Pros
A beautiful building with great natural light. A generally amicable and communal staff who are supportive of each other as people who also enjoy great natural light. There is free food and a brand experience manager who works tirelessly to bring the staff away from their desk to experience the natural light. An executive leadership team committed to generally knowing most peoples names.
Cons
I’m told I came to Swift a few years too late and l’ll never know if that is true. I do know I didn’t get what I was sold: an opportunity to work in an inclusive space where big ideas were welcomed, life and work were in balance, and the resources needed to make smart work were guaranteed to ensure I could continue to make the creative I was recruited for and capable of making. I say ‘was’ capable of because Swift has the unique distinction of being the only work environment I’ve experienced that reverse engineered my capabilities, exhausted my creativity, and defeated my confidence in a way that still shocks my therapist. I thought I took a job with a social agency but quickly learned the very words ‘social media’ are trigger words for the executive team. Shortly after I started the ELT announced Swift was henceforth to be called “a creative agency for a social world.” Retrospectively the presentation was actually comical. It included unveiling a pledge of allegiance-like poem they themselves wrote about “Smart work” plastered on the executive boardroom window in cheap vinyl lettering. Had they consulted a single creative to lend a hand in an effort, it might have been less garish and tone-deaf. As for life and work living in balance: after firing the top and bottom tiers of the creative department, the senior leadership team made another regal announcement that Swift was reevaluating their brand pillars and asking for the staffs commitment to shift from “being here for the work/life balance” to “being here for the work.” What does that mean? It means BIGGER IDEAS, of course. THINK BEYOND SOCIAL. As a creative this means you’re expected to take a client brief for three social posts and pitch an episodic commercial broadcast series with a pop-up store staffed by fully developed brand characters to sell special edition merchandise in a spin-off web series that will rollout on Instagram stories. This is not hyperbole. This is how desperate the ELT is to get away from social. Spoiler: when you pitch outlandish ideas to the client, they will not buy it and ask for the three social posts they thought they asked for in the brief. You’d think that after three or four pitches yielding the same blank, often confused if not annoyed, expressions from clients the madness would stop. Spoiler: it doesn’t. In the end, the creative department sees no end. They stay late to make those three social posts, now ill conceived, rushed, and below the bar they are capable of. They show up the next day with yet another seemingly straightforward brief and are yet again pushed to take it beyond social, to go bigger, to “dial it up.” The phrase “break the internet” will be actually written as a mandate on multiple briefs that cross your desk. You will be given a generous 48 hours to concept. You will receive the phrase “I don’t get it” and “dial it up somehow” by middle-aged white men earning three times your salary.