I’m not saying, "don't work here," because it's a step above starving to death on the street, but please understand that I’m barely exaggerating when I say, “a step above.” If you’re truly desperate, to the point where you can’t wait any longer to find something better, then you’re exactly the kind of keyboard-smashing meat-bag this company is looking for, one who is needy enough to put up with absurd workloads, half-baked systems and processes, fragile egos, overt favoritism, misdirected blame, detrimental office politics, unprecedented laziness, and obscene incompetence. When I look at reviews of companies online, I often see a handful of negative reviews and dismiss them as outliers; there’s a tendency to assume that those reviews are from disgruntled or incompetent ex-employees, but I would encourage you to take every criticism of this company to heart. You should also know that Affinitiv Advertising was previously called, Caldwell & Kerr Advertising, CK Advertising, and Moore & Scarry Advertising, so I would recommend checking out those reviews as well. This company hasn’t made much of an effort to fix anything over the years, so pretty much all of its problems from the early days are still problems. Don’t expect anything to improve at this company, because in my experience, you’re only setting yourself up for disappointment.
I want to make it known that I was an extremely productive and innovative member of this team, that I consistently went out of my way to help my co-workers (even on my last day with the company), and that the day after I left, things took a turn for the worse. I was an integral part of the team, but like nearly all of my peers, I was treated as if I was replaceable. I was with this company for several years, and contributed a lot (far more than I needed to), but when it came down to it, none of that mattered; this company has no sense of loyalty or integrity. They might be able to tell who I am from this review, but I’m comfortable with that; I firmly stand behind everything I have to say here and I have no problem burning the bridge between myself and this Great Pacific Garbage Patch of a company. The way that my peers and I have been treated is proof that this company does not respect or appreciate its employees, even the most dedicated and capable ones. This issue has been brought up multiple times, and is only ever addressed in the most superficial and fleeting way possible: management dishes out shallow, meaningless compliments for a few weeks or so, but does absolutely nothing to make sure that employees are being treated appropriately.
To be clear, the biggest problem in this company is the management- not the CEO or anybody up at the very top of Affinitiv- the management in the Affinitiv Advertising subsidiary, the people who will more directly impact your day-to-day. These aren’t people who were selected based on ability, or intelligence, or merit; these are people who knew the owner back in the day and- knowing that they would never be able to qualify for anything better- decided to take advantage of that connection. As a result, working for this company means getting paid a meager wage to work under deeply incompetent, under-qualified, power-hungry, overbearing, stubborn, two-faced, complacent buffoons with fragile egos. If you’re genuinely trying to do a good job, you’re guaranteed to have conflict with these people because of their “my way or the highway” attitude. They always have to have the last word and they’re more than willing to make the product worse- effectively making the client look worse- just to avoid admitting when they’re wrong. Their biggest concern is making sure they look good to upper management so they can climb the corporate ladder, and they’ll do anything except their actual job to maintain that illusion. It’s rare that management actually knows what’s going on in the department or even bothers to take the 5 minutes the average person would need to understand a situation before jumping to conclusions, which is especially pathetic given that they have their employees hitting start and stop buttons for every job, and redundantly, filling out a spreadsheet of those same start and stop times. When an issue arises, they claim to be on your side one-on-one, but are quick to throw you under the bus in front of others instead of finding out who’s actually at fault, and they’ll never, ever admit it when they’re the ones at fault. In front of HR, management claims to be interested in taking care your concerns, to the point where they have actually said the words “we love to hear complaining,” but behind HR’s back, it’s clear that they want to bury your concerns so that they can stay “positive” instead of addressing the problems that hold this company and its employees back. Your concerns will be met with a bunch of thinly veiled excuses, and then, if that isn’t enough to make you give up and shut up, management will change the subject and go off on some tirade about something completely irrelevant. Quite often, it feels like management is playing dumb as some sort of manipulative tactic, and while that may be the case sometimes, there are other times where they seem to be genuinely, unbelievably stupid. When I say “stupid,” I don’t just mean uneducated, I mean incapable of critical thought, lacking in any and all problem-solving skills, and deeply opposed to understanding other people, their goals, and their concerns. When I left this company, the head of my department was surprised and didn’t seem to understand why I was leaving, despite all of the concerns that I had brought up to him and all of the conflicts that we’d had in the past. Word on the street (since I left this company) is that none of the company’s problems have gotten any better, and that things have actually gotten noticeably worse. Employees seem to be quitting left and right.
When it comes to your day-to-day as an Editor/Motion Graphics Artist, everything is a contradiction and a mess. This company wants your work to be good, fast, and cheap, but according to the famous Project Management Triangle, a project can only realistically be two of those things. If you’re good and fast, they should pay you more, but they don’t, if you’re fast and cheap, they demand better quality (without explaining what “better” actually means), and if you’re cheap and good, they tell you to work faster, even if you’re already completing work ahead of schedule. Regardless of how fast you are, you’ll inevitably get slowed down by other departments failing to do their jobs and by the internal approval process.
The internal approval process largely consists of nitpicking fine details such as kerning, leading, and drop shadow opacity, as well as minor blemishes in the footage, such as a piece of litter or a puddle of water off in the distance. At another agency, waiting an hour or two for someone to respond to an email might not be a bit deal, but because the turn-around time at Affinitiv Advertising is so ridiculously short (shorter than anywhere I have ever seen or heard of) that hour or two can be the difference between getting your work done effectively during regular hours and having to cut back on lunch time, stay hours late on weekdays, and work weekends to avoid getting blamed for problems beyond your control.
You’ll be expected to “follow the script,” but scripts are often incomplete, full of errors, delayed, impossible to follow given the assets the company has, or simply non-existent. This is usually the Account Representative’s fault; they make changes to the scripts without consulting the Copywriters because “it takes too long.” Sometimes these changes are so massive that the script no longer resembles what the copywriter originally created. Scripts that are impossible to follow are primarily management’s fault for not keeping the Copy department informed on what assets the company can access and what the Editors/Motion Graphics Artists can reasonably do. You will be expected to get started while waiting for a script (which usually means creating content that winds up in the trash), to catch any and all errors, to fill in blanks, to make changes on the fly across multiple projects and, in the case of large campaigns, to make changes on the fly across multiple Editors/Motion Graphics Artists’ computers, and to do all of this flawlessly without a hitch, or else you’ll get blamed for any errors that make their way into the video during the approval process, even if those errors are from the script or directly from the Account Representative. What should be seen as going above and beyond is instead treated as part of the Editor/Motion Graphics Artist position, despite not being in the job description. Supposedly, this is because “We’re responsible for what goes in the spots,” but actually it’s because the people in charge of the Editors/Motion Graphics Artists are massive cowards who won’t confront the people in charge of the Account Representatives. These mistakes often make it into the voice-over as well, unless the vocal artist catches them, which can lead to complications for the Editors/Motion Graphics Artists. Similarly, for shoots, talent will almost always receive their lines for the first time on the day of- or night before- the shoot, and that copy has to be adjusted then and there or else it’s baked into the footage forever. When a video involves assets created by the Art department, Editors/Motion Graphics Artists are told to “match the art,” which like the script, has been approved by the client; however, approval means nothing to management (it’s as if the meaning of the word “approval” is completely lost on them), who will make grand-sweeping changes to the look of a spot during the internal approval process. As a result, the Editors/Motion Graphics Artists wind up doing what should be the Art department’s job. The Art department is also extremely overworked, but that’s no excuse to have Editors/Motion Graphics Artists altering their designs. This actually often creates more work for the Art department because they have to go back and adjust their art to match the commercial spot.
There are spots that the Editors/Motion Graphics Artists create from scratch, but there are also “pick-ups” and “punches,” which are spots where they take an “approved” spot and make specific changes to it. This can be as simple as changing a price or an expiration date. Since the rest of the spot is “approved,” management should just be checking the part that had to be changed, right? You’d think so, but no. Management will ask for changes throughout the spot, despite the fact that they themselves already approved of the previous version. The common excuses for this are “We were busy and probably didn’t have time to make the changes” and “We should always be looking for ways to improve our spots.” If there’s something wrong with a spot, then don’t approve of it, even if that means it’s late. If that’s a reoccurring problem (which it is), then there’s something fundamentally wrong the pipeline/workflow, and that needs to be addressed. Also, keep in mind that there’s no winning in this situation. If an Editor/Motion Graphics Artist makes unrequested changes to a spot, they risk being told that they’re “making it harder than it needs to be” or that “the spot needs to match the others,” but if the Editor/Motion Graphics Artist doesn’t make unrequested changes to a spot, they risk getting blamed for the mistakes in the spot and having go back and fix those mistakes, taking additional time. If a “pick-up” spot has 30 mistakes in it, and you catch 27 of them, all management sees is that you sent a spot for approval that had 3 mistakes in it, and this will be held against you forever. That’s right, you’ll be judged for other people’s mistakes, whether it’s someone in another department failing to do their job correctly, someone in your department failing to do their job correctly, or a previous employee from 2014- whose spot was located on multiple old (possibly broken) hard drives that you had to dig through just to try to salvage it- failing to do their job correctly. It doesn’t take multiple instances of you “screwing up” for management to have an issue with you either; they will take a single instance and use it as an excuse to avoid promoting you.
Promotions in this company are largely meaningless; they’re essentially title changes that give management more opportunities to throw you under the bus under the guise of “getting your name out there.” Why would you want a promotion, then? Well, because titles matter; a title should be an indication of the work you’re doing, and when you’re doing things far beyond the reach of your title, then you deserve to be promoted to a position that more accurately reflects your responsibilities. Unfortunately, in this company, there are people with different titles and the same responsibilities and people with the same title and different responsibilities, which is blatantly unfair. This means people are either being overvalued- typically out of favoritism- or under-appreciated. If you get promoted in this company, it’s likely because your manager prefers you over your peers (for personal, superficial, subjective reasons) or suspects that you’re about to walk out the door and wants you to stay. When it comes down to the wire, and they see that you’re on your way out, they’ll make a small effort to get you to stay, but by that point, it’s too little too late.
All of these problems are intensified by the fact that most low-level employees are expected to work for peanuts at an absolutely break-neck pace. It’s certainly possible to create good content at a fast pace, but it requires three things that this company simply does not have: thorough planning, effective communication, and comprehensive organization. Without these three things, this company winds up overworking and underpaying their employees just to pump out mediocre trash, and some people can put up with that for a long time, but very few people can put up with that forever. This contributed to my decision to leave, but personally, what really pushed me to the edge was all of the lies and all of the manipulative behaviors that Affinitiv Advertising’s management expressed. Working with these people means working with charlatans and thieves. There are other companies where you can get paid more and suffer less, while creating better content with people who respect you.
The biggest takeaway from my experience with this company was to never stop working on myself and my own career. Always keep your resume and portfolio updated and always keep an eye out for other jobs, because there’s only so much nonsense that one person can take, and when you hit that breaking point, you’re going to want to get out as soon as possible.
