Month: April 2020

“I had to do it,” said the CEO. “I was getting complaints about people who refused to turn their cameras on, probably for pretty good reasons, but it ruined the flow of the rest of the meeting and it all became unproductive. So I had to make a rule.”

Most workers are entering week 8 of their new work-from-home existence. The initial snow-day thrill of ditching the commute has descended into depressing chaos of corralling distance learning kids, wondering if showering every other day is OK and, yes, endless Zoom calls. The thrill of glimpses into coworkers’ homes and lives on Zoom — “hey, is that “Conversations With Friends?” Loved it!” — has inevitably been replaced by Zoom fatigue. The lawless land of Zoom, where someone always doesn’t know they are muted, needs some order. A rough school of etiquette has slowly emerged.

Lurking is a common breach of etiquette, for example. In a six-person meeting, there can be one person who’s decided to, mysteriously, keep their video off, there but not there, like some kind of coronavirus-era poltergeist. Of course, reasons abound: People may be in a situation where their kids or pets are jumping all over the place, or maybe, like one exec said, they’re “hiding in the bathroom so my children won’t find me.” But it doesn’t work. 

Lurking is only part of the problem. As “doing a Zoom” enters our cultural parlance and “Zooming” becomes the most common, if not the only way, to communicate, more and more stuck-at-home workers are starting to get frustrated about what they may perceive as a lack of basic manners.

“My 8-year-old’s school sent out some Zoom etiquette that I almost forwarded to my team. Basic stuff: don’t get distracted, mute yourself, cool it with the stupid virtual backgrounds,” said one ad agency employee. “Seriously, did I mention mute yourself? I stayed put. I guess it could have come off a little passive-aggressive.”

(The school’s etiquette rules include that if some kid were caught flouting etiquette, the teacher would mute that person and keep that kid muted for the entire day. This is perhaps one for businesses to emulate.)

What was once cute — look at your co-worker’s dog! What a good boy! — now is starting to feel wearying to even worrying. “I had a tech leader stand up and show their pajama pants,” said one advertising employee.

At one ad-tech company, a mid-level employee said she was “indulgent” at first about her manager’s insistence on what she calls “unnecessary, sympathetic small talk” at the beginning of every single meeting. She has, on average, four Zooms a day.

“It’s getting downright unbearable,” she said “I start every single meeting with a long, protracted recitation of what he has been doing, what he cooked, what his kids said that day, how he’s feeling, and then I have to answer, in detail, his questions about how I am, how my kids are, how I’m holding up, if I’m OK. I appreciate the concern. But for God’s sake, can we get down to business so I can get off this call.” 

For another, “the Blair Witch-style tour of their house while they walk around” is where it gets too much.

Another common one is the Zoomer who clearly would like to talk about anything but business at hand. Those who derail Zooms love to do it, with with an observation about, say, a mug they’re holding, and the family story appended to it. Inevitably, the behavior will interrupt what could be a productive conversation

“I have an employee who can’t multitask but thinks he can, so all Zooms include what I like to call a ‘distraction break’ where he will make an observation about something completely different and we have to take five minutes to talk about it,” said one exec

Then of course, there’s the eating. Zoom’s active speaker view makes the act of eating (especially when coupled with the act of not muting yourself) particularly horrifying for some, especially when crunching is involved. For Lizzie Post, the author of Higher Etiquette and the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, coffee, or tea are OK, but “slurping” definitely isn’t. Or at least, announce it first by asking if someone minds, if you have to do it, said Post.

Some things, meanwhile, don’t need to be announced vocally, but should be said. Don’t French exit on a Zoom call: leave without saying anything at all. The wave — basically now universally loved — is a great method to use, in tandem with the subtle use of the “chat” function.

One of the strangest features of this new virtual reality that has taken a little of getting used to is that we’re all looking at our faces more than we ever did before. But some of us are looking only at our own faces, enamored, perhaps, as how good our skin looks due to having all the time in the world to sleep, or perhaps concerned with how dire it’s getting with your roots. Either way, staring at yourself, instead of at the people you’re talking to, or if presenting, looking straight into the camera, is obvious for everyone, and an obvious no-no. It also creates a sense of a performance, like you’re in this for the show that only you can watch, a grotesque narcissus falling in love with yourself instead of listening to your team.  

And perhaps last, but not least, don’t be “poor Jennifer.” Don’t go to the bathroom while on a Zoom call, forget to turn your video off, or forget to turn sound off. 

The cancelation of live sports has hit spending — at this point in the year in 2019, almost half (47%) of soda brands’ TV spending was directed toward the NCAA Tournament, NBA and NHL, according to iSpot.tv.

But the lack of live sports doesn’t tell the full picture. This slump is largely down to a loss in sales following the closure of bars, restaurants, movie theaters and stadiums — plus the decline in impulse purchases made at convenience stores — during the quarantine period.

Coca-Cola has been particularly impacted by the lockdown-enforced shift in consumption habits. Net sales fell 1% in the three months to the end of March, versus the year-ago quarter. But Coca-Cola said its when reporting earnings on Apr. 21 that April sales volumes had slumped by 25%.

Coca-Cola warned its advertising partners and vendors early into the crisis that “from April and until further notice, we’re putting commercial advertising for Coca-Cola and all our brands on hold,” as Digiday previously reported.

“We have determined that in this initial phase there is limited effectiveness in broad-based brand marketing,” said Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey on the first-quarter earnings call. “With this in mind, we have reduced our direct consumer communication, [and we have] paused sizeable marketing campaigns through the early stages of the crisis and will re-engage when the timing is right.”

As far as its national TV spend was concerned, Coca-Cola appears to have shifted its efforts away from soda and toward juice, energy drinks and sparkling water. The company launched its AHA flavored sparkling water brand in March and spent $3.8 million on TV ads in the period analyzed — 21% of the estimated TV ad spend in the water category over that time, according to iSpot.tv. Coca-Cola also spent an estimated $2.1 million on advertising its Simply Beverages juice range and $6.1 million on Powerade ads.

Coca-Cola declined to comment.

PepsiCo — which owns a variety of food brands as well as drinks like Pepsi and Mtn Dew — expects second-quarter sales to drop by a low single-digit percentage. Declines in its beverage business outweighed gains in sales of grocery staples like Quaker oats and Tostitos chips.

Hugh Johnston, PepsiCo CFO said earlier this week the company is “reducing nonessential advertising and marketing spend to reflect the realities of the current environment.” For Mtn Dew specifically — in which the company had been investing heavily, including a Super Bowl ad in February — CEO Ramon Laguarta said while the brand has been hit by a drop in impulse purchases, “as soon as people are driving around and moving around, we’ll see that brand coming back and we’ll be ready with our commercial programs when that circumstance occur.”

PepsiCo did not respond to a request for comment.

Across the soft drinks industry as a whole, spend stayed at fairly normal levels throughout the first week of the analysis in mid-March. But by the end of March and early April, most brands had pared back their TV ad spend significantly. By the end of the analysis, Mtn Dew was the last brand spending a significant amount on TV — and even that tailed off over the last week. Overall, Mtn Dew and Pepsi Zero Sugar made up the lion’s share of spend (around 58%) over the analyzed period.

As with many of the advertising trends during this crisis, the situation is constantly changing as companies recalibrate and reforecast. Ad spend will likely return as companies’ sales recover, it’s just not entirely clear when that will be.

Data and analytics company GlobalData estimates that U.S. beverage sales will fall around 7% by volume in 2020. David Harris, GlobalData soft drinks product manager, said that could be revised down further.

“This paints a grim scene for brands, and particularly larger brands with enormous, costly operations,” said Harris.

In the meantime, soft drinks makers that aren’t feeling the brunt of the pain caused by the closure of away-from-home venues have an opportunity to boost their share of voice at a time when TV ad prices are cheaper than usual.

“Evidence from the past shows if you maintain or increase your share of voice during a recessionary period, you come out of it stronger,” said Christian Polman, chief strategy officer at marketing and media consultancy Ebiquity.

He added the caveat that this crisis is different due to the extreme drop in sales many drinks companies are experiencing, which has shifted them into cash-preservation mode.

The effects of that spend “don’t necessarily show up in short-term econometric models,” said Polman. “If you look over a long-term basis it can yield dividends over a multi-year period … there’s a great opportunity in the marketplace for a drinks brand to take a leadership position from a brand perspective.”

BuzzFeed had been looking to cull its site of some programmatically sold ad units that receive lower viewability scores prior to the pandemic.

“We had it on our list of priorities for a while as something to consider,” said Andrew Paulus, senior director of product management at BuzzFeed. Then the coronavirus outbreak led many advertisers to cut budgets and led BuzzFeed to move that culling up its priority list. 

The move may not trigger advertisers that have pulled back budgets to immediately reconsider buying BuzzFeed’s inventory, but it will likely put BuzzFeed’s advertising business in a better position as ad dollars return to the market. “Having a higher viewability overall should help CPMs,” said Paulus.

“Right now, you’ve got some downtime. CPMs are lower. From that standpoint, there’s less risk in whatever you’re doing and if you pull a lever back to ease off of your practices, the impact has probably already been taken. So retool, restrategize, align yourself better for better practices when the markets come back,” said Scott Messer, svp of media at Leaf Group.

Improving page-load speeds is among the more popular housekeeping efforts that publishers are undertaking during the quarantine. BuzzFeed, for example, is in the process of switching the coding framework that powers its site, which has reduced load times by more than 30% for visitors that have been exposed to the change. Another publisher is in the midst of “a large site-speed optimization exercise” that would have been riskier to do when there would be more ad dollars at stake, said an executive at this publisher.

One publisher has turned to reorganizing its ad tech stack to improve its page speeds. This publisher is working to move more of its supply-side platforms into Google’s Open Bidding program, which has the SSPs bid for the publisher’s inventory in a single auction conducted by Google. The move is meant to reduce the number of calls a page needs to make each time an impression becomes available, and that reduction in calls should improve page load speeds and potentially lead people to visit more pages on the publisher’s site, according to an executive at the publisher.

“We’re getting back to basics, cleaning everything up and making everything as fast and efficient as it can be,” said the second publishing executive.

Publishers’ programmatic upkeep also extends to their sales teams. Similar to how publishers are tending to their technology to be better positioned when ad dollars return, they are also using this time to cultivate their sales teams’ programmatic educations.

Leaf Group typically trains its sellers on programmatic each year around the end of the first quarter. It has done the same this year, but the slower pace of business and higher availability of sellers’ time enabled the publisher to delve deeper into the analytics side.

“We’re teaching them way more about win rates and bid rates and how to understand their deals. These are things that when you have the downtime to do them, you can really focus,” said Messer.

Having to conduct the trainings virtually has also helped to make them more comprehensive. A publisher that has a global sales team has found it easier to communicate information across that organization “because we can get everybody listening to the same thing,” said an executive at that publisher. 

Additionally, the virtual trainings enable more feedback. Not only is there more time available for sellers to ask questions, but sellers can submit questions anonymously, which can make them more comfortable asking important questions without being judged for not already knowing the answer.

“If you can ask a question anonymously in a training, you can get an answer and it might be an answer other people had a question about but were too nervous to ask,” said the third publishing executive.

“It was really a rally of the troops moment,” said Coddou. “The other thing I wanted to do, not comfort but let my employees know we are in a unique place in which my payroll isn’t high, and I don’t foresee even if things slow down significantly having to lay anybody off.”

In order to cater to consumers who are stockpiling right now, Supply offered a limited-time promotion in which for customers who bought a new razor or a starter kit, the company would offer them a free year’s supply of blades. The company also ran more messaging encouraging customers to support small businesses like Supply. A week and a half after reporting its worst day of sales, Supply reported its best week of sales since Black Friday.

For many direct-to-consumer founders, it’s been six weeks of extreme highs and lows. Like Supply, some of them have recorded simultaneously some of their best and worst sales days within those same time periods. But even companies that have reported record sales haven’t been immune from having to lay employees off. As a result, many DTC founders are finding themselves having to navigate situations that they never have been before, and are having to learn new ways of leading.

Founders who are normally tight-lipped with employees about certain financial metrics have to be more transparent than ever before with employees to reassure them that the business will survive. As everybody is getting used to managing via Zoom, some founders are warming up to the idea of hiring more remote workers once the business climate improves.

All CEOs, no matter the type of business, are finding themselves in a similar boat right now. But DTC culture is unique in certain aspects. DTC founders have a reputation for being on the younger side — at Modern Retail, we’ve joked that DTC brand stands for “we sell in stores and wholesale but our founder is under 35.” So, many of them have never been through any type of recession.

What’s more, many of these DTC brands, especially the venture-backed ones, also had growth goals that were becoming even more difficult to make before the coronavirus thanks to rising customer acquisition costs. Now, they’ve had to throw those goals out of the window as they have no idea what consumer behavior is going to look like in the next month, let alone the next week.

“We used to forecast by the month and by the quarter, and right now we are forecasting by the week,” said Aaron Luo, the CEO of luxury bag brand Caraa. “I grew up in a very Type A investment banking type of world,” he said; before the coronavirus outbreak, most of the conversations with his 30 employees centered around KPIs and results. “This has reminded me to be human more than ever.” Now, as his entire team has shifted to working remotely, he’s finding that whenever he has a free block of time, he spends as much of it as possible checking in individually with his employees, checking in to see how they and their family and friends are doing.

But, no amount of personal connections with employees, can make tough news any easier to deliver. Leslie Voorhees Means, CEO of DTC custom wedding dress company Anomalie, said she did have to make layoffs in March, though she declined to say how many employees she had to layoff. Even though Anomalie’s sales have been growing, she felt she needed to “explore all options” for cost-cutting. As a venture-backed company, she wanted to extend Anomalie’s runway for as long as possible, as she didn’t know what the fundraising environment will be like for the rest of the year.

When she broke the news to Anomalie’s remaining employees she said she tried to stress that the layoffs were done, “with the intent that we did not have to do it again.”

“I wanted to protect the team from any financial stress around, what’s our runway, how much time we have until we run out of money and these unit economics and all of these financial metrics,” Vorhees Means said. “What we’ve found is the team is actually feels less stressed if they are more clued into everything — and we’ve been, as a leadership team, just more and more open about those metrics.”

Vorhees Means said that the coronavirus has also led Anomalie to change how it sets KPIs. Normally, Anomalie sets one growth goal for the month, and may set multiple goals for each department. Now, Anomalie sets KPIs on more of a two week basis, and the management team drops more reminders about growth goals in Slack, to ensure that everyone is laser focused on the goals.

“I think [this crisis] has affirmed my leadership style — I’m introverted, I’m an engineer, I’m methodical and more organized…I’ve never thought of myself as very charismatic,” Vorhees Means said. “I think actually during this time, leaning into what your strengths are and what you are good at helps — so, for me, it was doubling down on being really organized and making sure people understood how they could succeed.”

Over the past six weeks, as agencies transitioned staff to working from home, couples who work at the same agency have created their own mini-remote offices as they are now quarantined with their coworker and partner. Doing so doesn’t come without its own set of challenges.

For example, the London-based pair is one of three couples interviewed for this piece — nine couples total were interviewed — who requested anonymity as their coworkers are unaware of their relationship. Others said that even though that hadn’t hid their relationship, seeing them quarantining together came as a surprise to clients and some coworkers.

“In the beginning of quarantine, there were still lots of people at the agency who didn’t know we were married,” said Jesse Unger, strategy director at TBWAChiatDay LA. Unger has been married to TBWAChiatDay LA art director Ryan Buckley for two-and-a-half years and together for 12 years total. “We accidentally surprised quite a few people when we showed up together on video calls.”

Letting people know you’re a couple isn’t the only issue while quarantining together. Other issues like managing space, overlapping calls and talking shop too much and the overall blurring of work/life balance can be problematic. 

Still, the couples say they are thankful to have a colleague to bounce ideas off of and that they’ve got a new respect for their partner’s work habits or pitch tactics. Others say being around someone who knows their moods and rhythms has helped them manage the stress of creating new work and managing client calls. 

“It’s a rollercoaster of emotions magnified by the light of a thousand suns; it’s gratifying, rip-your-hair-out frustrating, intimidating and a tad serendipitous,” said Katie Walley-Wiegert, brand communications manager for The Martin Agency of working with her husband of nearly a decade, Taylor Wiegert, vp of strategy at The Martin Agency, at home. “Taylor’s my full-time support system above all else, so I’ll call myself infinitely lucky.” 

That sense of support can prove doubly helpful for couples who are also creative teams. For BBDO LA’s Kory Brocious, art director, and Ally Farrish, copywriter being quarantined together has led to more projects and responsibilities, said Brocious, adding, “We’ve been able to prove how effective we can be. There’s an added benefit to being able to concept in person rather than doing it over a chat or a Zoom call.” 

“If they call one of us they know the other is there and that we’re easily accessible,” said Farrish, adding that the couple has been together since last August and worked as a creative team for the last year and a half. “If we were quarantined separately, it might be harder to wrangle [us for a new project].”  

For Farrish and Brocious, taking Zoom calls together has become a new norm. That’s easy for couples who are working on the same project. For others, especially those in tiny apartments, finding areas of solitude to work or take calls has proved particularly challenging. Some say they split time between the bedroom and the living room. Others have had to get more creative. 

“I’ve turned the bathroom into a substitute call-center when there’s no other option,” said Unger, adding that the couple lives in a small one-bedroom apartment and when they’re both on Zoom calls it can be a “huge pain in the ass.” 

Unger continued: “Ryan’s been banished to the outside more than once. When we do go our separate ways, the dog has no idea who to choose — she runs back and forth between the two rooms, which ends up being more distracting than if we had just stayed in the same place.” 

Unger and Buckley aren’t alone. For The Martin Agency couple, managing space and call times is also difficult, though they do work in the same room when there’s a lull in the meeting schedule.

“Our work orbits don’t really overlap that much, so being in the same room all the time would be tough, especially when we have meetings,” said Wiegert. “We’d just be talking over each other.”

Of course, issues don’t only crop up when it comes to space or calls. To manage disagreements — personal or work-wise — a pair of junior creatives at VMLY&R in London, Matt Jones and Abigail Stephenson, designated a “speaking elephant,” where “you’d only be allowed to speak if you were holding the stuffed elephant toy,” said Jones. “It went missing after two days. Abigail is offering a cash reward to anyone that has any information.”

The threat of embarrassment is also higher when working at the same agency. “There’s definitely an added layer of stress to the whole peeking-into-the-room ‘Are you on a call?’ miming action,” said Sarah Wallace, art director at McGarrah Jessee; Wallace has been dating McGarrah Jessee strategist Nick Carr for three years.

“It’s one thing to burst into the room screaming about Gigi Hadid’s pregnancy news when it’s in front of your partner’s coworkers, it’s different when it’s your own coworkers and they can make fun of you for it.” 

“I don’t have time to read them before,” she said, but reading them cold elicits genuine reactions that she said translates well on camera.

Since then, the show has garnered 8.9 million total views and on average, each episode has had 344,000 views across FoxNews.com, Fox News’ YouTube channel and both Fox News & Perino’s pages on Facebook. On Perino’s personal page, which has over 1 million followers, each “Storytime” video receives more than 1,000 likes or reactions.

Initially, Perino planned for the series to just take place Monday through Friday at 3:30 pm on her personal Facebook account, sandwiched in between the two shows she hosts for Fox News at 2:00 pm and 5:00 pm. And it was aimed at giving working parents a short break in the day since at that point, most schools began to close. 

But after running into an executive at Fox News the next day and mentioning the new show, Perino said that the idea was picked up by the exec team and by Monday, March 23, “Storytime with Dana” was syndicated on FoxNews.com, Fox Nation, the company’s YouTube channel and it was linked on the Fox News’ Facebook page. 

In addition to “Storytime with Dana,” Fox News also launched a vertical called America Together, which consists of integrated video segments within the channel’s shows and articles on its digital platform. This series’ tagged videos have collectively brought in more than 9 million views.

Perino has been working remotely and shooting her Fox News programs from her home office for seven weeks. The 10-to 15-minute children’s show uses the same camera equipment.

“I thought it would be for a couple of weeks,” Perino said. But now, “I plan to do it as long as I will be working from home.” Beyond that, she said if the audience still engages with it and there is an audience, they will keep doing it.

Perino said there is not any advertising now, nor plans for sponsorship. Instead, “Storytime with Dana” was more about community building and engaging with not only Fox News’ typical audience (whose primary age demographic falls between 25 and 54, according to Nielsen Media Research), but a younger generation of their kids.

Jason Berk, head of social media and entertainment marketing at the agency Sid Lee, said distributing a children’s show makes sense for Fox News because the show is approaching a secondary audience, whose parents are discovering the show and sharing it with their kids.

“Facebook Live was a platform that was in vogue several years back,” said Berk. Right now, though, he said Facebook Live has become popular again is because audiences are “binged out” and “they want to look forward to new programming.”

Publishers “have to start thinking about time slots again because that worked really well back in the days of network television,” he said.