Wonderful for the training & experience, but not a place for long-term employment
Pros
Excellent training in current innovations as well as paid certification in the latest technology. Casual dress code and ample socializing opportunities like happy hours, lunches, and holiday parties. Customizable hours depending on your location and traffic considerations. Opportunities to work on a large variety of accounts in practically any industry (education, entertainment, home goods, IT, arts & crafts, etc.). Compensation for internships - including overtime - which is rare in an industry that expects pro-bono work from recent college graduates.
Cons
After starting as an intern, one's internship pay becomes one's salary and that really never increases by much. Annual reviews are unscheduled or have to be requested multiple times, and the areas in which one is expected to grow (in order to earn a raise) are doomed to fail by design. Thus, one's salary is forever stunted. On the bright side, this means everyone receives a 20-30% pay boost immediately upon finding a new job elsewhere! Making the sale takes precedence over figuring out how that work is actually going to get done. Accounts are assigned regardless of how much existing work one already has or how overwhelmed one may be. For the ones that work hard and care about their jobs, the stress and emotional abuse can be debilitating. I knew three different people who had to quit due to severe health deterioration, and my own health suffered severely. I'm talking throwing up in the bathroom every day kind of stress. The unspoken company policy is, in a nutshell, to hire inexperienced marketing graduates, pay them a bare-minimum wage, train them to do the basic tasks, and immediately dump difficult projects on them with little-to-no instruction. After naturally making serious mistakes, they are then publicly humiliated in the the team meetings to make an example. After the company has exacted their pound of flesh, these employees leave for bigger and better things and are promptly replaced with eager new faces. This mindset is unfortunate for the hardworking minions, but diabolically brilliant on the part of the company.
