I've dragged my feet on writing a C-4 review, because it's hard to sound balanced when reviewing this company. I'm reviewing this company because I believe in paying it forward and helping other people make the right decisions regarding employment. I know that there will continue to be positive reviews on Glassdoor...yes, because the company encourages current employees to leave positive reviews but also legitimately because some people are really pleased to be there, occasionally for months at a time.
In short, I wouldn't advise working here outside of your first couple years out of school. If you have a couple years of experience and have become accustomed to defined goals, meaningful projects, and having the time to (at least occasionally) create good work, you are likely to struggle here. I was sold on a growing company, blablabla startup, blablabla data and analytics and technology, oh my! This phrase was big when I started: "A year or two from now, you'll be amazed where you will be." A year from then, I was seeking literally any other offer. Two years from then, C-4 will be a distant, funny-in-retrospect memory.
C-4 feels like a smaller company than it is, because a) few things that the company does are very complicated, so there is very limited process, b) the owners treat the company like their sandbox, and c) there is not much in the way of professionalism. (Oh and possibly also because they have half a dozen people squeezed in every office, nook, and cranny.) Everything runs on the owners' whims. They subscribe to Shiny Thing Management (sometimes called ADD Management) Theory, which states that if you are in charge, the most important thing is the thing that has caught your attention Right That Minute. It's a complex theory, but it's beautifully put into practice at C-4. Suddenly, you'll be put on a special project, Emergency! due by EOD!, and then it will languish in the partners' inboxes for weeks and ultimately be scrapped. Your time will not be respected; the work you do will not be respected. If you're okay with that, you'll be fine. If you feel remotely like an adult, capable of running projects and accustomed to having some small level of authority, it will be less fun.
Regardless of your position at C-4 (with maybe one or two exceptions), expect to be doing very repetitive work. The automotive industry is crazy broken, and so C-4 has developed a niche of serving dealerships with PPC, SEO, and a lot of repetitive creative produced overall. The vast majority of accounts are dealerships or dealership groups. When I was there, at any given time there were over a hundred individual dealerships and a handful of non-automotive clients. The few non-automotive are local businesses, such as movers or appliance centers. They tend not to keep non-automotive accounts for very long. If you work in a service department (anything aside from account management), it's pretty standard to have dozens of clients assigned to you, and your clients will change often. Churn is the name of the game at C-4--especially employees but also clients.
Because people leave quickly, promotions also happen quickly, particularly for account managers, whose work is more visible to the owners. Promotions are often dependent on your relationship with management than on your work, though everything is linked because the clients you get may depend on management, and your clients' perceptions tend to be key to your success. (Perceptions is the key word here.) There is really very little in place to make promotions mean more meaningful work, so you might get a fancier title and more money, but there is almost nowhere to go in terms of changing your day-to-day. Being part of management here mostly means a little more contact with the owners and some deeply irritating meetings. The owners perform all reviews, though they MIGHT ask you as a manager to write something before that review. It's unclear to me whether they will also read what you wrote.
A lot of reviewers mention the people at C-4, and indeed I worked with a lot of great people, but it's tough to talk about employees when, a couple months after leaving, you're likely not to know the majority of people there. You will join a company of 50+ people, likely mostly close to your age, and the culture tends to push people together, so you will likely come out with a core group that you trust and really like working with. There will be others you do not trust and do not like working with, partly because the culture encourages nudging colleagues toward the underbelly of large, noisy, and fast-moving people transporters but also simply because, generally, a lot of people suck, and if you stay at C-4 for any considerable period, you will work (briefly) with a lot of people. Law of averages and all.
Oh yeah, the benefits are not-so-great. They sort of rely on most people remaining on their parents' insurance. Honestly, financial considerations like this one kind of went out the window when I was at C-4 just because I was absurdly unhappy there and my health insurance premiums just didn't seem like my biggest problem.
The office is also kind of the worst, unless you really, really dig Route 1 in Saugus. And you've never been remotely scared that you might get stuck inside a poorly functioning elevator.
Oh, and company-wide emailing is a thing there, and management really cares who contributes. So expect every chain to be a nightmare of enthusiastic one-upmanship. A POSITIVE ATTITUDE expressed with A LOT OF exclamation points is the greatest gift you can give C-4!!!!!!!!
