Month: May 2021

In fact, less than four (36%) in ten agency respondents to a Digiday Research survey said they received mental health support compared to half of those who worked at a publisher. Furthermore, just a fifth (20%) of agency execs said their employer invested substantially in mental health versus one third on the publisher side. Also worth noting: around twice as many in both groups said their companies “talked” more about mental health support than actually “invested” in it.

“It’s all just words,” said Paul. “Taking a proper lunch break or the afternoon off twice a month to have some downtime works if you don’t have important meetings or urgent deadlines, but if you do it never feels like you have the support of your boss to push back.”

It’s not like agency CEOs are oblivious to this disconnect. Mental wellness was on their radar long before the pandemic. But the hydration reminders, lunchtime yoga sessions and Headspace app subscriptions invested in by so many agencies to provide mental health support, never really addressed the intense workloads of many execs. They often saw those benefits as bribes to make up for the grueling expectations foisted on them. The pandemic just compounded this. 

One agency exec was so burnt out that he was signed off work by his doctor for two weeks at the turn of the year. The stress of the job, combined with the emotional toll of living through the pandemic, caused him to have a breakdown. While his bosses acted swiftly to agree to the PTO, it never seemed like they knew what to do once he returned. He has since left the agency for another. It’s a slight improvement.

“The bosses at my new agency are cool, but they’re not going to do my report if I tell them I’m tired, which I should be allowed to do given the conditions,” said the exec who declined to be named over concerns of reprisals from his employer. “I don’t how this all nets out, but I can tell you the effect of stress is very real because I’m feeling it now. I used to be able to onboard clients in 90 days — often that was actually 45 days. I don’t know if I could cope with doing that even though I know how to because my energy levels and mental abilities are impaired by my experiences at work.”

Even so, there are cases where the corporate clamor for mental wellness seems well-intentioned. Just before the exec left his previous job one of his mentors there tried to intervene and offer advice. The caveat: the advice was devoid of reality. 

“The advice I got was to essentially refuse to work under those conditions,” said the exec. “I can’t say that to my manager. If I refuse to do the work then the client will fire us.”

So, while agency leaders acknowledge this stressful situation and often have HR policies in place that state that they are caring organizations and look after their teams, in reality they are not monitoring what is happening to their employees and intervening on their behalf. They are trying to convey a sense of “business as normal” in times that are far from normal — and teams are falling like flies.

“Good leaders step back and look at the impact of their decision making,” said Tessa Gooding, director of communications for the Institute for Practitioners in Advertising, the trade body for agencies in the U.K. “It is not about control. And they know their people are their biggest asset and they are not for burning. We are already seeing agencies change how they work.”

Whether it’s enough agencies remains debatable. 

And that’s the stark reality here. The concerns of agency CEOs are often out of whack with the needs of their employees. Leaner businesses often mean more work for one person. Media dollars moving online means the manual process of buying ads from the largest media owners is even more labor-intensive. Meanwhile, the desperate scramble for new businesses means agencies rarely turn down work — even if it means employees will be stretched. Eventually, something has to give. 

At the same time, clients have been managing their own difficulties — whether these are childcare or lockdown issues or increasingly stressful business environments arising from the pandemic, said Stephanie Drakes, managing partner of Social & Local, the agency which initiated, funds and manages mental health and well-being campaign for the advertising and communications industry Brilliant Creative Minds. “This has often meant that clients are not prioritizing the wellbeing of agency staff as much as they should be,” she added.

This stark outlook from the frontline of ad agencies should make CEOs uneasy. 

Now that the world has been upended, the way people feel about work and their careers will never be the same. Increasingly, they’re clearer on what a work-life balance means to them and are subsequently more prescriptive about what they want from an employer.

That’s not to say there will be a recruitment crisis. Far from it. Publicis Groupe has 959 job openings, while Omnicom has over 1,000 per Linkedin. The issue is whether the best and brightest execs still want to work for those companies. After all, demand for agency talent is growing from rivals, whether it’s from platforms, consulting firms, ad tech vendors and even advertisers. 

“When I took the redundancy package last year my mental wellness was a big unconscious factor but it wasn’t necessarily the main one at the time,” said a former senior agency buyer. “I’m speaking to other agencies now about roles, but I’m entering those conversations with certain requirements that I want to be assured of — and I’m not entirely sure I can be.” 

Understandably, this exec’s experiences have left him jaded. The allure of sacrificing long hours to deliver explosive growth via noise-canceling felt booths while the head of culture waxes lyrical about the benefits of fun, inspirational, values-led culture has faded. In its place, he left somewhere that would give with one hand toward mental wellness, but take away from it within the other.

“I don’t know what the answer is here because if an agency starts saying that they’re going to give execs a half a day here or there then that means their fees with clients are going to have to be cut,” said the exec. “What agency will do that in this environment?”

There are no easy answers. The success, wealth prestige and sometimes un-empathetic arrogance needed to build global agencies are at odds with the more humanitarian needs of their employees. Yes, progress is being made, but it must be faster if the current toils of agency execs are anything to go by. 

The Atlantic sees the move as a way to focus on “the products and services that most closely align with The Atlantic’s long term goals,” according to a spokesperson. Atlantic Brand Partners, the company’s media and advertising group, and Long Dash’s creative and consulting business portfolio “can grow most rapidly by pursuing separate paths,” the spokesperson said. 

The Atlantic’s ad revenue has grown 65% year to date, according to the spokesperson. Atlantic 57 grew its revenue 30% last year, thanks to signing on “a couple new partners,” but largely due to “growth from existing clients,” according to Watts. “This is a powerful business, one that can flourish better as a separate entity,” Watts said. 

Atlantic 57 was founded in 2013. It started out as a consultancy, then grew to include content communications and editorial strategy. In September 2019, The Atlantic acquired Watts’ design company Faire Design — its first acquisition in 163 years — and folded the firm into Atlantic 57, with Watts becoming the agency’s president.

When Watts first joined Atlantic 57 in 2019, almost 75% of the business was focused on clients that were nonprofits, foundations and public media companies, Watts said. Now, about 75-90% are Fortune 500 to 100 companies, according to Watts. That includes clients like Google, Salesforce and Allstate. While Long Dash will continue to work with nonprofit organizations, it’s “hard to scale on that alone,” Watts said.

Grounds for separation

As an independent brand, Long Dash will be able to compete with other business consultancies and creative partners, the spokesperson said, especially as “an independent subsidiary with a leadership structure entirely focused on its specific business model.” The Atlantic and Long Dash will continue to work together on existing shared projects and with future clients, they said, as well as refer clients to each other for the respective services they offer to brands.

Watts believes that Long Dash can grow “faster” as an independent company. The separation “allows us to be more nimble, more responsive and to be not tethered to The Atlantic brand,” she said.

The separation is also a way to clarify the agency’s role in the marketplace, where there was “a certain perception” that Atlantic 57 was “just a content and communications firm,” she said. There was also “some confusion” around whether Atlantic 57 was an in-house agency serving The Atlantic, or an agency only serving Atlantic Media brand partners. Atlantic 57 is neither of those things. “We are a competitor, not an in-house agency or associated with certain agencies” of The Atlantic’s, Watts said.

The Atlantic has never been a client of Atlantic 57’s, according to Watts. While they’ve worked with The Atlantic on a few projects, “we have only been a partner to them in the sense that we were generating revenue for the larger business and our profitability helped them serve their mission of journalism,” Watts added.

The complex, competitive landscape for creative consultancies

Michelle Chong, media planning director at Fitzco, wondered whether this change would make it more challenging to work with The Atlantic or Long Dash. “Separating these entities from each other feels like it’s adding friction to the process,” Chong said. “If you separate your creative from your publisher, that just adds another layer of complexity.”

However, “Even if [the split] does add a few extra steps, if it’s the right audience and the right deal, you’d figure it out,” Chong said. In other words, it would not impact spending with The Atlantic or Long Dash, but may have an effect on the process of working together.

But Watts assured that the split will have no impact on relationships with clients. “Clients will continue to work with us in the same manner they always have,” she said.

However, the role in the market for outfits like Long Dash may not be the same as it once was. Watts acknowledges the “post-pandemic economy” is a challenge for agencies and consultancies right now. While the creative consultancy space is “competitive,” one ad buyer that spoke to Digiday said the legacy around The Atlantic and its businesses “backed by journalism, data, insights” is the “special sauce” for the company.

“I personally don’t think we would reach out” to Long Dash, the buyer said, and instead sees Long Dash as an agency that a client would hire directly.

Chong said Fitzco could work with Long Dash if they have a client looking for “something different that we can’t do ourselves.” Chong and the media buyer both said this change would not impact their spending or relationship with The Atlantic. 

Chong noted that she has not worked on any content partnerships in the past year. Instead, clients’ goals have been to “make up for lost time” due to the effects of the pandemic, with a focus on generating conversion rather than brand storytelling. “I see next year looking different,” she said. Clients will shift to asking “how do we get back to branding?”

Chong suggested Long Dash could be “anticipating a refreshed need” for brand storytelling in the near future.

When there’s lost ground to be made up after the disruption of the pandemic, it makes sense to remove as much friction from the buyer journey as possible. Mixed messages and dropped opportunities because of gaps between sales and marketing are something any business can do without. The problem is that most companies tend to focus their alignment efforts on just one part of that journey — and it’s not the section where they have most to gain.

Sales and marketing alignment is about more than closing deals

Typically, sales and marketing teams focus on customer acquisition. It is the journey that buyers take prior to becoming a customer on which most of their alignment efforts are focused — i.e., have they agreed on how to qualify leads, when and how do they pass an opportunity from one department to another and does one team know what messages the other is putting out? 

It’s also acquisition-focused metrics that businesses look at when judging whether the sales and marketing engine is running as it should. Companies judge the state of their customer journey based on how many marketing qualified leads (MQLs) convert to sales opportunities. They look at the close rate for marketing-sourced leads versus sales leads. They look at how much new revenue marketing has influenced.

However, these aren’t the only indicators of how effectively aligned the business has become or how satisfying its customer journeys actually are. To assess whether the sales and marketing engine is getting the business to where it needs to be, it’s crucial to look closely at what happens after deals close. This is where the clearest signals about the buyer experience lie – and it’s from where a large proportion of future growth will come.

Identifying the sections of the journey that customers remember 

A good place to start is looking at the number of new customers seeking support — whether that’s by phoning in, using social media or other digital channels or just visiting the business’s troubleshooting pages. That’s an early indicator of whether they’re finding it easy to get the value the company has promised them.

Just as important is understanding the experience from this point onwards — as it provides sound indicators as to what it can feel like to be that business’s customer. How many visits or calls does it take to resolve a problem? How many have to be escalated? How long do people have to wait to speak to someone who can help them?

If the goal is a connected, seamless customer journey, then it’s important to look at the content of these conversations as well. How often do customers have to explain what they’ve been promised — either in a sales conversation or through a marketing campaign?

The neuroscientist Daniel Kahneman makes the point that human beings don’t remember experiences in full. Their memory and perception of experiences are hugely and disproportionately influenced by what happens at the end of them. If marketing and sales want to understand what the customer journey actually feels like to a customer, they need to pay close attention to the customer experiences that occur right after the deal closes.

Businesses care about recurring revenue — but they pay far less attention to aligning around the experiences that will influence that recurring revenue, and they pay far less attention to the indicators that show whether it’s under threat. They track customer loyalty, but the point at which customers start to churn is, by definition, too late to do much about it — especially if the last time they really focused on delivering a consistent experience was before the customer even signed up.

Unlocking the power of always-on advocacy

More and more businesses care about customer advocacy — as well they should. Loyal customers who spread the word are the ideal foundation for robust, sustainable growth. 

The problem with the way that most businesses try to generate customer advocacy is that it’s almost entirely disconnected from the way they manage the customer journey. The marketing strategy calls for advocates, and the sales team then gets recruited to help go out and look for them. They try to generate momentum for advocacy from a standing start — and it’s a big ask. They first have to identify the customers with the best story to tell and then try to persuade them to tell it. Customer advocacy often feels haphazard and fragmented as a result. It doesn’t reach its full potential.

Now imagine if a business applied the same focus to aligning around the customer experience after a sale as beforehand. By this approach, it wouldn’t just connect sales and marketing but customer service and customer advocacy teams as well. The teams would pick up on signals when customers needed help, upsell to those growing their business and exploring new areas — and then keep marketing to those who could be making greater use of their solutions. Advocacy would become an always-on process, reaching out to those having good experiences in real time and at critical moments. The approach also generates continuous insight to help improve the earlier stages of the buyer journey too.

In ActiveCampaign’s experience, connecting touchpoints through a shared source of data can play a big role in these steps. It’s not just about tools and data, though. It’s also about an organizational mindset — deciding that what happens to customers after they buy is as important to them and to the business as what happens beforehand. Almost any business wants their customers to spend far longer as customers than they did as potential customers — and achieving that goal takes planning the customer journey in just that way.