imc2 Reviews

Pros

Fun environment, full of energy and diversity. Promotes innovation and creativity; but limited to a narrow slice of the marketing world. Still, a solid experience.

Cons

Management hires when they need folks and fires (I mean laysoff) folks when they lose business. One year, they had well over 5 layoffs!!

Advice to Senior Management

20% of your staff is carrying the rest. Figure out what you really want and improve your reputation to attract good talent. Talent that you commit to keeping for 2+ years.

Pros

For the most part, everyone was friendly and it was an exciting and fun environment that seemed like it was going places...in the beginning...

Cons

There was very little to no management or direction. As an entry-level advertising professional, there was no mentorship and the person I directly reported to seemed like she was not even happy to be working there...which you can only imagine made the experience that much more intolerable. There was a very positive and energetic front, but employees could be found gossiping and bashing the company around every corner.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees, period.

Pros

Most of the employees are team player.

Cons

The budget never work with the clients expectation, therefore, no work life balance. Never compensated with days and weeks of overtime.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't claim to have moral and value when there is very little of it. It is extremely deceiving to the clients and employee when there is not "a drop of kindness" when it really matters.

Pros

Strong production teams, great ideas, willingness to try the "big idea" or high creative and high strategy.
The delivery teams are committed to high quality and great work.
Great environment and facilities. The daily work can be great, until over-allocations ruin the experience.

Cons

Absolutely no work life balance. This keeps coming up on all the employee surveys done but never is tackled.

No training whatsoever. The internal training initiatives are great for some folks but not for practical, every day use.

Top leadership is inexperienced and arrogant about how "great a place to work" it is. Ever see the company win a "best places to work" award? Nope. That's because those are based on the EMPLOYEE (not leadership) reviews and submissions not the empty mantras of the management.

They run their business on shoestring budgets, spending money on high priced, ineffective new "thought leaders" who stay, make a [negative] impact and then leave for greener pastures while leaving the production-level teams working their tails off without support or relief. The only reason for the success of the company is the GREAT production teams (creative/UX/Tech) are excellent and get roped into joining the company before they burn and end up leaving.

Top Senior leadership team is clueless and do not understand or listen to the daily issues of the average employee. They PRETEND they do but in many,many years, have never seen a positive, impacted change occur that has improved the daily life and work-life balance of the employee.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop hiring the "best and brightest" who can talk at conferences and write books and suck up to the CEO nicely until they tire of the company and then leave it (in a weaker state).

Stop assuming your creative and production teams are just going to "get it done" and actually give them some breathing room and not over allocating them. 90% billing weekly targets calculations are not how you should be calculating "success"

Stop trying to "get by" with the LEANEST production staff possible. Fire a few of the non-productive executives in favor of 4-5+ more production team members across ANY of the disciplines.

Pros

Emloyees are encouraged to learn and create new, innovative solutions. It's a fun place to work that promotes a feeling of family within the group. I like the way the company is differentiating itself in the marketplace, even if the idea is a little overly touchy feely.

Cons

It can be very hard to find the resources you need for a project. Too many people are involved in the review process, so it takes far too long to get anything done. Despite pretty consistent complaints from employees, very few changes have been made to address the concerns.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management needs to listen to employees. Hire people that you trust and empower them to make the decisions required by their role.

Pros

Let me start by saying that I did not leave imc2 on my own accord. If it were up to me, I'd still be there. And I'd still be there because I loved working for Doug and Mark.

imc2 is a place that fosters an open dialogue between leadership and others. There is no feeling of grandeur from those in higher positions and instead they encourage everyone to share their thoughts and insights.

Sure, imc2 has a few incompetent people, and sure they deserve to get beat up for laying people off right before the holidays a couple of years back; but they are still led by people with great ability and good intent.

In my experience, those people who were let go were often times those people who were not cutting it. Some of those I worked with that were laid off or fired were either incapable, lazy or had bad attitudes. I can count only a few people who were none of those that were let go.

So imc2 is not perfect, but being gone from there has made me appreciate it even more. Sure they can improve, but believe me that they are trying. Doug will not sit back and allow the company to grow stale. He has some great people who do great work and he will continue to empower those people to help in the company success.

Cons

At the time when imc2 grew very rapidly and added a lot of people, they hired very carelessly. I would hope that if there is ever a need to grow so quickly again that they will be more judicious in who they hire. I'm sure the lesson was learned when most of those new hires were let subsequently let go.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep forging ahead. There are certainly some of those that are bitter. And there are certainly some of those that truly had a bad experience. Learn from those, but know that there are many good things about how the company is run and the work that is being done.

Pros

Some of the work is interesting. Some cool clients. Smart people.

Cons

Burn out fast. No work-life balance.

Pros

imc2 manages to get some great clients and do some pretty good work. The people working here are very committed to doing great work in spite of the fact that their is no REAL support from upper management.

Cons

Enough with all the feel-good platitudes that contradict your "bottom-line only" consultant approach. Stop being so short sighted about your clients and they will stop treating you like that. You might love selling strategy, but in the end, it's strong creative that matters most. The creative team is not there to implement your "brilliant" strategy. The strategy is usually delivered by the very self-satisfied strategy team and involvement ends there. The baby is left to be raised by the creative team and always has to be re-worked.
And one last thing, a chocolate bar is not a great reward or incentive.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't be so arrogant that you may actually know what you're doing. Don't take employee polls or surveys if you don't want to know the answers. Dallas is not NY and vice versa. Try to foster some good feelings between the offices. Listen to people when they say they need something instead of firing them. And quit trying to run your accounts so lean on the backs of junior people who you don't have to pay a lot of money to. That's pathetic.

Pros

The employees - at least, the small section which actually produces work, are a group of highly-skilled, talented people.

Cons

By far the worst management at any agency I've been employed by. They refuse to address issues that have been going on since at least the beginning of my employment at the company in 2007. Their habit of promoting from within means that the company attracts people looking for a higher salary and position than they're qualified to receive and would never be considered for elsewhere, and the idea of "earning" a promotion typically means throwing those capable of quality work under the bus. These comments apply to both the Dallas and New York offices.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees. Appreciate those who have faith in the ability of their co-workers. Tell both upper and middle management to move out of the way so work can be accomplished more efficiently and without so many unnecessary - and, typically, undeserved - egos getting in the way.

Pros

Smart, creative people who care about what they do.

Cons

Lack of discipline. No understanding of basic project management principles.

Advice to Senior Management

Get a better understanding of what goes on with your project teams. Big corporate clients expect better than this.