AKQA Reviews

Former Employee – worked at AKQA full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – -famous brands
-smart creatives+tech
-good name

Cons – -cheap
-unmanaged client expectations
-reactionary leadership
-poor communication within departments

Advice to Senior Management – Value the employees you have, not the ones you're trying to get.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at AKQA full-time for more than a year

Pros – The work is usually varied, and projects are beautiful and innovative. Wonderful offices, very friendly colleagues, culture of politeness, good equipment, central location surrounded by bars/cafes, travel opportunities.

Cons – Every project is a ground-up restart with few lessons shared or work re-used. The pay is uncompetitive compared to other industry roles, and hiring is done more on cultural fit than skill. Getting development support is hard. Managers are great at their day jobs, but poor at managing people and their development. It's easy to feel overlooked and interchangeable. There's a rule on 'no promotions or pay-rises within a year of joining', regardless of performance. There's a rigid career ladder and there's no scope to carve out new roles - skills outside the narrow job spec will not be recognised or used.

Advice to Senior Management – Please develop your senior managers. Many are incumbents who aren't that effective. Many manage by giving a 'thumbs up' to initiatives from their teams, but won't support initiatives and can't make things happen. The founder's monthly hyperbole-and-air emails make staff roll their eyes, and set a bad precedent for the VPs, who attempt to do the same and just look disconnected.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at AKQA full-time for more than a year

Pros – The Creative Development department was good to work with. I worked with many great people.

Cons – Everything else was horrible. Systematic problems, massively underpaid employees. High rate of unfulfilled promises (e.g. 100%). Lies about salary bracketing. I would even warn against contracting at AKQA. The bottom line is that if you are an engineer, this might make your skills decline, and may hurt your career.

Advice to Senior Management – Don't take advantage of your employees.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at AKQA full-time

Pros – Some great talent.

Some decent project briefs

Good for resume

Cons – No evenings or weekends. Work life balance doesn't exist-this place burns people out. If you have a family be prepared to never see them. Be prepared to miss holidays, vacation days and personal days.

Unrealistic deadlines, production mentality, sell executions not ideas.

Unreal turnover rate.

Only value winning.

Advice to Senior Management – Growth is great, but...Try and keep the good people, you're burning everyone out.

Current Employee – been working at AKQA full-time

Pros – Most people here are nice.
- High-profile clients like Target, Audi, Xbox, and Anheuser-Busch.
- A new office coming in 2013 that looks to be more pleasant than the current one, and is walkable from both Caltrain and BART.
- Supposedly, the AKQA name looks good on a marketing resume (say other reviewers), though my own experience doesn't reflect this.
- Monday bagels.

Cons – As 32 other reviewers have noted, the pay is way below average. Check the salary tab; compared to other agencies you'll see five-figure gaps across the board. Benefits are no better.
- Their philosophy on work ethic is shallow, inconsiderate, and unfair. Efficiency and quality of work take a back seat to the only metric that counts: face time. All employees classified as "creatives" are expected to be in the office from 9:00-6:00 at the minimum -- which for some who take public transit means 8:30-6:30 -- and then there are the late nights/weekends, which are frequent. There's also this mentality that if some people have to stay late, everyone should, even if there's no real work to be done. Should you get a salary offer, make sure to discount it by 30% to reflect these asinine attitudes.
- Meetings, meetings, and more meetings -- and on some projects, tack on a couple meetings after that. On ours, meetings are masterfully engineered to be as dumb and intrusive as possible: gathering in a circle every morning as a "team" while the PM goes around the room telling each person, one by one, about his/her assignment for the day. For all involved, the result is 30 seconds of talking followed by 15 minutes of standing idle and listening to irrelevant side conversations -- a hilarious daily waste of three man-hours. Even funnier is how at one point, the powers above noticed this trend and held a meeting about the ludicrous oversupply of meetings; no change took place except for a mandate moving them even earlier in the morning. (Things have a history of not changing around here; I've read every GlassDoor review dating back to 2008, and most still apply.)
- Not technically a con, but AKQA has a pretty homogenous workforce, especially for SF. Aside from a handful of Asians there are almost zero minorities, and few past the age of 35 (maybe because some parents prefer to actually see their children). The whole office has this certain… sorority house vibe, too. Aside from the technical types and analytics team, smart/interesting individuals are a rare sight.
- The concept of creativity is thwarted at every turn. The "committee" philosophy dominates here: turn in a piece of work and watch it get bounced between 3-5 people (seemingly chosen at random) for "corrections," most of which make things worse. Sometimes it gets passed to an outside agency for even more changes, which are expected to be obeyed blindly. Should you ever try to argue, expect to be branded as difficult and Not a Team Player. These factors make AKQA feel more like a production house / assembly line than a place of any creativity.
- While most people are nice -- a quality that's more attributable to San Francisco than anything else -- that adjective applies far less to the middle managers, aka the ones the most people call "boss." The first problem is oversupply: AKQA is one of those bloated bureaucracies with ten captains for every rower. There are FOUR levels of "Creative Director" alone (then the real management, and finally the corporate overlords at the WPP conglomerate), and few of these directors seem qualified to do their jobs, or all that bright in general. I've met CDs who couldn't understand subject-verb agreement, wrote copy containing nonsensical statements, had trouble articulating themselves in e-mails, or just had the literacy of your average YouTube commenter. Between them and the project managers, the whole lot of them seem painfully lacking in common sense.
- The ones at the top of this chain (who never leave) are as low on ethics as they are on talent, treating the rank-and-file as disposables. I've witnessed scenarios in which employee A recruited employee B, then when the latter turned out to be cheaper, the management just flat-out fired employee A (while making up stories about said employee's performance as justification). These people also turn a blind eye to the bullying that sometimes goes on below them, as long as the offender is in their social club. Not nice + not smart + not ethical + unlimited power equals a lethal combination to those below.
- Given all of the above, it's no surprise that annual turnover is higher than at any company I've seen by a matter of multiples: FIFTY PERCENT, almost on the mark. (Imagine what it would be in a normal economy!) By my three-month anniversary, three of the four people sitting next to me had quit; by nine months I was one of the older people in the room. While funny, this sky-high turnover becomes problematic by leaving giant holes in the workflow -- and the so-called solution from the middle managers is to have people with totally unrelated jobs fill in the gaps, i.e. an account guy doing the review work of a creative (for free, of course). You'll often find yourself arguing with people who are long on authority and short on knowledge, and it creates quite a dysfunctional atmosphere. It's no surprise that the best and brightest leave AKQA often, and soon.

Advice to Senior Management – Start treating the employees who do the actual work with some respect, in terms of both hours and compensation. Unload 90% of the current middle managers, who even if they did their jobs well, serve no purpose. Start with these two basic steps and maybe people wouldn't be forming lines to jump ship.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at AKQA full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – * the chance to work in an English speaking environment and practice your English
* relatively easy to get transferred to other offices - your chance to go and work in Japan or the US, London, Amsterdam, or Paris!
* if you want to work in London, AKQA looks good on your CV there. Sadly, in Germany nobody knows them and nobody cares

Cons – * Sweatshop. Friday at 19:00 the office is always full of people. Sometimes 20:00 too. You are expected to do unpaid overtime every day, and often work weekends.

* management promotes ferocious internal competition as they think the best will naturally rise to the top. In fact, the most vicious rise to the top, the rest leave.

* No career options if you are not originally fro the London office. The Berlin office is run from London, and all the senior positions are filled by people from the London office. No chance if you were hired in Berlin

* Management is hopeless - they've had an absent MD and no creative director for months, and the management below them has too much to do to manage projets properly, even if they cared. They tend to just throw you at the deep end without any backing, and two months later they'll come back and check how things are going, and blame you if all's gone wrong. Which it does, more often than not.

* No good projects - not many projects at all. They keep losing clients.

* It's a Java shop. Front end development is not treated seriously, although this is slowly changing.

* all the cons of a startup (badly organized, everyone is really young) and of a big corporate (design by committee, lots of red tape)

Advice to Senior Management – * give some chances to non Brits too

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at AKQA full-time

Pros – Creative work, awesome team - driven people to do bigger and great things.

Cons – long hours. long, long, long hours, goodbye to weekends.

Advice to Senior Management – manage client expectations correctly -

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at AKQA full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – - Great clients with awesome budgets
- You make your own future
- Two years on your resume is more than enough to get you hired with 20% pay hike elsewhere
- If you can work at AKQA you handle anything!

Cons – - Not all clients are great and some accounts suffer from production weary workers
- Competence beyond microsites and creative deliverables is minimal
- Line management is not helpful in developing your career or future, you need to make your own plans
- Middle management is a waste of space and I won't even mention the snr management
- In two years you'll be burned out if you don't push back on incompetent management
- It won't be long before other companies realize that AKQA is not a positive line item on your resume

Advice to Senior Management – Make change before the remainder of your good staff depart. As it is you have already waited too long to make key decisions.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at AKQA full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Talented people, great brands, ahead of the curve in data science and digital media. AKQA offers a breadth of services in brand strategy, digital media, advanced data analytics, and social media.

Cons – Falls into some agency pitfalls like lack of communication between departments, and upper management isn't as involved as it could be in steering the accounts in the right direction.

Advice to Senior Management – Make sure the vision of AKQA is expressed in every account

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at AKQA full-time

Pros – - great experience
- never boring
- challenging
- only the best work there

Cons – - clients can be over demanding
- work life balance can be difficult to balance

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend