Vanity Project by a bunch of industry “never beens” - Anonymous employee BLKJ Employee Review

The free coffee and loads of natural light in the office

Messy structure and no room for growth. You'll be setup to fail and one year later you'll be gaslit into feeling that you're the problem all along. If you're in the creative department, good luck. You'll need heaps of it. Forget about any form of creative direction, guidance, mentoring. You'll just end up executing some average idea of a certain senior creative and be used for it again and again and again. Prepare yourself for talks around how you're not up to the 'level' yet whereas the truth is, you'll never be given the ladder to get there in the first place. If you've read the other reviews of this place, you'll be smart enough to know to avoid it. This place is for a very specific type of a worker. Someone who doesn't upset the status quo, ok with being unambitious and just going with what's told. The culture is toxic, some people are nasty and form their cliques and do mean things to the ones outside of it, and the management is downright dishonest and exploitative.

A few bright sparks manage to shine through the dysfunction, but they rarely last long. You’ll learn resilience here, though mostly by enduring mismanagement.

This place is now the poster child for wasted potential. The management operates with a condescending air, seemingly more interested in maintaining their own illusion of authority than in actually leading. Some staff hold lofty titles they haven’t earned, and it shows. They are painfully out of their depth. The titles are gifted, not deserved, which only breeds a culture where mediocrity gets mistaken for merit. A word of caution to anyone hiring from here, a thorough check is a must! Instead of empowering the teams with modern AI LLMs, which could drastically reduce dependence on incompetent strategists, suits and uninspired creatives, the company insists on clinging to outdated practices. And egos. The $$ burnt on seeded PR, glossy case films, and award-rigging has taken a toll on the agency's financials. So what looks like success on stage hides a crumbling business underneath. All the vanity projects have resulted in financial rot masked by trophies. While this isn't new for this industry, the sheer immaturity at how it's being handled here makes you feel if the management even has a clue on how to run an enterprise. Some of the "heads" indulge in plenty of grand talk, with very little output of substance. The "long-term loyalists" who should be driving progress are instead coasting, treating the agency like a padded landing zone where ambition goes to die.