AKQA – “Good rewards if you work hard.”

Pros

Great clients, high standards, and the top creatives are very good. The network consistently produces award winning campaigns and has a very good reputation within the industry. The San Francisco office is in a good position to collaborate with industry leaders in rich media, social networking, search engines, and portals - all are very close to the office. Projects are well promoted externally, and projects are often written up in periodicals, in studies and research, and often become candidates for industry awards. AKQA is a great place to train if you are creative right out of school. If you have talent and can keep pace with the workload, there are great benefits for your portfolio.

Cons

As with most agencies, most of the resources are dedicated to a few select accounts, and the remaining accounts are challenging to staff and grow. Resources are kept very thin and workloads can rise and stay high for long periods of time. The hours for creatives are long and very challenging. Agency turnover has left the senior level positions spread very thin as well, and oversight is often not able to deep too deeply into individual executions.

Advice to Senior Management

The recent departures have been a large number of very talented people. Retaining talent should be priority number one.