Karsh Hagan is an amazing ad agency that has many high level clients in their portfolio and is generally a pretty well known agency. What I found most astounding about this whole talk was that this time instead of having a single speaker giving us information about their agency it was four different people with three of them having more senior positions of directors that make the big decisions for their many different projects. Having this perspective with all of them in the teams meeting was extremely informative and felt a bit more humanizing than I would expect a large cut throat agency to be. Some of them were smoking cigarettes during the session and petting their dogs which does a lot to remind me that they themselves are human and less of my image of a power crazy ad agency director. I think their session with us was very useful in understanding the hierarchy of the organization and the way that agencies themselves function along with the thought processes that go into their projects such as the Denver international airport campaign. This really gave me a chance to really look deep inside myself and think about if this is the kind of lifestyle I would like to live where I am giving up a lot of time for what I see as a less than ideal wage with the benefit being these amazing projects and the experience that would allow me to work anywhere. I feel that I myself really value having a work life balance even if it may mean that I don’t work at a fast paced agency and may not get to work on projects of a similar caliber. In addition to that I’d rather I get compensated more if I am putting in intense amount of hours in one week. Overall getting this glimpse into Karsh Hagan was extremely helpful in understanding the environment of working in an agency. I got a better understanding of the roles that creative directors play in the process along with how freelancers are hired in these agencies along with the way that alumni from my same program managed to work their way into getting a job at the agency, and how exactly they navigated the step between interning and landing a position in the agency.
