AKQA Reviews

Pros

Fun work environment, cool office, great peers.

Cons

Low pay, little respect - idea that you're just a line item.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay your employees better.

Pros

Great people; they only hire the best meaning both competent and social.
Interesting clients.
Encouraged to be innovative and think outside the box.

Cons

AKQA have a tendency to accept more work than they can staff, making it hard on those already in the office.
Management is not consistent, leading to some confusion and holes in process.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop pitching new business until you're able to staff up what you've got. There are existing clients willing to give us plenty of new business without the pitch if we could only do it for them. Why not grow our existing relationships?

Pros

+ Opportunities
+ Great work space
+ Culture
+ Quality
+ People
+ Variety
+ Innovation
+ Independence
+ Good senior management

Cons

- Salary & Benefits
- Bad heating in winter
- Could be better at being transparent

Advice to Senior Management

Sort salaries out!

Pros

great people
good culture
top clients
cute dogs

Cons

very poor compensation
unorganized - not defining processes at the upper management level thus continuing to make the same mistakes= boring + tiring

Advice to Senior Management

this is the Bay Area you can't grow your company or hire A people with such poor compensation

Pros

Almost complete autonomy in internship tasks, pays off a lot in the long run when presenting experiuence for Job interview after graduation.

Cons

Too Short and no room for being timid. If you arent assertive can fade to dark behind strong personalities of other Account Coordinators. I was the only intern in the DC Office, so I had to build confidence quick to make a name.

Advice to Senior Management

Connect all interns in some fashion, i.e. internal networks. Would have made the internship a bit easier to bear in the future.

Pros

- Good people
- minimal office politics

Cons

- long hours without compensation

Advice to Senior Management

- offer more employee benefits for the long hours they put in

Pros

Great location (if you like Georgetown)
Great creative reputation (although the DC office rides the coattails of San Francisco and London offices, who have much larger and more prestigious client portfolios)

Cons

Inexperienced project management and account coordination and client services teams, which means frequent communication breakdowns with clients and internally, resulting in wasted technical work, frustration.

The Creative team's output is often managed by the Account team, which means that the results can be awkward and less than inspiring--not up to the AKQA quality that the client expects.

The Tech team is often saddled with the burden of managing late breaking scope and requirements changes, when many of these could have been mitigated through better project management. As a result, the tech work experience can range from the mundane to the frustrating. Expect very little support from senior leadership (Tech Director, Account Directors, General Managers) to your concerns. The attitude is "suck it up and bear it".

Advice to Senior Management

Hire better project managers to reduce wasted work effort. Clients are frustrated and so are internal team members. Account management is lacking in basic project coordination expertise, zeal, and direction.

Pros

Cool-looking office, location, a beer fridge, and a pool table.

Cons

But the above serve as distractions from the terrible work environment--a reason not many stay here for longer than a year. The company hires inexperienced account managers who also serve as project managers--many of these hires have never worked for a digital agency before, or have had any significant experience dealing with other agencies and clients. As a result, requirements are not accurately translated to Creative and Technical teams, project scopes constantly swing, budgets are stretched, client expectations and trust are frequently blown, and the guns turn on you.

Nearly all company events are centered around alcohol. The atmosphere can be cliquey and suffocating.

Hiring is completely reactive, instead of being strategic.

Advice to Senior Management

Fix the glaring problems within the Account team. Hire competent project managers and product managers that have had a deep experience working with blue-chip clients in a digital agency environment. Allow the Creative team to take more of a leadership role in driving the ideas forward. Hire strategic planners with a proven record.

Pros

In short you get to work on fantastic accounts, benifits are good, fry up on a friday is cool once a month

Cons

management just push and push till you fold you work silly hours and get no thanks , coming here is like going back 10 years they think a 50 hr week should be normal and celebrate peopel who do 100hr weeks ratehr than go hay we have somethign wrong here.

Advice to Senior Management

get a grip - hrs spent does not equal good quality work produced , get people to work smarter not longer.

Pros

Good balance between being a large company and an independent agency - you get the best of both worlds.
For technical people hours are not so long (but creatives are not so lucky)
The IT dept. is very responsive and leaves staff freedom to admin their machines
They win big accounts with the brief of coming up with good ideas, so the projects can be fun.
More process oriented than any other creative agency I have worked for (for a tekkie, that is a pro :-)
Staff tend to be young and fun hipsters (in production at least)
A couple of years there look very good on your CV

Cons

Being creatively led can be frustrating for tekkies - you have to bend backwards to implement their sometimes daft ideas.
Technology stack is set in stone and a bit mainstream: Java, .NET, jQuery, svn. No other options.
Management often waste a lot of the budget, and by the time it reaches production there is little left (this is true of ALL media agencies, to be fair).
Career opportunities are nil. Most people will leave at the same level at which they enter.
They foster internal competition which doesn't suit everybody (that could be just the tek dept. though, which is run by someone from the finance industry)

Advice to Senior Management

Don't make promises about career advancement during the interview if you don't mean it, just because you are desperate to fill in the position.