Pros
- Regular industry events and parties - Free snacks from suppliers/media owners - Industry competitions you can enter - Training budget means company will pay for your training and some competition fees - Yearly office trip paid by the company - Good banter in the office and pretty casual atmosphere. You can speak your mind - Office location is good - Agency experience carries quite a bit of weight in this industry, looks good on a CV when you inevitably want to jump ship - The wider industry is fascinating and you'll develop great relationships/friendships with clients, suppliers and publishers Note that some of these are dependent on actually being in the office.
Cons
- Can feel extremely cliquey and unwelcoming if you don't immediately get absorbed into the 'inner circle' - Not very diverse or inclusive team. For a global company, MediaCom should be able to do better - Racist and sexist remarks by some staff still proudly tolerated - HR is practically nonexistent and centralised at the GroupM level, so good luck if you have a complaint or need help - Junior level work isn't very interesting nor meaningful - Middle management can be dreadful (lack of direction, awful-to-nonexistent people management skills, lack of any care for you whatsoever). They need proper training - You can't really say "no" as an Exec, so you will constantly have extra worked dumped on you, and your manager won't care nor have your back - Almost complete lack of attention given to professional development, with very vague paths to advancing your career - Lots of pointless, repetitive and inefficient tasks and processes. Company and group seemingly has no desire to improve in these areas - High turnover of staff, can feel like a revolving door sometimes - Slow re-hiring after people quit means their workload gets dumped onto others (often the junior staff) - Small team means you will wear many hats, some of which you'd really rather avoid like finance/billing - Salary is low even for marketing/advertising (and even compared to other agencies) - "People First" mantra complete rubbish. Don't fall for it