McCann Worldgroup Reviews

Pros

nice people to work with.

Cons

needed to diversify client base.

Advice to Senior Management

good luck.

Pros

-Young crowd
-Located in a nice area
-Happy hour
-Very casual dress code
-Get 4 Summer Fridays off
-Some nice people to get to know

Cons

-VERY straight hierarchy
-Not very team oriented
-Extremely low salary
-VERY long hairs
-A lot of people working here are either very self centered, lazy, or not every bright
-HR is very disorganized

Like a lot of the other agencies, UM is very top heavy. Junior staff is often taken for granted and not paid attention to. When it comes down to it, upper management only care about themselves and saving their own ass. The ironic thing is that the office is open layout, emphasizing "open communication" when in fact, there is none. Rather than address employees' departures from the agency, senior staff choose to ignore it and continue on w/ their day.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management needs to stop being so cheap and offer better incentives to their employees. I mean it won't kill you to offer a higher base pay and extra time/over time for the lower level positions considering all the long hours that are spent

Pros

The Brand, the Culture, the ideas

Cons

I do not have any negatives.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep doing what you are doing .

Pros

You also start with 4 weeks of paid time off to use for vacation or sick days. You don't tend to have to take work home with you.

Cons

The Los Angeles office has trouble signing new clients, so new opportunities rarely present themselves. The members of upper management don't seem to care much about the employees below them. The employees seem to be expendables assets. The HR office is rather dishonest and untrustworthy. I would never complain about a boss or anyone in management, because they would be alerted immediately. The paid time off is great, except for the fact that you will never get to actually use it. A high quality of life is not something the Universal McCann strive to give to it's employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn what motivates people. It isn't office meet & greets and ice breaker games. These are only necessary because the turnover is so high. Offer to let someone actually take their full time off or give them an annual wage increase.

Pros

traditional, big, ability to move around between departments is good. summer fridays. closed between xmas and new years. not too "cool."

Cons

boring clients, senior levels micro manage. very top heavy. dark offices and hallways. no game or fun areas. it's a silo.

Advice to Senior Management

stop micro-managing. let other people make decisions and take lead roles. get a new strategy and planning team. better PR.

Pros

Decent pay, standard professional benefits, good PTO, 401K, very smart people to work with.

Cons

Agency is about branding down to the titles. If you are client facing (like most people are) you're given a very impressive title. At our agency over 20% of the employees are Senior Vice Presidents or Vice Presidents. Way too much management and too little production staff. Too many cooks in the kitchen trying to battle for control of a project. Too many ego's due to title inflation (see earlier comment). Poor roles and requirements, can be difficult to figure out where your job role ends and someone else's begins. Poor communication and processes which lead to mistakes and tight deadlines, i.e. you will work a lot of hours.

The largest problem however is the agencies inability to move past their financial billing model. They create an environment where every hour must be explained, causing managers to call for unnecessary meetings so they can bill time. They also have not been able to successfully catch up with interactive or digital agencies and their business model and financial billing models don't reflect the needs of today's clients and therefore does not support the infrastructure in the company to do a decent job for our clients.

Advice to Senior Management

Digital:
1. Get rid of title inflation. Get rid of the ego's that come with them.
2. Create and enforce tight job roles and responsibilities and career paths.
3. Re-evaluate financial billing model and current business model to succeed in being a digital agency, i.e. we have absolutely no way to bill for a license based service even if it makes the most sense, literally millions of dollars have been lost because we couldn't fit a clients financial model!
4. Closer communication with lower level employees and clients. Too much of the game 'telephone' goes on where upper (i.e. SVP/VP/Director) talks with client, then tries poorly to communicate what was learned through a power point presentation to rest of the team. The end result especially with digital projects is a complete failure to meet client expectations. So much money is spent communicating clients needs when only a handful of people are allowed to talk to the client. Read this as: smaller teams. OR restrict anyone from scheduling more than 5 meetings a week. Seriously, I know some people who create meetings just to bill their time to the project.
5. To help turnover and burnout. Possibly introduce sabbaticals or find someway to stop the "WE NEED TO GET THIS DONE LAST MINUTE" part of the job. The lifestyle and work hours at the company can be miserable.

Pros

People at McCann are fun and interesting. We worked hard and produced solid creative when deadlines required it, but did not overwork ourselves unnecessarily.

Cons

Management did not lead nor communicate well with employees. Performance appraisals and career paths are non-existent. Different functions don't play well together.

Advice to Senior Management

Lead by example. Communicate regularly with employees. Explain how the business is performing. Don't hide bad situations -- they all come out in the press any ways. Build a more collaborative culture.

Pros

Work on multiple brands at once, get more involvement at a junior level than you would elsewhere

Cons

If you don't think exactly like your department director, you won't excel quickly. People are judgemental and seem to see value in the "hipster" type. They encourage creative thinking yet don't appreciate people that don't think like them. Many people DO NOT know what they're talking about. Those who succeed have someone in senior management to support them. You have to have someone who has your back otherwise you will not be remembered or succeed as fast as others. There is WAY TOO much ego. People act like they are rock stars when they are regular business people just like everyone else. Also, don't expect to make money when you work there. The raises they give are pathetic. They are NOT in a good place right now. They are losing business left and right, losing pitches and clients are cutting their projects. The industry is losing respect for this once successful agency. It's too big to be nimble and too corporate to come up with out of the box creative ideas. The president makes bigs promises about making everyone more digitally savvy, becoming more nimble and creative but I haven't seen him take any action to improve it yet. Hopefully he can turn things around.

Advice to Senior Management

Someone needs to pay attention to the corruption that occurs internally. Many times smart people are forgotten while loud mouth idiots who have someone to back them succeed. It's not fair and also leads to a bad agency reputation.

Pros

Great opportunity to learn on a blue chip tech account.
Direct managers are supportive.
Great people from a peer standpoint. Smart people at some levels.
Organization is proactive to try and offset dependancy on key client, specifically in trying to build out skillset that other competing (creative) agencies can't offer with key client.

Cons

Organization is very top heavy - at the senior levels, they seem to want to bring in outside talent to round out skillset. Growth at junior levels is good, but not at senior levels.
Too reliant on key client.

Advice to Senior Management

Management has an attitude of "where else are they going to go" with current employees which could backfire on top talent.

Pros

If they win new business, and the new management is even slightly more capable, then it's possible for them to turn around. The reason you would want to work there is the potential to work on major global brands, with large budgets, which allow for ideas to have a grand stage.

Cons

Big agencies, as a model, are clearly dysfunctional. There are major inefficiencies, and it can be very hard to make your voice heard. If you are able to fight through that, and carve out your own niche, then there is hope. However, if you are a high-level thinker with a lot of talent, you will be putting a lot of hours in to fill the pockets of a lot of overpaid people in upper management.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate EVERYTHING to the employees. Be transparent. Tell them what you expect of them and tell them what you are doing to meet and exceed both the clients and the employees expectations.