Month: February 2019

In early January, an account director at an advertising agency sat in a conference room along with two senior-level people from her agency as her client, a Fortune 500 advertiser’s brand manager, screamed obscenities at her through the speakerphone. Ostensibly, the client was upset about an issue that the agency wasn’t responsible for. But the conversation had quickly devolved from disappointment to open berating to what she called “verifiable, 100 percent bullying.”

The staffer went to human resources at her agency, saying this was the latest in a pattern where the client called her names and raised his voice at her. The HR department didn’t do anything. The senior executives in the agency advised her to just “take it.”

Interviews with senior-level and junior-level employees inside agencies reveal a pattern of bullying and verbal harassment inside ad agencies. Some pinpoint the prevalence of bullying to agencies’ culture of rejection, “thick skins” and the power imbalance inherent to services businesses.

Digiday research backs this up. Harassment and discrimination remain problems at agencies, according to the results of a Digiday survey taken by 446 agency professionals. The survey, which was fielded in January, found that 49 percent of women said they have been the victim of workplace harassment. Among Digiday survey respondents who experienced workplace harassment, 77 percent said that they had experienced verbal harassment.

Eighty-two percent of men and 74 percent of women who had experienced harassment said it was verbal.

How it manifests runs the gamut. For one staffer, it came in the form of name-calling and yelling. In this person’s case, it felt to her like her boss wanted to show to her higher-ups that she could be tough. “There’s no doubt there’s verbal bullying and harassment at agencies,” said this person. “Basically, there was a dynamic between her and her boss, and it came in the form of it being better for her to come off as a bully. It’s overcompensation.”

For another agency employee, bullying came in the form of targeted name-calling — “he’d keep telling me ‘you’re a lazy prick,’” said this person. There was also what he called an overwhelming sense that “this person was out to get me,” by consistently talking down to him during meetings, spreading gossip, and other ways. “There didn’t seem to be a reason why, except that he didn’t like me,” the staffer said. At one point, a rumor spread that he was having an affair with someone at work. It only stopped after the bully ended up being promoted to running another office.

A Society of Human Resource Management study found that 51 percent of organizations report incidents of bullying last year, with 62 percent reporting gossip or lies and 50 percent reporting threats. Another survey, sponsored by the Workplace Bullying Institute in 2010, found that 35 percent of U.S. workers have experienced or witnessed bullying. The survey also found that men bully other men more, while women bully other women.

Workplace bullying and verbal harassment, although related, are a little bit different. Bullying is not illegal  — mostly because no laws really exist to protect people from being bullied. Unlike race-based, gender-based or other forms of discrimination, those who are bullied aren’t considered a protected class unless that bullying spills over into harassment that is targeted because of race, gender, sexual orientation or another reason.

There are bills in the works in certain states to create “healthy workplaces” and afford legal protections for bullying. But those are yet to be turned into law.

“I think the issue is, I don’t even know what qualifies,” said a longtime agency staffer. “Is it someone cursing at you? Is it not being fair in the critique of my work? I have young employees crying because I give them feedback. Am I a bully?”

This person said that she’d been in one situation where she felt she was being ignored — literally, given the silent treatment — by a colleague. It felt like bullying because there was somewhat of a power differential, and she felt threatened.

For a fourth agency staffer, a group of colleagues would regularly go out for lunch and not invite him. He wonders, in retrospect, if he was being bullied. “Should I have said something? I figured it was just one of those things. Maybe young people are just more sensitive now.”

“I have a theory that to be successful in advertising you have to have thick skin,” said the first agency staffer, who was bullied by a client. “It’s this idea that the only people who rose to the top faced a ton of rejection and had thick skin. Previously, it was sexual in nature. Now, it’s this.”

It’s in some ways generational: Agency culture, especially in creative departments, thrived on the rejection of ideas, usually for good reason. But sometimes it feels, say employees, that it’s tough love for no reason. Those people who came through that way of working are now in senior-level positions at companies. “You have a sharky network on top. Maybe we’re sensitive to it now, but that’s what it is.”

At the 4A’s, there is an attempt to try help. A new workplace certification program, introduced last year, was aimed at helping agencies not only address sexual harassment issues, but also confront workplace bullying, seeking to arm execs with the knowledge needed to recognize and stop bullying. Simon Fenwick, who is leading the program at the 4A’s, said that it’s harder to train around bullying than harassment since harassment is illegal.

“Bullies often look great on paper, their skills and perceived relationship skills are driving success for the business,” said Fenwick. “Their client skills are amazing, but they’re still a bully.” The key is train bosses and HR to recognize that success is not just what that person brings in terms of revenue, but the impact they are having on workplace culture, and whether they’re driving people away, for example. “We as an industry need to note that skilled bullies are low performers because they have bad attitudes,” said Fenwick.

Fenwick said he anecdotally notices improvements, especially on the client front, where agencies are opting not to participate in RFPs where clients have bad reps. “The impact of a bad client is deeper to the bottom line than they think,” said Fenwick. “And for all the talk of harassment in the workplace, bullying has led to depression, to phobias to lots more. In some ways, it can have as much impact on the bottom line as an individual case of sex-based harassment.”

For a fifth agency employee, bullies have always been clients, not bosses or peers. “Big nightmares. These people have always been all about power trips. Treating us like we’re less than human.” That includes asking them to fly someplace for meetings only to cancel them or calling them at 4 a.m. with supposed problems. “None of us can say anything; this is our agency’s biggest client, and they know it. They’ve even held that over our heads. We’d sink if we lost them.”

As client-dependent businesses, especially in a climate where reviews are common and the threat of disintermediation always exists, bullying clients have become what appears to be the norm. “Putting up with clients like this is part of the job,” said this staffer.

Agencies find it tough to deal with bullying, mostly because it’s hard to identify. For everyone interviewed for this story, whenever they’ve brought up issues either to bosses or HR, it’s acknowledged, but it’s also advised to try and stick it out. “This is the new normal.”

The post ‘You need a thick skin’: Ad agencies grapple with workplace bullying appeared first on Digiday.

Curbside pickup — the service that lets customers fill orders online and then have them delivered to their car upon store pickup — is becoming more critical for retailers competing in the Amazon age of grocery.

On Tuesday, Walmart announced a strong fourth quarter, with store sales increasing 3.6 percent over last year, the biggest pickup in over 10 years, and online sales climbing 43 percent. To stand up against online competition, Walmart has invested in faster delivery times, last-mile delivery solutions with outside partners and e-commerce initiatives and acquisitions. With customers who shop both in stores and online spending two times as much overall as customers who only shop one or the other, Walmart’s focus is on meeting them wherever is most convenient, according to CEO Doug McMillon.

The post Retail Briefing: Curbside pickup is becoming a critical part of retailers’ Amazon-proofing strategies appeared first on Digiday.

Procter & Gamble wants to break Tide, one of its most recognizable brands, out of the drugstore and turn it into an on-demand, mobile laundry service.

On Monday, the CPG company launched Tide Cleaners, a service that lets customers pre-pay for laundry through an app, drop the laundry off inside lockers or drop boxes inside apartment buildings, offices and retail storefronts, and pick up the clean clothes once the app notifies them they’re ready. Tide Cleaners is currently live in Chicago, Washington, D.C., Dallas, Denver, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Boston and Nashville.

Tide Cleaners is the most recent example of how Procter & Gamble, like other CPG companies, is extending a brand’s reach beyond the traditional wholesale-retail model and into services, hoping to drive recurring revenue from repeat users. For example, in Chicago, monthly laundry can cost from $1.24 per pound to $1.36 per pound, depending on the plan, or $1.59 per pound with no plan. The work is carried out by a mixture of in-house employees and Tide Cleaners franchise operators, and the company plans to expand to new markets depending on customer demand. Tide Cleaners customers get access to special product formulas and specialized services like color restoration and personalized offers.

Through the direct model, Tide gains two advantages: owning the relationship with the customer by accumulating information on preferences, including how often they do laundry and if they have special requests, and possibilities for recurring business through discounts from customers who commit to a monthly plan.

“As people are looking to outsource everyday things, there’s an opportunity to bring Tide’s experience into this space,” said a Procter & Gamble spokeswoman. “This is the first time we’ve had people all over the U.S. representing the brand.”

Overall, Procter & Gamble has rethought the role of its brands as it has deepened investments in direct-to-consumer business models. The company is reportedly experimenting with more than 100 seed stage digital-only brands and empowering millennial employees to take charge of the concepts. It’s an approach that lets the company readily test new products and assess how well they’ll do as digital-only brands.

For some of its skin-care brands, including its Facial Treatment Essence product, it has moved away from television ads and into digital and social media-driven marketing with the help of influencers. Like Unilever and Pepsi, the company has also been on an acquisition tear, acquiring personal-care brands L., Walker & Company, First Aid Beauty, and Snowberry over the past year. Tide Cleaners is also the product of two acquisitions: laundry services Pressbox in 2018 and University Laundry the previous year.

To digital marketing consultant Judge Graham, a foray into direct-to-consumer laundry services is a defensive move.

“Tide understands that they have a legacy, old brand, and if it’s not them, others will come up with this idea,” he said. “They get to own this market, and I suspect they’ll see a spike in their traditional retail sales as people perceive Tide as this ‘Uberesque’ sort of innovative brand.”

A delivery service also helps Procter & Gamble learn more about customer habits tied to specific geographies, insights that could inform future product and service design. The company has experimented with laundry delivery services in the past, including Tide Spin, a service it tried in Chicago in 2015, and Juvian, a laundry delivery service it tested in Atlanta in 2001.

“It gives them new, previously untapped data on the demographics and geographies of their most dedicated customers, it gives them an opportunity to test new products, and it gives them insight into [future] acquisitions,” said Jonathan Smalley, CEO of data analytics company Yaguara.

The app-driven service will give customers real-time updates on the status on the orders; the convenience and consistent quality of the service will be the biggest incentive for new customers, the P&G spokeswoman said. But despite the appeal of these features, Procter & Gamble’s biggest challenge may be keeping customers, a challenge other subscription-based startups face.

“We’ve generally been a little bit hesitant with [the promotion] of a lot of the direct-to-consumer models,” said Jake Matthews, research director at Gartner L2. “When you look at the cost of customer acquisition, a lot of the direct-to-consumer companies struggle with customer retention. In order for a subscription model to work, you need to have predictable consumption behavior.” 

The post P&G is testing a Tide-branded laundry service appeared first on Digiday.

Podcasts have caught the ears of marketers at Benefit Cosmetics.

With the number of weekly podcasts almost doubling in five years — from 3.2 million 2013 to 5.9 million in 2018, according to Ofcom — advertisers like the cosmetics manufacturer are playing catch-up.

But the rules of building a brand in a podcast are different to those for streaming services or even traditional radio, Lou Bennett, head of marketing in the U.K. and Ireland for Benefit Cosmetics, told Digiday at an event hosted by Impero. Rather than simply buying audio impressions, the advertiser sees podcasts as evergreen content that won’t easily date given organic listens grow over time.

“It’s not the explosion of podcasts as a medium that’s interesting to us a brand,” said Bennett. “It’s that it shows that younger generations are willing to consume long-form content.”

Sponsored podcasts will likely be the way forward for Benefit, said Bennett. It’s less intrusive to have a so-called “live read” before the podcast starts where the producer explains to the listener that “this podcast was brought to you by” than it is to stick an ad halfway through an episode. It’s more “immersive” this way, said Bennett, who teased that the advertiser could go a step further than sponsored podcasts and fund its own as it has done for video.

“If you look at our ‘Bold is Beautiful Empowering Women’ video series, we were happy to take a backseat to the content and the topic,” said Bennett.

Bennett’s stance rules out direct response ads on podcasts. Sticking a promo code within a podcast has been one way advertisers have tracked results. Doing so, however, doesn’t make for a great listening experience, which is why Benefit Cosmetics sees podcasts purely as a brand building play for now. “

Podcasts aren’t a sales tool. It’s about sentiment,” said Bennett. “Not all activities have a commercial return attached to them.”

It’s a similar view taken by other advertisers, many of whom are buying ads in podcasts without a robust set of analytics to measure ad performance. Closing the loop between listened-to ads and conversion is hard.

“We’re lucky enough to have such a robust marketing strategy that we can have pockets of just brand-led activity,” said Bennett. “We’d use the number of downloads by regular listens as a measurement of success for our activity.”

It’s questionable as to whether advertisers get a fair return on the ads they buy on podcasts given how expensive they are compared to other mediums. A typical cost per thousand impressions for a podcast vertical runs between £12 ($15) and £14 ($18), said a media buyer on condition of anonymity. That number can be as much as £20 ($26) for CPMs in a premium list of podcasts. It rises further to £22 ($28) for podcasts that are sponsored, said the media buyer. And yet the price is justified by demand, which is outstripping supply in a market controlled by a handful of players. It’s part of the reason why publishers like The Economist and the Financial Times threw more resources at podcast production last year.

“Advertisers are buying something they can’t get elsewhere,” said the executive. “They might get someone like Stephen Fry reading out their brand name, which is undoubtedly valuable. That can only go so far though because there’s no common measurement currency between the different podcast media owners.”

Prices will fall once more of those ads are sold in programmatic auctions. Indeed, Spotify, Global and Google are all building out their programmatic audio businesses now that the audience for podcasts is too big to ignore. A record $314 million in revenue was made from podcasts in 2017. That is set to grow by more than 110 percent by 2020, according to the IAB and PwC.

“Podcasts are in their infancy, but there’s a huge amount of demand among advertisers. I do feel as though demand is outstripping supply,” said Howard Bareham, co-founder at audio media buying and creative agency Trisonic. “We’re seeing traditional radio broadcasters get involved in podcasts and dynamic audio and then there are those advertisers that are bypassing radio advertisers to focus on podcasting. The market is expanding and that money is coming from digital, TV and radio budgets.”

The post ‘It’s not a sales tool. It’s about sentiment’: Benefit Cosmetics eyes podcast ads appeared first on Digiday.

Today, video is recognized as the most important medium for viewer engagement and retainment. And, according to Vizrt’s 2018 Digital Publishing Insight, over 20 of the world’s leading digital publishers say it’s not going anywhere.

Despite a competitive environment with an ever-evolving digital economy — which now includes an added layer of brand safety and transparency issues — publishers still aren’t doubting the importance of engaging audiences via video. From building trust in the content to gaining internal confidence in a video strategy, here are a few challenges to be aware of.

Quality versus speed: the trade-off

Human resources. Redundancies. The ever-decreasing budgets of publishers, both big and small. Let’s be honest: being a journalist today means having four pairs of hands, two bodies and an infinite capacity for learning new skills and understanding niche topics. And publishers are increasingly aware of this demand to produce as much content as possible to drive engagement.

Above all else, however, journalists need to be able to make their content distinctive. There is this huge requirement for publishers to be fast, be beautiful and to be everywhere. This leaves content creators begging for solutions that expand creative capabilities while making the whole process easier, especially when the demand for producing video content can fall on people who lack video production skills.

With all these tensions buzzing around, it’s unsurprising when content creation boils down to a direct trade-off between quality and time.

The future requires a business plan

Publishers know that they must digitize their products, but the majority are unsure about how to do it profitably. For smaller publishers, this is slightly easier, as they are flexible and usually have a defined brand — adapting to change is a smoother ride.

The online publishers attached to more traditional print businesses are struggling. Many are trying to build their digital and video content model with inflexible, siloed editorial teams and while maintaining their brand heritage and relationship with their audience — factors which can result in a bumpier ride.

The uncertainties around digital, including the need for a solid business model for building and retaining new audiences, affect the confidence in the direction and investment in video. This is creating a bit of a whirlpool in the industry leaving publishers swirling around in uncertainty about taking the plunge.

However, the more traditional publishers should look to their newer, smaller counterparts for inspiration. The businesses with the clearest video and monetization strategies are the ones that are most confident and thriving.

Risk plays a part in any business plan, however this is overpowered by the increasing need to stay relevant to audiences.

Strong branding breeds trust in video

When it comes to video, strong brand identity is central to an authentic voice and content. First and foremost, people notice branding, even on a subconscious level, before anything else. If a piece of content doesn’t have some kind of identifying mark embedded within it, audiences will probably still watch it, but they won’t trust it, engage with it, or share it.

It’s also important for online videos to have an authentic tone: they need to feel more real, raw and less glossy than their TV counterparts. Online videos need to look good; not like you have buffed any resemblance of reality out of them. Any additional graphics need to add value to your audience as well. If a story is complicated, use graphics to help tell it. Graphics should be used to bring a story to life; not weigh it down.

Authentic branding needs to strike a balance between credibility and adequate branding — no one wants to watch a video that feels like an ad. Finding the right mix of these elements builds audience trust in the brand and their content.

So, what should publishers do?

Here are the key takeaways:

–  The future is definitely digital, which means that if you see your publication existing in 10 years’ time, you’ll have to embrace this reality.

–  Invest to accumulate: if your team is small and is not going to grow, invest in technology that will see you through the next five years and help you be creative without compromising speed and efficiency.

–  Find your revenue and engage with your sales team to create a monetization strategy especially for digital.

–  Engage and empower your staff; technology can only be as good as those motivated and capable of using it.

Change is difficult within organisations, but video isn’t going anywhere. Galvanising people, processes and partners when creating your video strategy is worth the groundwork.

The post Why video is still the best investment for digital publishers appeared first on Digiday.

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