The person worked at Ogilvy for about five years as an ART in the Creative Department and has been gone for several years.

【Pros】

1. You can meet many prominent people in the industry. For example, shooting films with Director Lo is practically an everyday occurrence.

2. There are many opportunities to create advertisements for famous brands or collaborate with popular entertainers.

3. Your colleagues are all very talented and willing to work hard, so you can learn a lot from them.

4. The company places considerable emphasis on creativity and takes on projects with the goal of winning awards, so you can build up quite a few good pieces for your portfolio.

5. The company spends big on many events. If you are not responsible for planning them, you can have a lot of fun.

【Work-related】

1. The workload is too heavy and staffing is insufficient, resulting in excessively long hours, yet the company still does not hire more people. It keeps trying to solve the problem by finding “Free” resources, which completely misses the point. Even when taking leave, you still have to reply to messages and cannot fully rest.

2. I suggest that the company consider developing junior employees so that the turnover rate will not be so high and the company will not have trouble finding people. Otherwise, employees who are about to leave may still be unable to find anyone to take over their work.

3. Welfare Committee activities are always handled by only a few people. There really does not need to be so many people involved, and the activities cost too much. The company does not need to make them bigger every year; it could save the money for year-end bonuses instead.

4. The company gathers employees under 31 and asks them to voluntarily participate in charity projects outside working hours. Officially, participation is not mandatory, but there is interpersonal pressure. Frontline employees already have enough work, yet they are also expected to use their own time to do unpaid work.

5. The company requires employees to fill out something called a timesheet to record what they did each hour. The regular workload is already heavy, and people work excessive overtime, yet they still have to spend time on this. If you do not fill it out, your email account will be locked, creating even more trouble at work.

6. Basically, there is never a day when the work is truly finished. Every project continues until the moment before the pitch. Working until 2 or 3 a.m. in the days before a pitch is normal, and rushing to work on another project after the pitch the next day is also normal. The company indulges every unreasonable client demand, and scrapping and redoing work is commonplace. (When this happens, the only person who is ever criticized is usually yourself, for supposedly not doing a good enough job.)

7. Colleagues generally do not come to work until noon, so the time you leave work is also pushed very late.

【Human Resources-related】

1. The company frequently holds events, but ARTs are required to help with the design for every event. The regular workload is already very heavy. I suggest that the HR Department find employees who know basic Illustrator or Photoshop, so that ARTs do not have their workload increased every time.

2. The evaluation for my promotion and salary adjustment was passed back and forth for six months. Although my salary was backdated after I was promoted, the experience felt terrible; it seemed as though I was promoted only because they had no choice.

3. Shortly after joining the company, I asked how to apply for overtime. HR threatened me, saying that reporting overtime would cause the entire team’s year-end bonus to be reduced.

4. When I was about to leave, I applied for overtime. My supervisor approved it very early, but HR’s review at the final stage took more than a month—almost two months—and the request was ultimately rejected. I do not know whether it was deliberately delayed because I was about to leave.

5. Employees have to swipe their cards when entering and leaving to record their working hours. Because the hours are so long, the system automatically asks what you were doing during the time exceeding eight hours. The choices are not entered manually but selected from preset options, such as accompanying colleagues while they work overtime or pursuing further education after work. Overtime can be requested, but as mentioned earlier, doing so may attract scrutiny, and overtime-pay approval is extremely slow.

【Environment-related】

1. Employees have poor hygiene habits. In the women’s restroom, people are always standing on the toilet seats to urinate, leaving urine all over them without cleaning it up. I have lost count of how many times I have sat on one.

2. The Creative Department’s seating is not ergonomic. Spending long hours creating graphics causes lower-back pain, back pain, and spinal curvature.

3. The office is open-plan. The desks are just large, uneven tables, and the storage space consists of two baskets. The stated purpose is to create the feeling of working in a café, but everyone has a lot of belongings and poor habits, so the office actually looks extremely cluttered. Discussions in the open space are also genuinely very noisy.

4. Many colleagues are heavy smokers. The first floor always smells of smoke, and some colleagues secretly smoke e-cigarettes in the meeting rooms late at night.

【Benefits-related】

1. The company holds a great many events. The ones I still remember are the summer pool party, year-end banquet, Creative Department outdoor trip, Christmas events, and so on. Every event requires frontline employees to handle the visual design and creative ideation. I do not understand why the company always spends so much money creating extra burdens for employees. Would it not be better to give employees a little more pay and let them live better?

2. Salaries are extremely, extremely, extremely low, while working hours are extremely, extremely, extremely long. The year-end bonus is about two months’ salary. During the pandemic, although the company was making money, it used WPP as an excuse not to pay year-end bonuses and told everyone to get through the difficult times together.

3. An evaluation is conducted about once every six months, and employees are usually given a raise, generally less than 10%. Promotions depend on whether you are backing the right boss: if your boss succeeds, you succeed.

4. The company promotes a work model in which employees do not have to come into the office on Fridays. Basically, in my five years at the company, I only got to do this twice—and we very often had to return to work overtime on holidays.

5. After working overtime past 11 p.m., you can apply for reimbursement of taxi fare, but you still cannot apply too frequently or you will be questioned.

Since I left a long time ago, some things may have changed. Everyone is welcome to add more information.