Month: April 2020

“It’s a real privileged problem to have in a time like this,” said Riley. “But it’s a problem.”

It’s Zoom fatigue. As millions of people stay indoors due to the coronavirus outbreak, business and pleasure has both moved to the virtual realm. That’s meant that nearly every single interaction most people are having is happening online — and whether it’s because of its ease of use or its ensuing ubiquity, it’s mostly happening on Zoom. 

Of course, there is a privilege in being able to work like this. Suffice to say that in the absence of real human interaction, the ease of use of Zoom is the next best thing. It’s invaluable to connect with teams, friends, colleagues during a time that is uncertain at best and paralyzingly anxiety-inducing at worst. 

Most companies have reacted to a new all-remote existence with a mandate to “over-communicate.” That has paid dividends in the early weeks, but for some has no led to a nonstop deluge of video calls that — let’s be honest –could simply be emails or Slacks. (Or even, phone calls!)

Zoom fatigue is exacerbated by how many interactions seem to have automatically moved to video chat, even if they were useless meetings to begin with, or could have been replaced by an email or a Slack. And even meetings or interactions that would have normally been done by that archaic method of communication, the phone call, have all turned to Zoom.  For many, uncertain times — and probably seeing hardly anyone outside of immediate family — means video chat is the default.

The rise of Zoom has been startling. What began as a better version of a Google Hangout, has entered the realm of shorthand. Who hasn’t been asked “do a Zoom” or simply “zoom”?

This growth isn’t just work, either. Family Zooms are now common, as are Zoom happy hours, Zoom classes, Zoom fitness instructions, Zoom meditations and more. One friend is planning a gender reveal on Zoom, and packages with “props” are arriving at all of our homes. It’s everywhere, ubiquitous, with screenshots of galleries of co-workers, friends and in my case, me with my Equinox instructor and 10 strangers doing a strength workout populating Instagram. It’s hard to tell if in some cases, it’s some kind of flex, your popularity (“look how many friends I have! look how many plans I had!”) distilled down onto a screen.

The cultural moment Zoom is having can be seen in how fashion has rushed to catch up with Zoom-ready tops and accessories. (Tie-dyes, bandannas, those dreaded headbands, and of course, earrings for days — all very in.)

Zoom isn’t a replacement for real-life interactions. Every verbal tic, every slight eyebrow raise, and every other non-verbal reaction signs are overblown when you’re all gazing into your screen, populated by multiple giant heads.

As Steve Hickman, executive director of the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion puts it, it overloads visual cues — hyper-focusing on whatever is available on your screen, but also maybe processing other information such as your phone ringing, dog barking and an email and Slack coming in. “It is a stimulus-rich environment, but just like rich desserts, sometimes too rich is just too much,” wrote Hickman.

That’s given rise to a new set of annoyances. There are those coworkers who love a custom virtual background — playing puppies, lol! — and those who find them distracting and inappropriate. There is the inevitable communal cry, “You’re on mute.” There are the people who will not, ever, put themselves on mute, when they really ought to. There are the obligatory “home tours.” There are people freezing during inopportune moments. There are people playing pranks where they are so still it seems like they’re frozen due to a bad connection. (They aren’t! Isn’t that fun?)

People — not me, of course — can be triggered, not to mention baffled, by why in the world a colleague would leave on the loud ding notification whenever a Slack comes in, which is pretty much all the time. A colleague, who left his Brooklyn apartment for a suburban exile only lightly packing, has a “Zoom sweater” that appears whenever he needs to talk to people outside the office. Will he at some point add a second? (Editor’s note: I’m working on it, Shareen.)

The early weeks of working remotely meant Zoom gave us glimpses into our colleague’s home lives. We saw kitchens, living rooms, even bedrooms. We met children, pets, plants named Stanley. We wondered whether the globe in the background opens into a bar set, wouldn’t that be neat? One of your colleagues has a dungeon, that’s weird. This newness wears off. Sometimes a person just wants to get an answer, not have to go through an obligatory first five minutes of every meeting talking about whether your coworker moved rooms in their house or if they decided to wear a floral shirt, or have to wave hello when a spouse walks by. You wonder how long your particularly fashion-forward colleague will wear put-together “cozy” outfits (and post them on Instagram.)

And, of course, offices being offices, there is a catty side to Zoom. Can you believe the Ikea art? Is that Grisham on the bookshelf? Do you only have one room in your house? Are you drinking a Bud Light at virtual happy hour? Are you literally in bed?

Kat Vellos, a UX designer who works with professionals on connections and networking and wrote a book called “We Should Get Together,” said this was something she had been “nervously anticipating when the door got slammed on the outside world.”

There was already a “dangerously high level of screentime before this,” said Vellos. Now, it’s more, and there’s a barrier on top of regular discourse, punctuated with screens that freeze at inopportune moments and right when someone is about to say something important. 

Plus, there are other issues: “On a video call, it feels necessary to be smiling all the time. It’s just the sense that our words can’t stand on their own. And as a black woman, I need to not be seen as angry, or just have resting bitch face. So I’m smiling. And I’m tired.”

“I’m feeling more drained at the end of the day versus our days in the office,” said Riley of TBWA/Chiat/Day, often because she is over focusing, trying to pay more attention, and also simultaneously hoping the meeting or check in can recreate the feeling of her company when everyone was together. 

The other issue many are observing is more presenteeism. 

As Riley says, if someone doesn’t have video on, or something else is going on, there’s a strange unsaid “What are you hiding?” feeling. For her part, she’s tried to communicate with her teams that it’s OK to not always have video on, and push back to say, take some self-care time if you need it.

“I work at a company that didn’t really do much of this work from home business,” said a marketing executive at a financial services company. “Now, we’re all doing it, so the pressure is on: Be on every call, every company happy hour, every manager check-in and catch up, react constantly make sure you’re being seen.” 

Lest management think you’re taking a nap on the couch, watching TV, baking in the middle of the day, or just slacking off, Slack is always on. And that bleeds over into video. 

It’s also more prevalent now that management is extra vigilant about checking in with their teams. (At least three CEOs I’ve spoken with over the past week noted that they were being extra communicative, holding multitudes of virtual happy hours and multiple daily check ins, plus weekly all-hands meetings and video messages) All good things, but not so great for the average employee who sees their Zooms adding up. There’s another element: It’s Paul Graham’s classic maker vs. manager problem, where managers have schedules that allow them to find open slots to have meetings in, while makers have to use days in ways where there are large blocks of time in which to “make.” For them, meetings are generally a problem. And with more meetings than ever in an effort to replicate connection, everything starts feeling seriously out of control. 

“The point of the performative aspect is a huge problem,” said Vellos. “It’s a dance. Look at the dot light that’s the camera, look at their face. I just go back and forth all the time. All of these little dances we have to do to replicate connection.”

In the month since then, things have only gotten tighter. Months ago, steps that were being billed as smart and necessary in order for an e-commerce company to become profitable, like expanding wholesale partnerships and opening their retail stores, have now turned into logistical nightmares as most stores remain closed.

The context here is important. By and large, DTC brands have failed to make huge exits (with the exception of Dollar Shave Club). Wall Street, meanwhile, has reacted coolly to the IPO of Casper earlier this year. Now, DTC startups are talking less about becoming a unicorn company, and more about becoming profitable. And this was meant to be the year it happened. After a couple years of breakneck growth-at-all-costs, this was going to be the year that profitability became the word du jour, especially as many brands fizzled out and a clear reckoning began to take hold.

Take beverage company Iris Nova. CEO Zak Normandin told me that his number one goal this year was to become profitable. And they were on track to do that, in the early summer, in part by expanding wholesale and retail partnerships in places like coffee shops and hotels.

Now, of course all of those retail channels are shut off. Normandin said that Iris Nova is still on track to be profitable this year, albeit by August now. In a few ways, they are better off than most other companies. For one, DTC sales have been up about 100% year-over-year. Last year, Iris Nova shut off Facebook and Instagram advertising entirely in order to acquire customers more organically, so the company didn’t have a huge marketing budget to begin with. And, Iris Nova is still on track for its biggest wholesale launch yet, when it makes its products available for purchase in select Walmart stores later this month.

But Iris Nova hasn’t emerged from the crisis completely unscathed. The company did have to lay off half of its staff once it became clear that most of its wholesale distributors would remain closed for several months.

“The reason why we are focused on profitability is because we really want to have financial control over the business in a way that being dependent upon venture capital doesn’t allow you to have,” Normandin said. “And I think when you have a profitable company you can kind of choose your destiny so to speak, and that’s a big priority for us right now, especially given the current dynamics in the market.”

In my conversations with more than half a dozen founders over the last week, what I’ve found is that the only companies that have been able to avoid making layoffs are the ones that one, have a low headcount (less than 30 employees), two, sell their products through a variety of channels, and three, have a product in a category where demand hasn’t completely evaporated. That’s also what enabled some of them to be profitable in the first place and even though their revenue is still probably going to take a hit this year, the odds that they will be able to remain profitable are higher.

Mike Grillo, CEO of Gravity Products, which did shy of just under $20 million in sales last year and was profitable, said that the company is still on track to be profitable this year, because so far direct-to-consumer sales for its products continue to rise, and direct-to-consumer is a higher margin channel for the weighted blanket brand. It has a big retail partnership scheduled for the fourth-quarter that, if scrapped, could limit the company’s revenue growth this year, but shouldn’t limit profitability. The company runs lean, with roughly 12 employees.

It’s also worth noting that the coronavirus has thrown a wrench in what previously seemed like sound business models. Away announced week that it was furloughing half of its team and laying off another 10%. Co-founders Steph Korey and Jen Rubio wrote in a  Medium post that, “a month ago, we were making a healthy profit margin on every order. Today, the company’s salary costs alone exceed our revenues many times over.” Away’s sales have dropped by more than 90%, as making a travel-related purchase has become pretty much a non-starter for any shopper.

“There’s this general perception or sort of commentary going around that a lot of these direct-to-consumer companies were like such a mess beforehand and there’s this sort of purging taking place, and I do think to some extent that’s true,” said Grillo.
But there a lot of companies that are making products that are not necessarily so timely right now….and it’s not for like lack of good business fundamentals that they are struggling.”

Trend alert
A number of consumer and retail startups shifting their attention towards raising money for small, local businesses. Direct-to-consumer apéritif brand Haus launched a new line of drinks this week, co-created with chefs from around the country, with 100% of the profits going towards local restaurants. Meanwhile, multi-brand retailer Neighborhood Goods said its opening up applications for musicians, artists, and restaurants to apply to secure space at one of Neighborhood Goods’ three stores for free when they re-open. It’s a way for these companies to get attention for giving back, but also hopefully gain new customers thanks to the dedicated followings that these local businesses have amassed.

Stat of the week
Consumers have now accepted that they’ll likely be spending a lot of time at home the next several months, and are buying products accordingly to keep themselves entertained. Shopify reported that for the week of March 30 among its merchants, sales of exercise bands were up 784% compared to 30 days prior, while sales of board games were up 691%.

Quote of the week
“How do you increase conversion without looking cheap or desperate? It’s scary,” said Justin Kerzner, president of Naked Retail, on knowing when to offer discounts.

Facing the grim possibility of a long recession, Snap’s ad sales team will have to work harder for every dollar they bring in this year. Most of its key partners — advertisers, agencies and publishers — are facing fundamental business challenges, some of them existential. 

In a conversation with Digiday, Snap U.K. general manager Ed Couchman said at a time when users are seeking information from trustworthy sources, its sales teams are heavily pushing its Discover platform to media agencies. Couchman also discussed how Snap is supporting its own teams through this difficult period That includes shifting CEO Evan Spiegel’s “Council” sessions — where ordinarily employees get together in the office and sit in a circle to openly and confidentially discuss their feelings — into Google Hangouts.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you ensuring your employees don’t suffer burnout?

Suddenly not having the commute — whether that’s a walk, a bus ride, or longer train journey — you now don’t have those physical divides in your day.

I did observe that people were working — and it wasn’t just flexible [hours] — many longer hours. The very simple thing I asked the team to do was at the end of the day — particularly at the weekend — is when you close your laptop to actually mean it and just keep it closed. I know that sounds simple but it’s actually pretty effective to say, OK, that’s the end of the day and I’m going to turn off all my work stuff and technology and do some other things.

How does Snap Council work online?

[Council is] that time we set aside to talk, in a circle in a physical room. I was unsure whether it would work virtually.

Everyone has the Hangout plugin, so you can have a grid with everyone on the call. We encourage people to turn off their Snap camera so it feels very authentic — no dog ears allowed.

I’ve got to say, it’s worked really well. My first one, I had some hesitations. We were asked to bring along our favorite coffee mug. I was like, ‘This is not going to work’. And I cannot tell you how fascinating people’s favorite coffee mugs are!

It’s been brilliant to have a little window into people’s lives and learn a bit more about them. It’s been a small silver lining.

How is Snap supporting its partners through the coronavirus crisis?

With advertising partners, some of them are having office hours — an open Hangout where anyone can drop in. We’ve also shifted a lot of emphasis onto training and product updates via webinar.

We have really accelerated our work with Discover partners. We feel a sense of responsibility to ensure the users are getting factual, credible news stories about the coronavirus. We recently polled [users] and 50% said they relied on news sources from official channels.

We’ve had record highs across loads and loads of different engagement metrics. One of those was Discover content. 

Are you doing anything to support news publishers in particular?

We have a responsibility to keep Gen Z and millennials fully informed around Covid. We need the partners to do that. We hear loud and clear [users] rely on trusted news sources. The job we have is to tell media agencies about the value of that and, to be quite frank, sell the media inventory around that because we have a rev-share with them. We are providing incremental revenue for them. We keep promoting the benefits of Discover — brand safe, curated by humans, et. cetera.

Clearly some advertising categories have been hit by the coronavirus. But we are seeing some other businesses that are really thriving, particularly around mobile gaming … d2c brands, ecommerce. They are continuing to advertise and we’re obviously telling them all the good things about Discover.

What are you doing to keep employees informed of the realities of Snap’s own ad revenue impact and also keep them motivated?

The most important thing that I do to tell them how as a business and a platform we have a role to play to stop the spread of the virus. Gen Z and millennials, we are the platform of choice for that.

[We are] providing credible information, the [World Health Organization] donation Lens, we accelerated the launch of “Here For You,” which is around mental health and wellbeing for young people.  The job we have to do to increase our advertising revenue basically pays for all that good stuff we’re doing and that’s why our role is so important. 

We try to keep them informed of how the business is performing. Because [coronavirus] is not treating all businesses equally, some are more impacted than others. We can have the agility within the organization to make sure we are supporting all of those businesses and also thinking how we can support some of the more disruptive aspects that are continuing to invest in media at this time.

“Everyone wants to do a webinar, and it feels very opportunistic and salesy,” said one agency executive. “The tone matters more than anything else.”

As an example of how companies’ approaches can differ, this agency executive said they have received food delivery gift cards from two different ad tech companies. In one case, the company sent it seemingly at random with no communication from the sales representative at the company. In the other case, the company’s sales rep sent an email asking for ideas of shows to stream during quarantine. “It’s the difference between ‘Hey, here’s a coupon’ and ‘Hey, how can I engage with you from a relationship perspective?’” this executive said.

To their credit, those on the sales side largely are skewing more toward the interpersonal versus the nakedly transactional, according to agency executives.

“[TV] networks are coming back to advertisers and agencies and saying, ‘How can we help you in any way?’” said a second agency executive. This executive, who has been in the industry for more than three decades and worked through multiple economic downturns, said the extent of these current relationship management efforts are “something novel. I haven’t seen this before.”

What would normally be considered gifts are being received as care packages by agency executives. In some cases, the items, such as gift cards to food delivery apps, are being offered in exchange for agency executives participating in virtual lunch-and-learn meetings. But in others, they are being provided with no strings attached, such as the $7 gift cards for Amazon Prime Video movie rentals that Innovid has sent streaming video ad buyers. 

The gestures have gone beyond such gifts to be more open-ended offers of aid, be that creative services assistance or Sudoku strategy advice, according to agency executives. “It’s not really a sales conversation anymore,” said Clair Bergman, associate media director at The Media Kitchen.

While ad sellers are asking if there’s any data they can provide to help agencies and advertisers navigate the present uncertainties — and implicitly steer any available ad dollars in the media companies’ direction  — they are more often checking in to see how people are coping and sharing puzzle ideas and other ways they are passing the time in quarantine. “It’s been a breath of fresh air,” said Bergman.

Why did things become so difficult? It’s a combination of antiquated (and often manual) ways of producing content combined with budget restrictions. Brands need more content than ever but they are struggling to meet demands around volume, scale, speed and high-quality output.

This phenomenon can be thought of as a type of content gap, in this case an internal production delta between the amount of content brands need to market and message to consumers and the resources they possess to produce and scale it — and it’s growing greater by the day. According to a Forrester report commissioned by Celtra, 70 percent of brands are already devoting more time to content creation for their campaigns than they would prefer; and for many the content production gap can’t be solved by merely throwing more money or hours at the problem.

So, what does this gap mean for marketers? How can they bridge it? Below are four common symptoms of the content production gap and how marketing teams can fix it.

1. Content output is too low (and the team needs more capacity)

While digital has given brands unparalleled opportunities to deliver personalized messages across platforms, many marketing teams lack the bandwidth to cover all of the ground those opportunities now represent. As a result, brands are failing to deliver against their media and messaging strategy.

Digital advertising goals are nearly impossible to achieve without tactics that can speed up production. For example, according to the Celtra Data Insights team, reusing assets by templatizing creative, rather than creating all of the variations manually, saves 75–80 percent on production time. By introducing automation and separating content from design, teams can design a strong asset and then scale it across numerous variations.

2. It’s difficult to produce excellent creative in the time available

The average person is served more than 1,700 digital ads per month. A marketing team’s signal drowns in all that noise unless it can generate creative that helps their brands stand out. However, when there’s a scant amount of time for getting campaigns out the door, creative quality almost inevitably takes a hit. 

There’s another challenging piece here too: creative consistency. Design, quality and cohesive branding are necessary to maintain this factor across all markets, all the time. Off-brand — or worse, off-putting — content will have an impact on a brand’s bottom line. Conversely, according to a Harvard Business Review report, consistent branding across all platforms increases revenue by up to 23 percent. Similarly, and also from the Harvard Business Review: “A euro invested in a highly creative ad campaign had, on average, nearly double the sales impact of a euro spent on a non-creative campaign.”

When scaling campaigns and content, maintaining true consistency and high-quality creative can be taxing. What can help bridge this part of the content production gap is to look for automated solutions that give teams margins to generate new creative that cuts through noise, all the while controlling for human error, and ensuring that elements like text, style and translations are laddering up. If automation isn’t an option in-house, then the team should look to partnerships that can add technology to the mix.

3. Advertising opportunities are slipping away

Ideally, top-performing marketing teams should take an agile approach where they can test, learn and iterate on creative continuously. In practice though, most are busy just trying to deliver the basics for their media teams and agencies. In those cases, the shortage of content leads to missed opportunities. Marketers end up lacking the capacity to launch campaigns fast enough or try out new concepts.

Again, technology can help, allowing the team to manage the technical side of production easier and faster while granting full visibility onto each campaign asset. When the team isn’t preoccupied with repetitive tasks — when they can cut steps and time spent on feedback rounds, for example, identifying real-time toolsets for editing, commenting and previewing content —  they can better focus on inventive and engaging content. 

4. Your creative is too generic

According to Marketo, 63 percent of respondents are highly annoyed by the way brands continue to rely on the old-fashioned strategy of repeatedly blasting mass messages. Even when a marketing team is satisfied with content volume and creative quality, it still needs to ensure that its ads and messaging include the level of relevancy that consumers expect.

Most companies are well-aware that this is an area in which they can always seek improvement. According to the Forrester study that Celtra commissioned, 61 percent of organizations reported that improving creative relevancy is their organization’s digital advertising creative goal over the next year. However, the more personalization marketing teams add, the more variations those advertisers will need to create to keep up with that strategy. 

Marketers are shifting their focus from improving longer-standing content production methods towards developing new ones entirely. New technology doesn’t just facilitate digital advertising; it establishes a new process overall, one that offers unparalleled production speed. Again, adding technology and strong tech partnerships into these efforts means opening wider margins for creativity and context-rich tactics. Software and platforms have become primary tools that help marketers bridge their content production gaps, empowering them to deliver at the speed of media.