Pros
- Good, friendly people for the most part - Unique, but always messy, office space - Dog friendly - Usually well-stocked kitchen - Located nearby food trucks that come three times a week - A lot to learn from the creative director's experience - A decent place to get your feet wet if you're just starting your career, but not if you're established.
Cons
- Creative direction is chaotic and dictatorial. You'll rarely work on your own ideas in favor of the creative director's. Often those ideas are pulled from past presentations and retrofitted for different clients regardless of the brand's needs, project scope or budget. Alternative viewpoints risk setting off long-winded soapboxing that wastes hours of time. It's one thing to strive for great creative, but it's extremely frustrating when you see the pattern of ineffectiveness in this strategy. - Due to the desire to have one main source of ideas, there is a cycle of hiring middle managers whose skills aren't creatively threatening - which leads to people in senior roles with questionable taste, demanding respect they haven't earned. There's good talent in the building at mid and junior levels, but it's suffocated by the understanding that time and effort spent crafting your own work will be wasted. This sense of futility is toxic. - There are no project managers on staff, and no plans to hire any. Meetings that happen are not scheduled, scheduled meetings do not happen, and the process is to put work up on a wall and hope there is eventually feedback at a reasonable hour. Account managers are either frazzled from trying to perform two jobs at once or indignant that things aren't running properly. Schedules and deadlines get pushed so often that projects stretch months beyond their expected length - on a few occasions the clients simply stopped responding. - Like most shops, there is a heavy desire to win awards, but there's no good plan of attack. The current clients don't understand good creative work - they're interested in selling their products and being part of social conversations. The response here is to try and cram in "award-winning" work without fulfilling their needs first. Often that work is off-brief or tone-deaf, and things rarely get made. No recent awards have been won. - Creatively, they're a bit stuck in the past. Proposed campaigns revolve heavily around video content, with little attention paid toward more interactive methods of communication. Videos are fine, but the clients don't have the money to do them properly. Too much time is spent writing brand mantras and tag lines. "Integrated" campaign elements feel like tacked on afterthoughts - not natural or cohesive extensions. - The file server is a big milk crate full of hard drives and Post-it notes. - It's a revolving door. People don't stay long, and there's little culture to speak of. It's a small office, so the hectic disorganized process doesn't allow for much time to interact with coworkers on a human level.