Pros
I’ve been full time at Rivers for just over four years. The workspace is beautifully designed and looks like an Apple showroom, bristling with tricked-out, up-to-date Macs and second screens for NASA-grade extra monitor space. For the size of the company, the benefits are impressive. It’s tough to swing decent healthcare with less than 50 employees but Rivers does it anyway. Free parking. Catered lunch every Friday. A stocked beer fridge (for after 5). Cupboards stuffed with snacks of every kind, from fresh fruit and granola bars to the really tasty kinds that seem to run out first, go figure. Flexibility to handle family issues, jury duty, meeting your plumber, the usual life necessities. Training is paid for to grow the capabilities of the individual and the agency. Tattoos are optional, but shockingly, not financed by the agency. The client list is lengthy and diverse and that’s a good thing for a borderline ADHD creative person like me. In my writing I get to shift tonality between conservative banker-speak, mind-blowing semiconductor capability, sly-humor online lighting storefronts and the language of a couple dozen other industries, and it’s a fun challenge. There’s a similar exuberance in the tech folks and developers when they’re scheming a new way to skin a technological cat. I’ve been in the ad biz for a long time, having held senior positions in several agencies in the Southeast, and I've never worked anywhere that is so completely agnostic in hiring. If you’re good at what you do, want to contribute and are housebroken, there’s a place for you. It’s a Star Wars bar of Myers-Briggs personality types, no surprise given the range of disciplines required in marketing communications today. Toss together strategists, computer scientists, writers, designers, producers, photographers, illustrators and developers speaking an alphabet soup of languages like PHP, SCSS, SQL, Magento 1 & 2, Python, C++, Drupal – and probably Klingon – and shake well. Everyone’s individual roles overlap and you can’t help but learn something new every day. That's the primary reason I wanted in – to stay current with the industry's tidal wave of game-changing digital marketing and communications technologies, I needed to be someplace that stays ahead of the curve.
Cons
No shorts allowed, not even on those steamy dog days of August in North Carolina.
