Solid Agency - Anonymous employee Threespot Media Employee Review

Threespot was an amazing place for me to learn and grow. I regularly felt supported to develop my skills and interests, I was challenged by the work, and worked alongside very smart people who I learned a lot from. The company was much larger when I started and now it hovers around 30 people. I preferred the smaller size staff. It was easier to communicate and keep in sync with teams and there is more oversight by the owners when the company is smaller. There isn't a lot of management so you're not micromanaged which was good for me, but hasn't been good for other people who I've worked with. Because of the previously large size of the company, Threespot knows how to manage projects and accounts like a larger agency but it feels personal and homey the way a smaller agency feels. There's still a lot of room for flexibility on projects which was great. Overall, the best part for me was the people I got to work with and the clients I got to work for. It's hard not to enjoy work when you're working for good causes and working with super smart people. Threespot has both of those things going for it. The work life balance and benefits at Threespot are great. After working at there I knew I wouldn't be able to work at any old agency afterwards.

The area that Threespot needs to improve on, is having a unified vision for the direction of the company that is communicated clearly to staff and then managed in alignment with that direction. There are often mixed messages as the company tries to optimize various measures like billability, profitability, timelines, staff resourcing etc. This is a struggle for every agency, but in particular at Threespot, the messaging often created confusion among the staff and then was either abandoned or simply never followed up on. This doesn't really affect staff at a more junior level, but as you advance in your career and are accountable for more than just your deliverables, this can be frustrating. Threespot is a great employer for people who have had agency experience and don't want to deal with the annoying parts of agencies anymore. It helps to have perspective on what the limitations of agencies are before you work there. In my history, staff that hadn't had agency experience had a harder time understanding why things were the way they were in some cases.

Threespot is a unique and remarkable agency. They're an awesome group of people with a fun culture... there is no small amount of effort put into creating an enjoyable place to work. The work also tends to be excellent: with a client list including the National Park Service, Planned Parenthood, Peace Corps, and the Brookings Institution, you're bound to be working on something new and interesting at regular intervals. Also, the Threespot notion of "we do good work for great clients" does hold some real value in my opinion. Coming from a background at advertising agencies, I can honestly say that my projects at Threespot stood out as work to take pride in.

On the flip side of Threespot being a unique and remarkable agency, it is very much still an agency, and thus suffers from many of the common agency troubles: accommodating client needs frequently leads to hiccups in resourcing and creeping project scope, non-technical account/project management staff frequently over-promises or under-sells fundamentally technical deliverables, and process tends to favor creative freedom over technical constraints. These factors together tend to create feast-or-famine workloads, and tend to yield outdated solutions. While I didn't feel that Threespot was doing any worse than similar companies in this sector, I did notice increasingly frequent turmoil as they grew in size (probably also very common).