Pros
It is a great place to work with Fortune 500 brands! It's a great opportunity to develop your ability in working with C-Level clients. You gain a wide variety of experience: project management, client management, vendor negotiations, new business development, creative development, etc. There is a feeling that you really operate your own business from soup to nuts.
Cons
Sales does not have the bandwidth to adequately penetrate their business. This is primarily due to ineffective and lack of sales support staff. Therefore as a sales person you end up doing a majority of your own backend work rather than managing the process. This in turn cuts into the bottom line of the company and at times leaves the client short changed. In addition, there a real disconnect from top end management and the field. There are way too many Kool-Aid drinkers that hender making effective change and providing true leadership direction. These Kool-Aid drinkers also don't have the sales and/or management experience to be effective in their roles. The promote order taking rather than engaging their teams in understanding their client enough to provide high gain solutions. While overall I enjoyed my tenure at BDA, I found most of the leadership team to be inadequate. Meaning I found very little value add from them as an employee. I'm always looking to enhance and increase my abilities and there were few on the leadership team that had the capability to provide the insight and guidance needed for a senior level account manager. In addition compensation is a real issue for sales. Sales goals and objectives are arbitrarily calculated. Although base salaries are high with ability to earn a substantial bonus, these bonuses are very rarely achieved. This is not to lack of efforts or results, but rather due to the way goals are set as well as how revenues are calculated and managed. This leaves for poor morales amongst sales and lack of motivation.