocated towards business needs.

There are waaay more people applying to digital marketing jobs in general, and search engine marketing jobs in particular, than there are job openings.

Too many people during the pandemic got into digital marketing because they thought it was a growing field and they could work remotely. The field is over saturated right now.

Nursing school

DEI officer.

The juco district hq here aged out office staff and replaced with business, video, photography, and journalism interns from the locl high schools, jucos, 4 year colleges. The don't want to pay the Health Insurance. 1- years ago they outsourced janitors, cafeteria, security guards, etc. It's a nationwide trend.

Maybe just a weird coincidence, but the medium sized Midwest agency I work at just laid off 15% of workforce. It was across 9 departments, that included my media team.

Cry me a river. Have you ever actually worked in any other fields? Didn't think so.

Tip of the iceberg. It was inevitable now with work-from-home. All highly paid white-collar employees, more so those working from home, have no idea they're standing on a trapdoor.

Going to push back on this, because while it sounds smart on paper, I am in a performance marketing agency right now and I know we are starving for talent and that it's the same across the industry. I get 3-5 linkedin messages a week headhunting me for SEM roles and I have three years experience in the field so am basically a baby. Meanwhile, friends in regular media are getting cut.

For every 10 applicants that come through the door at our agency, 9 are rubbish and the only experience they have is managing organic social or playing in the kiddy pool boosting Facebook Posts. If they are running google ads (very very very rarely, it's almost always socials), they don't know how to set up a Shopping feed, they're just doing the most basic text ads and passing it off as SEM experience. So yes, tons of applicants, who see the remote work opportunity, but none actually know what they are doing, and their resumes get insta trashed.

OP, I am serious, if you are already in marketing, don't just jump ship and start from zero in a completely new field - take the free Google courses in google analytics, google merchant centre and SA360 fundamentals, learn about things like floodlight bidding and portfolio targets and draw on your existing experience within marketing in the interview to knit together some plausible story of how you've applied it in your current role, and you will be far ahead of the rest of the candidates we get.

Deja Vu.

My grandparent era had secretaries, key punch operators, human bank tellers, paper junk mail. The minicomputers eliminated those jobs.

Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data is eliminating accountants, customer service, video camera operators, reporters, truck drivers, warehousemen. etc.

It's a new day.

Mom was a fashion photographer for leading magazines. Mom worked in Milan, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. The Auto-focus, Auto-exposure made it easy. Next Digital slashed incomes. Then I Phones. What buried her career was Reuters, AP using internet servers to scoop up billions of public domain smart phone pictures. Today, no more jobs exist in photography in New York City.

Try floating your resume to your company's DEI department.

Tell them you will stay on, find another job, and then have a really fun time quitting or getting fired. Maybe make a week out of the process. Come in loaded, stop bathing, smoke right at your cube/office and send your manager out on errands.

What lol. Who's crying? I'm giving honest advice to the OP.

Now that I know, I wish someone would have said to me: Be a firefighter or join the military. Both positions give you lifelong benefits, are respected, allow you to retire early, set you up for future cushy jobs and opportunities and generally its a built in community that take care of their own, and you can never be fired or outsourced.