Clients & Employees - Take Heed - Lead Analyst Merkle Employee Review

- “Acquire and fire” should be the company’s motto – they only grow the company by acquiring new ones without any regard for developing existing talent - If Merkle is the iceberg, then company morale is the Titanic - If you aren’t 100% billable (8 hrs/day), you should be worried about losing your job - Consistent rounds of layoffs decrease headcount and increase the workload on other employees, pushing many of them to be over 100% billable - All training is expected to be done on your own time – whether it’s skillset training or the hours of training videos Merkle makes you watch just so you know how to submit your time - Merkle has abandoned all thought-leadership and efforts of creating and driving industry standards – they now only care about how much they can utilize individuals on client accounts A note on the layoffs – there have been three rounds of significant layoffs in the past five months or so, with each round chipping away at the already diminishing morale. This should be a huge red flag to existing and potential clients alike. Merkle is laying off highly skilled (and high salaried) employees in favor of opening up reqs for new grads and others with little industry experience with the idea that they will train these employees up to be adequate to do the job. Meanwhile, the existing employees must then deal with the extra workload of the employees who were let go in addition to spending time to find, hire, and train the new employees who can’t yet contribute on client accounts. Merkle only cares about its bottom line and hitting revenue goals so the execs can get a hefty payout from the Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) acquisition. This company is, and has been, on the down and down for quite some time now. Their strategy is to acquire companies to increase their revenue but they don’t have any plans or sound methods of integrating these acquired companies. For acquired companies, they will promise not to lay you off, and that’s true – but only for the gestation period when the acquisition is announced. Once you become fully integrated into Merkle, all promises are off the table.