Column Five Media Reviews

Overall, you can sense that C5 has yet to reach its peak maturity in terms of mentality, conduct and culture. They also tend to hire young, recent grads with little to no experience, so in terms of growth and learning opportunity, it can get stagnant pretty quickly. The leadership team is quite large as well—for a company of 50+ employees, it seems unnecessary to have 15+ directors. This tends to lead to lack of clarification in terms of direction due to inability to reach consensus. Personal and career growth is another issue—there were many promotions, but it seemed as if they were based on time constraints. The roles and responsibilities didn't change as much. Compensation is extremely low compared to market—it led to feelings of being under valued and disrespect. If you can deal with a low salary in exchange for the right to put big brands in your resume, go for it. The culture is interesting, but it's a small agency so everyone treats each other like family—this has its own pros and cons. In my opinion, it became clear very quickly that this was not a fit for me. There is a balance that needs to be established.

It's been a few years since my time there, so I'm hoping that a lot of these things have changed since then. — Pay is not good. — Salaries are below-average compared to other agencies and organizations, job listings, and industry surveys. It would hand-waved away by saying that other places have to pay higher because they're bad places to work, which is disingenuous. Each team member complained about it at one time or another to me. There were many talented people earning far less than their worth. — More of a content farm than a creative agency. — The company's website and social media shows off some beautiful, unique projects. Unfortunately, those are more of the exception than the norm. Most of the day-to-day work is working to punch-up dry documents like ebooks, infographics, and other materials for corporate marketing and sales teams. Many of the designers that came through would get dejected and uninspired by this. So it's good to have realistic expectations. — Too many meetings. — The people here just love them. Some days you'll spend the majority of it in meetings. It was normal to go home at night and work several hours catching up on my actual workload, and I wasn't alone on that. — Poor work/life balance. — Many worked heavy hours just keep their workloads managed. It was common to work at home before bed, or over the weekend for most folks. — Culture. — I put this under "Pros" as well, because they do do a pretty good job. But there's also areas where they miss the mark: - Sometimes in an effort to promote positivity, praise gets thrown around a bit too much to the point where it feels over-the-top and comes off kind of phony. It made people hesitant to offer criticism toward the company or management when they think they're in an echo chamber. - There's certainly a level of inconsistency in what is deemed professional and what isn't. I'd see comments or jokes made in Slack that seemed like a bit too much, and knew certain others wouldn't get away with the same. Some people would arrive way too late in the morning or disappear mid-day for hours. Some people would show up high. - The company is a bit too homogeneous (which included myself). Not enough diversity, and certainly a bit of a bro-ey atmosphere at times. - After my time there, I wasn't ever contacted to do an exit interview or anything. I didn't have a good experience, so it was frustrating that I wasn't given an opportunity to voice any of the concerns or issues that I had during my tenure. — Organizational Structure. — There seemed to be a lot of organizational clutter and no rhyme or reason to what department one person was in or what positions existed within a department. There were also people whom others didn't even know what they did. There's no real ability to move up in the company if you're not a manager already. I joined as a manager and would hear the frustration from my team when they realized there weren't many places for them to go if they stick around. I know the company did some restructuring after my time there, so I'm hoping things have improved on this front.