I worked at STRATMARK (now KerstenDirect) for several years - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso Stratmark

The company is finally recovering from a time when departments were adversarial about assigning blame to one another, but small ripples can still be felt. For all their stated focus on looking foreword to new ideas and approaches in the direct marketing field, they keep making the same mistakes over and over again when it comes to winning and keeping new clients. The "on the ground" employees do their best to work smarter not harder, and the employees who run the show do their best to render those efforts irrelevant. They have all the resources, intelligence, and opportunities to start projects/proposals early, work effectively, and produce wonderful work. The people that cause the "big projects" to be delayed until (or revamped at) the last minute are not held accountable, and don't really care given that they aren't responsible for actually getting the work done anyway. STRATMARK always attracted the kind of employees that took pride in helping non-profits help other people. That was why the environment is so welcoming and friendly; the employees are the type that take pleasure in helping people. When I was laid off, there was a push in the company to start courting conservative political groups as clients. Their target audiences have money, they are often non-profits (STRATMARK's stated focus), and it was thought they could be charmed by how religious-friendly we were. Suddenly employees who signed up to have pride in their clients' works had to decide if they wanted to help sell the vitriol and misinformation that comes with politics. I fear if STRATMARK keeps heading down the road toward political clients looking to help themselves, rather than charities looking to help others, they'll lose the one redeeming factor being employed there has: awesome co-workers full of caring and compassion.