Pros
Good work life balance in December
Cons
• The products are fake from DS perspective. They use cheap audience data from random sources because there is no budget for high quality sources. Also the data is generic - it doesn’t tell you anything brands don’t know already • The campaign optimization products do not actually improve performance most of the time. It is like flipping a coin if you use the products or bid randomly. Traders are good at hiding bad performance by killing margin to eat impression loss. This hurts the business and is a lie to clients. Big brands should not spend money with GroupM because they are paying for subpar performance plus headcount fees, product fees, service fees, etc. So the true campaign cost is much higher than what a campaign report shows because a brand should factor in the fees they are paying Choreograph • Choreograph OS Platform is a bunch of disconnected legacy rotting garbage pieces scotch taped together to pretend to be a cohesive end to end solution. In reality none of it works by itself and it is disconnected so it doesn’t work together either • Every solution is templatised. This means if you work for Ford, you are getting the same solution as Toyota more or less. This is because templates save the company money and employees have no incentive to improve on them • The AI investment that is mentioned in PR statements is mainly about workflow automation and templatising work. From DS perspective, this means same low quality outputs for as many clients as possible • Layoffs are frequent and random. In US they happen in a frequent “drip drip” stream during every quarterly budget planning. This is because management would have to give employees a few months’ notice if they did it all at once. So they do a few every 1-2 months. The layoffs are random because they are determined based on new leaders who the staff never worked with. Managers are often not told Their teams will be let go till afterwards. Employees with mid to high salaries are the first to be targeted. This happens because leadership is given budget cutting targets every quarter, and has a few days to decide who to fire to meet the new lower budgets. There is a restructuring every 6-12 months, so when new leadership comes in, they fire employees they never worked with because that’s easy for them. They should rot in h3ll • Terrible base pay • Salary increases are less than inflation and do not happen every years • Promotions are based on who management is friends with. Do not pretend it is based on performance. It is not • Lots of new people in management who do not understand advertising or how to build products or how companies make money. These managers then punish their employees who have been there a long time and understand the business needs to prevent them from growing in their careers • Client revenue is down obviously because the products look, smell, and perform like garbage. Then they fire US sales people who were not able to sell the garbage products at no fault of their own. Then revenue stays low so they fire competent tech and product team members because they do not want competition from good employees. Then remaining terrible team members build products that make no sense and have no value. Good sales people are gone so bad one have difficult time selling the festering vaporware. So management fires those sales people. Cycle continues. Meanwhile incompetent managers get promoted and have more room to make worse decisions impacting more people