Vantaggi
- Nice office space in a good location - Friendly support staff - The agency has a relatively respected name within the industry - A vibrant, impressive and above all friendly design department that produce exceptional work - Talks from the founding NYC team members are inspiring yet strangely at odds with a London office that should have adopted the same culture and output ten years after its inception - Strong creative teams; but sadly hamstrung by poor resourcing allocation - Formidably smart and approachable CSO (albeit one with little interest in line managing the strategy team)
Svantaggi
- Pronounced lack of diversity in terms of both socio-economic and ethnicity backgrounds; vast majority of staff in the account management and strategy departments are privately-educated, many from elite "public" boarding schools - The result is a cold, polished, culturally-homogenous group of low emotional intelligence - Astonishing lack of processes go beyond glib descriptions of "organised chaos" - Production department largely made-up of itinerant freelancers which ,coupled with a lack of process and structure, means that the department lurches from one "crisis" to another - Lack of process extends throughout the business: from finance through to an under-qualified and un-empowered HR department - An air of nervous energy permeates throughout the office; this is largely precipitated by a CEO who, rather sadly, visibly shakes with a wild-eyed anxiety - Upon receipt of a staff happiness survey that indicated that a large majority of staff were unhappy, the CEO chastised the entire agency during a "Monday morning meeting". - Rather than employing a degree of empathy and looking at what could be done to make things better, the CEO's facile response was "this is a tough place to work, and not for everyone" - This was followed by a perfunctory announcement that two senior department leaders had left the business; drawing parallels between their departures and the "this is a tough place to work" mantra - Hierarchical nature of the account management team and profoundly poor line management skills means that opportunities for growth beyond Account Director level are limited - The latter position is regrettably little more than a glorified Account Manager in comparison to the level of responsibility and scope offered at other small to medium size agencies - An insidious, patriarchal relationship exists between the NYC and London offices when it comes to working together on global accounts; the London office prefers to be deferential to NYC in person, but complain helplessly in private - Whilst the founding New York office may live up to the notion that the business is more than a traditional advertising agency, the London off-shoot is as traditional as they come - from the output of the work to staff culture - The strategy team are overworked; under-resourced and as a result, invariably negative, rude and unhelpful