THE WORK. In short, your work will be inefficient and unfulfilling. Workstreams are hypersiloed and there is poor collaboration between departments. The work is very often boring and repetitive, with a large focus on reporting versus actual strategy. Your insights will probably be ignored by the client and internal delivery teams. Most internal meeting time is spent using florid jargon to tiptoe around coworker egos, at the expense of getting real work done. As a result, basic communication errors are the norm; launches are botched and frequently accompanied by firedrills and excessive finger-pointing.
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
This is not the place to go to if you want to hone your skillset and professionalism. Little to no effort is spent onboarding new hires -- combined with a major attrition problem (discussed below), best practices and contextual knowledge are lost and there is a lot of "reinventing the wheel", despite ample lip service to the contrary. Digitas does have access to an EXCELLENT and very expensive suite of digital tools, but few to no people know the tools well enough to deploy them to their full potential. In my experience, knowledge base and subject matter or operational expertise were mediocre at best.
LEADERSHIP
Management and HR do not reward good work (with higher pay, promotions -- more on that below), nor do they attempt to help you grow. Good people management skills are not actually necessary to reach middle management. Most managers care more about looking good for their VPs than developing you personally and professionally (but there ARE notable exceptions). Senior leadership is very opaque about the actual state of the agency.
COMPENSATION
Compensation is low for the type of work you perform, and things are not going to improve; this is an industry-wide problem as the traditional agency model calcifies. Promotions are painfully hard to obtain -- there is supposedly a competency matrix, but actual promotions are driven by an arbitrary melange of favoritism, luck (e.g. what account you are assigned to), and shameless self-promotion. Due to persistent and worsening attrition, management is even slower to promote people, which leads to more attrition.
