Hill Holliday Is the Best Place to Work in the Ad Industry

By Patrick Coffee 

That’s according to business ranking site Glassdoor, which released its “Best Places to Work” lists today.

A quick perusal of the main list, concerning businesses with 1,000 or more employees, reveals lots of tech companies and consultancies but no ad agencies. The fact that In-N-Out Burger, Costco and NBCUniversal made the top 50 may lead some to question the accuracy of this list and the methodology behind it, but we thought we would take a closer look anyway.

At any rate, Hill Holliday is definitely the only shop to appear on either the main roundup or the small-to-medium business list, where it ranks #33.

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But what does this mean?!

For comparison, Wieden+Kennedy has a higher average ranking at 4.2, and every single employee who took the time to answer the question approves of Dan Wieden’s leadership (though the usual complaints about long hours and low pay do crop up).

The key, though, is that W+K has fewer reviews overall. We don’t know exactly how Glassdoor weighs these factors, but the lists strongly imply that a certain numeric threshold must be met in order to qualify.

CP+B, on the other hand, has more reviews than both previous agencies, but its overall score is too low to make the top 50 at 3.6 — and 15 percent of respondents (who may or may not be current/former employees) do not give chief Andrew Keller the thumbs up. GS&P has similarly positive-but-mixed reviews — and while 83 percent of Publicis Groupe employees claim to like Maurice Levy, only 53 percent say they would recommend the company to friends — and its average review is a flat three.

These rankings are completely arbitrary, of course, but patterns do emerge. For example, some agency employees demonstrate a notable lack of confidence in their own chief executives while others definitely don’t plan on providing references for their friends.

Today Glassdoor told us that many of the talented professionals in the ad industry have mixed feelings about their jobs/employers, and our readers will be shocked to learn that this result did not surprise us in any way! Other things we learned: if any agencies want to get noticed via Glassdoor’s next round of press releases and Twitter mentions, they should encourage more employees to write anonymous reviews. Alternately, they could just use our helpful tip box.

Why not do both?!

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