Digitas Reviews in Boston, MA Area

Pros

Built a standing reputation. Digitas = great name to have on resume roster. The working process within agency walls is insightful and adds to experience from other agency/companies. Solid & smart alumni network! (which never stops growing.) Great 'new' HQ office in Boston.

Cons

longer than average agency hours. too much policy, process, talk versus sometimes just getting teams/groups to focus on task at hand vs chain of command. existing employees here like to pull rank and/or mention tenure at company no matter if junior or senior to new hire. this creates a bit of an unspoken division between the ole lifers and new hires. agency has been actively recruiting across departments for years to help support 'change' however seems to be only a matter of time before good people leave and everyone at digitas knows this. (turn-around is too frequent) agency does good work (god bless many creatives) but there's too much red tape & process for an agency. very corporate like atmosphere. really important to keep project teams motivated and focused on client work (why we are here and what we need to achieve) versus distracted from what's happening within their teams or across agency teams. internal politics often get in the way and work could be less dramatic/difficult/such an ordeal.... really need to loosen up. its not the only place in the world to do this sort of work well. must keep an attitude: Let's team up and just get it done. Feel good about work and work together. this is a culture that you must create within your team because it doesn't exist as part of the culture. focus on earning peoples trust but don't expect there's in return.

Advice to Senior Management

executive management is strong! but the senior management team could better enable teams to let their guard down and focus on more teamwork/trust... and good work will happen for clients. the tenured employees own the culture so i understand its hard to change. at the end of the day its about good work for our clients and ourselves and working in a healthy, productive environment. when good smart people decide to stay the culture will slowly start to improve for the better, inherently. (no more meetings about having less meetings. yes this happened and of course i thought it was a joke but it was not. meeting happened with a ppt no less)

Pros

Great learning environment. Good place to learn the ins and outs of online and offline marketing.

Cons

Fairly hierarchical. Like many companies, gets political at higher levels. A little arrogant in the industry.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue the focus on training - that is a large differentiator in a space that is changing so quickly.

Pros

Good people, good benefits and vacation tome.

Cons

Working more than 60 hours a week every week, lack of client management, no work life balance

Advice to Senior Management

I feel that they do not take care of their employees on the GM account. There is little to no client management, and no push back at all. There is no regard for personal time or a work life balance and I woudl not recommend anyone working there. There are on average 2 nights per week where you would be expected to work all night and then work the next day and there is almost nothing being done to change this. It makes me sad to see that good people are going to leave because the senior management is not looking out for the execution team.

Pros

The location, people, and energy are all positives. Very smart and creative people

Cons

Poor work-life balance, extremely political, long hours

Advice to Senior Management

People's work should speak for itself. Priority should not be given to those who make it a point to " be their own cheerleader" at all times

Pros

After working at Digitas, you can work anywhere. Being able to put "Digitas" and "agency experience" on your resume lends you some serious industry street-cred and is a huge career booster, no lie. It's a great place to expand your professional horizons, as there are lots of opportunities to learn and grow, career-wise.

Digitas also offers one of the best benefits packages in the industry and has a reputation for paying well, which I can confirm with my own experience working there.

The very fast-paced environment pushes everyone to their limits, and depending on the person, brings out either (or both) the best or worst in everyone.

Working with very smart, talented, and capable people, a lot of whom are some of the best in their fields, naturally pushes you (in a good way) to up your own game, constantly.

Fortunately, managers are usually open to giving and allowing you opportunities to better yourself, such as paying for conferences, classes, and training — provided, of course, that they are relevant and reasonable.

Swanky Boston headquarters in a brand new building at 33 Arch Street, sandwiched between the Financial District and Downtown Crossing — nobody's compaining about that. It makes the commute very easy for pretty much anybody on any of the lines in Boston's T system: get off at Downtown Crossing for Orange and Red Line people, Park Street for Green or Red Liners, State Street for Blue or Orange Liners, and Temple Place for Silver Liners. And of course South Station for suburbanites commuting further distances on the Commuter Rail or regional busses.

The location also offers a lot of vibrant options not only for lunch, but to run ever imporant lunch-time personal errands. Every major and minor bank in Boston / New England has a big branch or a headquarters in the Financial District. There's a Boston Sports Club right next door and Bally's is also right around the corner, so you can hit the gym on the rare occasion that you have a lazy afternoon, or, more commonly, before or after work. There are lots of yummy food options, both mom and pop as well as your usual chains (such as Starbucks and Finagle A Bagel). There's also a cafeteria on the 19th floor for days when you don't feel like venturing outside. The food there is pretty decent, though options are limited, especially if you're a vegetarian. I didn't patronize the caf on too many occasions, to say the least. Although, I do have to say, it made a great alternative space to work for times when I didn't want to be bothered by impromptu "check-ins" by marketing or project management people stopping by cubicle or giving me incessant phone calls during crunch time.

And of course . . . how could you not forget Bagel Fridays?

Cons

It's a high-pressure, fast-pasted environment. You will get compensated handsomely, however the expecations are always there to return the favor. You will work hard. Sometimes excessively.

Although you are given ample vacation and time off, it was often a bit of an ordeal for me to get approval for time off, and even when I did, I sometimes found myself doing work stuff during "vacation." Granted, it wasn't like I was doing 8 hours days at the beach, but I did have to take some time out of my vacation schedule, which was an inconvenience. This was not something unique to my own experience, so be warned.

It's Corporate America®™. There is a underlying, subtle, yet palpable, atmosphere of passive aggression. I came across this more than once, and as passive-aggressive culture is one that is very foreign to me (I still don't understand it), I had to deal with it; it did make it especially hard when the passive aggression was coming from someone with greater authority than me.

Though diplomacy isn't a formal requirement of the job, it won't hurt to have plenty of it. What you will need plenty of, if you want to get promoted, is political savvy. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean brown-nosing or butt-kissing, though there is planty of that that goes on as well. It just means you will need two things: 1) talent — which is pretty much a given if you are going to A) get hired by Digitas in the first place and B) if you do get hired and don't really have that much talen, are going to last for a sufficient amount of time — but talent is only one part of the equation. The second thing you need: Your talents need to get recognized somehow. This is where diplomacy comes in. Many people at Digitas (well, in general anyway) have . . . different ways of promoting their names and reputations within the company. I will definitely say that you can play a clean game and still win.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to and pay more attention to the people in the trenches — they are the ones doing the legwork, and often have to pay for short-sighted decisions made out of fear by working extra and longer hours.

Pay less attention to the noise of industry buzz — the trends, the gossip — and get back to just creating great work. Trends come and go. Great ideas are timeless.

Lend more credibility to creativity and pushing the technological envelope, and the most to fusing these two seamlessly together, and less to statistics, "proof", and data.

When the clients says, "Jump!", don't ask, "How high?" — ask, "Why?" Then ask them what their definition of "jump" is.

And finally, don't read industry trade rags. Or at least, not too often. Listen to your inner voice.

Pros

Fun atmosphere, intelligent, hard-working, young, good-looking employees. Lots of fun events. Top-notch clients who, while not always the most cutting edge, are often open to learning about recent developments in interactive media and how they can be applied to their business.

Friendly, helpful atmosphere - even with senior management.

Cons

Long hours, hourly billing-driven financials require maximizing the amount of time worked on billable job codes which can make it difficult to explore non-client opportunities within the company.

6 month promotion cycles can be very frustrating, if you don't get promoted it will not happen until the next review period, no matter how good a job you are doing. Promotion decisions are made by committee of senior leaders, meaning that lower level employees need to be very political and get their name known to people outside their team.

Additionally, individual managers lack the ability to directly influence salary decisions making negotiations impossible.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the fun events in the office, even when times are tough - they really help solidify the spirit/enthusiasm in the office that allow us to work those crazy hours with a smile on our faces.

Pros

There are a ton of brilliant people at Digitas - and as an intellectual snob, I find that incredibly important and stimulating.

We have some amazing accounts and people with even more amazing ideas for how to market them.

For an agency, the hours are relatively reasonable.

Cons

People don't always use their intelligence to further the work. Marketing people in particular can get lazy about pushing the clients to accept things outside their comfort level. Considering that we have an incredible strategy and analytics department that can (and does) show proven results for more envelope-pushing creative work, you'd think the marketing people would be willing to fight for great creative.

Although teams generally get along well and like each other personally, there's absolutely a combative relationship between marketing and creative, and creative almost always loses - mainly because we don't own the relationship with the clients and don't get many opportunities to plead our cases to them.

Promotions are done in an obscenely bureaucratic manner, which rarely rewards the people most deserving. People get stuck in a position and a payscale that hardly befits their skills, experience, and talent and can languish there for years.

Digitas calls itself an agency, but it feels like an accounting firm when you walk around the office. There's nothing creative about our space, and there's no frenetic energy of great ideas being tossed around.

With all the brilliant people working here, you'd think we'd be winning more awards and creating better work. The only reasons we aren't doing those things are that our clients are afraid and our marketing teams don't fight for the break-through ideas creatives come up with.

Advice to Senior Management

Recognize that the creative output is your product. It's what our consumers see, what convinces them (or doesn't) to buy our clients' products. Currently, we're not a creative agency, and we're wasting the amazing talents of everyone in our creative department. The longer we wait to allow brilliant, scary ideas to flourish, the more likely it is that the skills of the creative department will diminish from disuse, and attrition will continue.

Pros

Good Pay, great work conditions, Tap Room, great holidays, great people, very easy to get to via public transportation. The team I work with feels like a family sometimes instead of just co-workers. I know that I can rely on the other people around me for help not just with work but with life.

Cons

Some of the clients are not as cutting edge as we are, so we find ourselves pushing out work that looks more like 2 years ago instead of the future. Some times communication can get a little mucked up, due to some people now knowing what it is that other parts of the company do.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep doing what your doing! Find us some cutting edge clients!

Pros

The hours are mostly 9-5:30 if you work hard to keep it that way. People are overall very smart and take pride in the work they do. The company does a good job having company events that are fun. I really enjoy the summer outing, Follies (our version of a talent show), halloween and holiday parties. The company is also very supportive when you need to take time off for family. It is not looked down upon if you need to work for home because you need to take care of something. Also we get summer fridays which is nice.

Cons

The compensation isn't great when you have been working there for a while. You have to leave and come back to make the best money for your level. Also, at times I feel that not everyone takes the same amount of accountability for their work. We are also a very meeting heavy culture. It doesn't help to be in meetings all day when you are trying to get your work done. Additionally, we send a lot of emails. People are not as likely to have face to face meetings. It is hard to manage your time at work when you are bombarded with emails and meeting requests.

Advice to Senior Management

Increase salaries for Marketing capability

Pros

Digitas is a great place to work in terms of learning a lot about digital marketing. Digitas is also a well known name in the Boston area so you can leave after a few years and likely get a great job elsewhere. Digitas does recognize achievements and promote from within but it is very political & highly competitive.

Digitas respects your life and gives tons of benefits including 8 sick days per year on top of vacation. Benefits are great and publicis does a great job managing these benefits. Overall, it feels like digitas respects that you are a person and gives you a great place to come everyday

Cons

I think the large nature is hard to sometimes navigate. It is also highly competitive. Career opportunities are available, but only if you are willing to go that extra mile and navigate through the political webs. You must get to know senior management on top of going to events and making sure you do your job at 110%. This can eat up your life just to make sure that you get noticed. Communication is sometimes a bit unclear as you get stuck in a bubble that encompasses your account and nothing else. Overall, digitas is still a good place to work.

Advice to Senior Management

I think they overall do a good job. I'd just ask them to trust more junior members