'Inside, It's Mostly Firefighting': Confessions of an Independent Agency Veteran

Agencies are always expected to have ready answers for clients and to anticipate problems before they arise. But inside the company, the picture often looks completely different. In its "Confessions" series, Digiday asked a former leader at an independent advertising agency how the company's internal workings left them disillusioned — the source's identity has been kept anonymous.

One example: company leadership cancelled every employee's corporate card with just one day's notice, and the announcement didn't even reach everyone. "People on my team were asking me, 'Are they really cancelling our cards?' And I told them, 'No, that's spam, report it to IT,'" the source says. It later turned out not to be spam at all. The decision hit younger employees especially hard — many didn't have a personal card with a high enough limit, and had to cover expenses out of pocket while waiting for the company to reimburse them.

The return-to-office mandate was announced just as chaotically — leadership sent an email on Friday evening at 6:30 pm saying "we'll discuss this at the next all-hands." When nearly a thousand employees joined that meeting, the topic never came up at all — leadership talked only about AI. In the stream of anonymous comments, the screen was flooded with thumbs-down reactions, with employees posting things like "this is an SNL sketch" and "this is a parody of a real agency." Leadership even had to ask for comments to be turned off. Oddly enough, the return-to-office mandate was never actually enforced afterward — but it was also never mentioned again.

The source says their team beat its targets for nine consecutive quarters, yet was still constantly required to keep a list ready of "who we'd lay off if we miss the target this quarter." In another incident, the company flew hundreds of employees out to the Cannes festival — and laid off hundreds of people the very day they got back. "It's like buying up small agencies with a great culture and then dissolving it into a soulless machine," the source says.

Pressure to adopt AI has also lowered productivity rather than raising it, the source says: "Leadership just says, 'be more efficient.' That's it. But employees feel how hard it is to learn a new tool while also doing their actual job." These tools can speed up some tasks, the source believes, but the unrealistic expectations set for rolling them out only further erode trust between leadership and employees.