The 7 Year Old "Start Up" - Social Media Specialist GTMA Employee Review

1.0
15 Sept 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

A great "act", the website will make it appear as if you worked for an authentic "advertising agency" in your next job search.

Cons

Internally, this company is a dysfunctional nightmare overcome by inconsistencies, which is now reflected client facing. GTMA has "restructured" twice within the last 8 months. There are no systems or effective procedures in place, be prepared to become a test rat, testing new "ideas" and "systems" that will prove to be ineffective after a week or two, although your feedback will be disregarded. Rather than leveraging the highly qualified talent pool at the "agency", management disregards and suppresses your experience, strategy and creativity (12.5 minutes per post, post tracking, working on 15-20 accounts etc) which is reflected in the quality of work and campaigns produced. Unlike most agencies, where the campaign has dedicated roles/teams for market research, paid media strategy, creative/art direction, and copywriting aspects, at GTMA, you wear all of the hats, which unfortunately means that the campaigns are mediocre, due to a lack of delivery. This can all be attributed to: A) The teams inadequate bandwidth/ workloads (campaigns/ reports are often not monitored/ touched for weeks at a time) B) A lack of and or in efficient systems + poor internal/client communication. C) Each campaign is essentially a carbon copy of the next, you will evolve into a posting machine. GTMA's excuse for all of the above is being "only 7 years old", when mismanagement is the answer.

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GTMA Response
7y
Hello! Thank you so much for your feedback. We value our team members’ opinions a great deal and are always looking to improve the GTMA experience. We appreciate your kind words about our website. It does indeed make us look like the amazing advertising agency that we are. We have a few corrections we’d like to make below then we’ll address your great feedback. First, we’ve only restructured once in the last year, and it did not go as smoothly as we would have liked. Thank you for pointing out to us that you’ve been feeling the occasionally negative effects of growth, and thank you for the reminder that we need to do a better job of restructuring efficiently as we continue to grow. We totally agree. Now that we’ve done it once, we are confident it will go a lot more smoothly the next time around. Yes, we are constantly testing things with our teams as that is a necessary part of being a growing business. We can do a better job of explaining the reasons behind why we test things, and that feedback from you validates that fact...so thanks. Regarding not testing things on our team, that’s just not possible. We are very clear up-front with our teams that they are entering an ever-evolving company, which means there needs to be an attitude of embracing change in order to be successful at GTMA. It sounds like the changes we’ve made have been hard on you (and that sucks), but it is a necessary part of our business to constantly improve and evolve. Thank you for your comments about our talent pool. We do have really awesome people, and we are constantly looking for ways to leverage their talent. If you have suggestions, we would love to hear them! As for our posting requirements and 12.5 minutes, we have one of the best social teams in the business, and we continue to use tools to track our progress so we can deliver an even better product. This means tracking our time and how long it takes to create a high-quality post, which helps us better understand how to price-out our products and services. 12.5 minutes was one result of one study and by no means meant to be a mandate. We apologize if you felt we implied that. It was simply a benchmark, and we’ll continue to benchmark against ourselves in order to deliver a better product. In regards to wearing a lot of hats, most of our talent really enjoy this fact, and it’s one of the things people value as it adds a great deal of experience to individuals’ resumes. If it’s not for you, we understand, but our clients and teams are very happy as evidenced by our growth. Regarding our campaigns, we are constantly thanked by clients for our unique approach and white-glove service. Enough said. We truly value your feedback, and we have learned a lot from your review. We’ll be sure to apply your input to our business, and we will continue to strive to do right by our employees and clients. Enjoy your new journey at your new position and be well!

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