What was your first day like in Advertising Agency?

The MD (only 25 or so people in this agency, smaller city but if you can get 1 or 2 big clients you're sweet) took all the juniors into a meeting and asked us to tell us who we know that we will ask to be our mentor. Everyone rattles off some family member or family friend working in business. She gets to me and I say oh I can't think of anyone sorry. She asks what does my uncle do? Warehousing. What does my aunt do? Check out chick. What about my cousins? Tiler, admin, sparky. At this point, she realises she has hired someone from working class. I was treated very differently from all the other juniors from that point, reprimanded severely for stupid things. The look on her face and the change in her tone after the mentor conversation made it very clear she did not appreciate dealing with someone who grew up poor.

I quit 5 months in. Bonus points for her yelling at me when I was there for 3 months about how I was not meeting the expectations for an employee of 9 months. The ad industry is always talking about how they have racial and gender issues but they always forgot they have major classism issues as well. Even if she didn't treat me differently because of my class background, I still felt out of place as I couldn't really relate to any of my co-workers life experiences and they truly didn't understand what working class is.

/r/advertising Thread