Pros
I've met some great coworkers here that have become lifelong friends. We bonded over the cons. Most of the clients are fun to work with if you're lucky enough to not work on the Paul Miller Motor Company-owned brands (Zipie is also owned by PMMC).
Cons
Excited to work for an advertising agency? Don't work here. Zipie is owned by Paul Miller Motor Company, meaning their policies, HR personnel and upper leadership team is shared with the car dealership. Bogus HR policies, like 1) NOT offering a holiday day if a federal holiday (4th of July, Christmas, New Years) lands on a weekend, 2) not being able to take sick time in the same pay period as vacation time, and 3) crazy expensive health insurance. These are just the policies written on paper. That doesn't cover the attitude of the dealership toward Zipie. To them, we were a department of Paul Miller Motor Company, here to do whatever they need, whenever they need it. They did not treat us like an agency, where we are able to guide the strategy and messaging (WHICH IS OUR ACTUAL JOB). Instead, it was a very "receive and do" relationship. Internally, however, there were people that didn't even touch a PMMC account, dealing solely with other clients. And yet urgent projects for the dealership would come up and have to be #1 priority for the production teams, even though we had other clients that were entrusting us with significantly more budget than PMMC's other businesses. It was incredibly clear to all Zipie employees that the car dealership came first. Whether true or not, the overwhelming feeling in the Zipie office was that HR was NOT on our side. That they didn't like Zipie because we had a few perks here and there that they and/or the dealership did not (if you call starting at 9am and celebrating employee birthdays a perk?) When you feel like HR is not on your side, that's a very helpless feeling. Upper leadership was entirely unavailable. I never even met the owner and yet our president was always traveling and doing side projects for him, making him unavailable to actually lead the agency and provide support to the employees. On top of this, I have never heard one good thing about the owner. I'm not going to give details because all I've heard is WOM, but reputation always has some truth to it. Never hearing a single positive thing is a red flag. Pay raises are basically nonexistent and they only hire entry-level people so they don't have to pay more than *very low* entry-level salaries. This adds to an overall lack of experience and mentorship support for eager young professionals wanting to get agency experience. Working here simply wasn't agency experience. It does not run like an agency, it is not operated by people who know how to operate an ad agency, and it does not have employees that have experience working in an agency. There is truly no reason I can think of to ever recommend working here to someone. I wish I could have read this review before spending any amount of my life on this company.