The Big Rip[off]

I will preface this piece by saying that I will not mention any names in order to protect the innocent. As much as I would love to sling mud at a previous employer, I just cannot do it. I've met so many great people there, and the life lessons learned there have proven to be invaluable. With that said, despite upper management's lack of morals and "bigger than life" egos, the place was actually pretty cool for a while, and it was mostly due to the people stuck at the bottom with me. This is our story.

I was a media supervisor at a medium-sized advertising agency in Chicago. We handled some big accounts, but we mostly handled very little (but extremely high-maintenance) clients. Maybe I should start off by saying how badly we ripped these people off. It wasn't me, I swear. It wasn't even the agency. It was the people who ran it.

Imagine this: 1) a sneaky, self-obsessed president and COO (we'll call him Charlie), 2) a hypocritical, bitchy and whiny bitch Vice President of consulting (we'll call her Wanda), 3) another bitchy vice president (we'll call her Monica), and 4) a cutthroat, lying and thieving account service director turned vice president turned president (we'll call him Sam). These four people really ruled the agency. In title, I was in charge of the whole media department for a while, but in reality, we were account services' bitch. I know, I know. According to all media people, media is always account services' bitch. But really, this agency just took it to another level. At one point we only had two media people in the department, handling all the work for 12+ accounts. While there was 2 or 3 people per account on the account service end, all we had in media was a media supervisor and a strategist handling the work for all 12 accounts. On top of all that, we were given the task to increase agency revenue by spinning off into our own media agency. So instead of just handling the 12 accounts, we handled those 12 accounts, as well as took on the task of developing a new business.

I'm not sure if you now how it feels to run your own business, but it's great. I love it! I find the entrepreneurial spirit very refreshing; however, part of its benefit is that you literally reap your own rewards. The harder you work, the better you're off in the end. However, the major fallacy with the agency's reward structure was that it didn't have one. The media strategist and I built the department from the ground up, with little-to-no money supporting our venture, and in the end, were given little to no motivation to make the venture succeed.

Maybe the COO knew perfectly well the type of media people he had hired, so maybe he knew integrity alone would fuel us. Integrity was our only fuel. So despite the fact two media people were severely underpaid, overworked, and under appreciated, we both helped launch the new media agency without a hitch. In all fairness though, around the time we started the launch we were given permission to have 3 media interns, and if it weren't for those fabulous, extremely intelligent and hardworking interns, I'm sure the new media agency launch would have been a complete failure.

But back to the cheapskate COO...

Can you believe the bastard didn't pay the interns (at least not most of them?)? Can you believe the guy was also racist, and that he only talked to the 'white' interns (the guy is Cuban, so that reverse discrimination baffled us all too)? Can you believe he truly believed he was paying us market value, and that we should have considered ourselves lucky to be employed by him? (I earned less than $40K at the time, and the media strategist earned less than $30k. We both had master degrees and extensive experience. But this is the kicker: since we dealt with Hispanic marketing, it's hard to find media people with this niche experience...and guess what? We both had that too...)

Money was never really important to me; I'm all about the variety of life, the challenge. I'm all about enjoying my job, and not worrying about having to suffer through another week of work. I took the job because I missed Hispanic advertising, and the guy (the COO) seemed like a nice enough guy to work for at the time. Like I told him, "if at the end of the day, I'm still cursing at my job, whether I make $10K or $100K, it still won't be enough." He was impressed with that statement. He hired me.

Other people were hired directly after high school or college. We had an average of about 22 people working at the agency, most of which were in account service. Of these 22 people, 11 were under the age of 25, 6 were under the age of 30, and 5 were actually 37 years old or older (I'll let you take a wild stab at who you think some of those people were). On top of these 22 full-time employees, we had about 15-20 interns at any given time. At one point, we had more interns than full-time employees.

We kept track of all the billable time by using the "adman" software. The interns kept track of all their projects and all their billable time on this software as well.

(Note: interns keeping track of their billable hours...hmmmm. Funny. Aren't the interns unpaid?)

Now, just for the record, I don't have an objection against interns marking their time as "billable hours,' (for I've met a lot of great interns whose work was better than full-time employees' work, so why discriminate?). I also don't have an objection against unpaid interns. However, I do have a huge moral dilemma with charging the client $100/per hour for work an intern did, and then not giving any money back to the internal at all. Unfortunately, I found out clients were charged intern billable hours only a few weeks before I left. An ex-intern of mine had given me the scoop shortly after she left.

Unfortunately, this incident was not the catalyst for me leaving. This is one of many, many incidents that lead to my resignation, but not the one specific incident that drove me over the edge.