‘Inside, most of them are dumpster fires’: Confessions of a frustrated indie agency ad exec

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Can you give me an example of a decision that was poorly communicated internally?

Absolutely. This is the type of thing where there were always these decisions being made, and it was so unclear. In this instance, they canceled everyone’s corporate cards with one day’s notice. 

How did that actually get communicated to staff?

No one was aware — the notice didn’t even reach all staff. People on my team reached out to me and asked, “Are our cards being canceled?” I was like, “No, report that email to IT, it’s clearly spam.” My boss, who ran our practice, was unaware. I was unaware. But someone internally then filled in the blanks and said actually “No, it’s not spam. They’re canceling all the corporate cards as of tomorrow.” 

What impact did that have on employees?

It was terrible. That type of move doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in a company, when you’re then in a position of having to put everything on our personal cards, with no notice, and just hope that they reimburse us.

And some of these people with corporate cards are young, who might not have a credit card or don’t have a very high credit card limit. And especially then having to wait on expenses, which is never normally a quick process — people don’t plan their budgets around this, because they wouldn’t normally have to.

Were there other examples of decisions being handled this way?

Yes, even the return-to-work mandate was handled poorly.

What happened with that?

For starters, leadership sent an email stating our return-to-office policy update on a Friday at 6:30pm E.T. but it said “Don’t worry, we will talk about this in our next town hall.” When that meeting came, there were about a thousand or so staff who signed onto this meeting, but no one raised the subject. All the leadership did was talk about AI and how great the technology is. Everyone was frustrated.

What was the reaction from staff during the meeting?

The comments were anonymous, which is probably why staff felt more comfortable to just write what they wanted to write. And the whole screen was raining thumbs down emojis continuously, to the point that leadership had to ask people to stop.

What did the comments say?

Things like, “Is this an SNL skit?”, “This place is a spoof of a real agency”, “Would love an answer on this one question. What did you expect today’s meeting was going to go like?” People were really frustrated. It makes sense that agencies are going to put their best foot forward, but inside, most of them are dumpster fires.”

So what actually happened with the return-to-office mandate after that?

That’s the thing. It felt like leadership just said things. They said there was a mandate, but they didn’t think about the practicalities of how it was going to roll out. And they didn’t actually implement the return-to-office. Leadership sent that email and then never actually did it, and never talked about it again.

What was it like working under that kind of uncertainty?

It was tough. To give you an example, our team had beat our forecasted goal every quarter for nine quarters — which was great. But we were still expected to have a list on hand of who we would lay off if we missed our goal by one quarter.

Even when your team was performing?

Yes. And there were things happening elsewhere in the business that made it feel like there was just no sense of humanity in how decisions were being made. Another example being that they sent hundreds of people to Cannes one year, then laid off hundreds of employees the day they got back.

That must have been difficult to watch.

It was. They had acquired all these small agencies that had incredible cultures and amazing teams, and they all got sucked into this soulless vacuum. At any point, if we weren’t going to hit our goal within a quarter, we had to have that list on hand at all times of who we were going to lay off. It was literally like working with this proverbial gun to our heads at all times.

Has the pressure around efficiency changed with the push to use AI?

Yes, but that’s the thing, AI, has made us less efficient.

Any decent leadership would say, “It’s going to take a lot of time for us to figure out how to integrate this to make us more efficient and allow people to learn how to work this into their workflow”. Instead, it’s just thrown at everyone. Leadership is like, “Be more efficient.” That’s it. But the staff are then thinking, I can’t do my job and learn this. And to be honest, maybe it makes a few tasks faster, but that’s it. The people who are expected to implement this are just handed these unrealistic expectations.