Pros
It's a big company with a lot going on. Offices are generally nice and modern with lots of different spaces to get work done (although we're nearly all at home for now). There are some genuinely nice and interesting people around. Work is often interesting and challenging. Within the marketing space there are few that do more and manage more spend than we do so this is certainly the big leagues.
Cons
Our company values talk a lot about being a meritocracy but in practice this often is not the case. Promotions and leadership selections are very cliquish and too often the profile that gets ahead in this company is the charismatic back-stabber. The culture makes it hard to bring out the best in people and as a result a lot of great talent goes unrecognized. A lot of the values like diversity that the company promotes heavily in PR pushes are not followed in practice internally. We're a global company with a very diverse employee base across the board but that diversity is not reflected in who gets promoted and recognized across our so called meritocracy. Just look at the top leadership team which only has one woman out of nearly 20 people and no representation from key parts of the world where we do business. Simply put it is often hard to get recognized for your accomplishments and contributions if you're not part of a certain tight-knit (heavily western male) clique. As our company wide revenues and performance struggled in recent years the pressure has become very intense in places to hit numbers that are often impractical or poorly thought out. Yes we should always stretch to do more, but anyone can just artificially set targets high. That's not a viable strategy or 'dreaming big'. The above in turn drives a lot of toxicity where the only way to get ahead is to make yourself look good at the cost of your peers. The culture constantly drives one to think about how to make yourself stand out over others and as a result actively discourages strong collaboration and teamwork during critical times when that's really needed.
