MRY Reviews

Where to start... Morale at the agency is absent. The main topic of conversation between employees is when they are moving on. Work/life balance at MRY is a complete joke. Due to lack of management oversight, half the agency works half days because no one knows what they do, while the other half works until 11pm every night and weekends. The agency has trouble convincing clients to pay for work, so the agency will do work out of scope, and then tell the lower level employees that their jobs may be jeopardy because they aren't working on enough billable work. Accountability, growth, and culture, is completely missing from MRY due to the high attrition rate. Due to the fact that MRY has been bought, sold, and stripped for parts five times in the last three years, no one at MRY (especially management) seems to know what is going on. Each year, employees are told that, due to the ownership group that owns MRY, no one will be receiving raises or promotions. This is obviously disheartening -- especially when MRY will continue to throw lavish parties and pump money into paid advertising to promote itself and it's executives' pet projects. Management openly says "if you want more money here, the only way you're getting it is by going out and getting a competing offer from another agency" Management openly complains that the company is directionless and says that they will be leaving ASAP. There is a real feeling that once MRY was purchased, the top brass at the company stopped caring about the agency.

None of the Pros apply anymore because almost everyone has since left. The bulk of the company was originally LBi's New York office, but has gone through a series of mergers and acquisitions starting about 2 years ago, resulting in a change in management. The new managers (from a smaller company, MRY, which LBi acquired) were now tasked with running the larger combined firm (which they rebranded with the name of their old firm). Yeah, you basically need a diagram to understand how all of this happened. In short, it's been an unmitigated disaster. They had no idea how half the office worked or what type of work they should be pursuing. This resulted in a large round of layoffs of employees whose roles they didn't fully understand, and were then shocked to find that we were understaffed for our scheduled workloads as a result. This triggered a process of rapid atrophy of the workforce, both from people seeing the writing on the walls and jumping ship while they could, as well as additional ill-advised layoffs. Inside of a year, the office went from needing to buy out another floor of the building to accommodate all of the employees, to having enough room to share their existing space with Big Fuel and still having room to spare. Incidentally, the new floor was never renovated or made ready, but management have been happy to pay the rent on it for coming up on 2 years now with no actual purpose for the space. Because that's obviously a better investment than retaining employees who are doing work. Hanging over all of this has been the massive lack of clear communication from the C-level exec team. Promises are made and constantly broken. Execs who promise a plan and a way forward promptly leave within weeks of telling us to stay. Entire departments have vanished overnight with little warning, leaving others scrambling to cover their work, at least temporarily, until all of the work dried up due to many major clients fleeing once they got a peek behind the curtain. But hey, there's free coffee, and look at how goofy the office is in the videos we post to social media. Bread and circuses.