Month: June 2020

This was not an isolated issue for T Brand. The Washington Post’s branded content studio WP BrandStudio and Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Media Studios both found themselves in the same situation. Only concerns came out from the teams about these operational tactics being able to provide the same level of quality that they were used to delivering to their clients. 

“There are some improvisational techniques that people have had to use to keep content production going while being remote,” said Denise Burrell-Stinson, director of content for WP BrandStudio. But she added that the issue of relying on those intermittently is that it is not easy to “maintain the fidelity” of quality that campaigns had prior to the pandemic.

Ashish Verma, global head of creative at Bloomberg Media Studios said he spoke with their various production vendors and found that some companies were creating new camera and lighting equipment drop kits that his team could effectively send to subjects’ homes and they could then deliver high resolution content versus grainy internet recordings. 

“Invention is about 50% of the equation of us trying to be proactive and trying to be on the cutting edge of what’s out there. But the other 50% is really being a trusted brand with significant brand safety,” said Anne Kawalerski, CMO of Bloomberg Media. 

By using the emerging technology like camera drop kits to ensure higher resolution content, Kawalerski said the team is able to ensure “inherent quality to the work” that further plays into the brand safety that clients are looking for from Bloomberg. 

T Brand and the WP BrandStudio also integrated drop kits into their production strategies, finding that while in some cases Zoom interviews made sense for brands in the context of what was going on, more evergreen campaigns could benefit from the high-res interviews in them.

“There’s a lot of trial and error,” Wiggins said, when it comes to guiding someone through setting up the cameras and lighting equipment from the drop kits. But overall, she said that her team has been able to get client campaigns done weeks quicker than before moving to remote production. This is because they don’t need to worry about the lead times associated with sending out a full production crew to locations. 

Burrell-Stinson’s team at WP BrandStudio is still doing some level of in-person shoots for subject interviews, however there are many factors that have to be met in order to sign off on those projects, including being outdoors, sending only the bare minimum number of people to the site and ensuring that they keep a six-foot distance from each other. For the campaigns that cannot be shot like that, she said her team is relying on drop kits that they walk through the subject through setting it up remotely. 

The biggest change Burrell-Stinson said her team has had to make while being remote, however, is moving away from the documentary-style campaigns that they had previously relied on, and going to mixed-media campaigns. 

“The storytelling is still focused, but we’re taking a diverse approach to the creative elements within the story,” she said. This means, intercutting the interviews that they’re able to do either onsite or via the drop kits with animations and illustrations that are produced in-house.

Total branded content campaign volume across 140 publishers is still down about 26% from the 10-week period ending on March 15 versus the 10-week period ending on May 24, according to Duncan Morris, COO of advertising research company DM Squared. This is, however, showing improvement over the 43% drop in the total number of campaigns that DM Squared recorded in the 25-day period after March 11 vs. the 25-day period after that date. 

“We are going to see even more creativity in not only what branded content gets created but how it is created,” said Kunal Gupta, CEO of Polar. “Some publisher studios are in a ‘wait and see’ mode for things to return back to how it once was, which I think is a mistake. Others are seeing this as an opportunity to bring their creativity forward in not only what but also the how.”

How are you approaching managing your team right now?

We’ve had a really gut-wrenching past few days here, and I just got off a gut-wrenching call with some of our black leaders. The back-to-back moments of thinking about how are you positioning for your people, clients, brands and in a digital world and society at large — you have to be intently listening, agile and fast, fast, fast. It’s a time where you’re not going to get it all right. 

Are you thinking of taking a day off or giving space to process this moment?

We’ve all been listening intently to stories. Before this we had been encouraging people especially on the marketing team to take time off [as some had been working overtime to reimagine an event to be digital]. People were doing that, going through a pandemic, teach their kids, worried about their own health. Now it’s even more important to think about that. 

In terms of advertising, some pressed pause due to coronavirus and now some are doing so again. Have you pressed pause?

We have not stopped advertising. We’re having a lot of conversations and watching very carefully. There’s an important balancing act here between all that’s happening, all that’s going on and all the understandable anger and emotion. The fact that we have 36 million people, or whatever the latest number is, who are not employed and businesses trying to reopen, get started again and get back on track. These are conflating challenges. Like any marketer, the best you can do is be really thoughtful. It’s an everyday conversation. There’s no, “Here’s what we’re doing for the next 90-days.”

To back up for a second, with coronavirus, did you stop advertising? 

We shifted to all new creative. With that shift I’m sure there were some days where we were not nearly as visible and present. But we were on-air with all-new advertising within 10-days so we were very fast to get new creative messages and new channels underway. We were not one of the companies that did major pauses. We were still on-air, in digital.

How much did you cut?

Of course we were like, it doesn’t make sense to be in elevators in New York City or have out-of-home so we did make some shifts and we did take down some of our ads. We had ads with people in conference rooms or on planes, that didn’t feel right. That’s why we had to come up with all new creative. Over that 10-day period there was probably a mix of taking things down and putting new things up. But we did not go dark or cut significantly. It wasn’t a meaningful number. We shifted gears but there wasn’t a period where we were really going to cut spend.

Are you having conversations about reducing advertising now? 

I am a firm believer that there’s no such thing as a fixed marketing budget. We should always approach this agilely. We also have to be very thoughtful about the cultural moment. We’ve been very quiet on social the past few days, for instance, besides expressing our support. We’re not out there talking about new product launches. We have not chosen to pull all of our TV advertising or do something more significant at this point. 

Do you think marketers will reflecting on whether or not now is the right time to be advertising? 

Good marketers always do that. Having seen this many times, sometimes it’s issues of the economy, sometimes it’s things like what we’re going through right now with race, there were periods with #MeToo. We’re always trying to walk that line sensitively and thoughtfully. I don’t think any of us have a crystal ball about this confluence of justified racial anger over racial inequality, and Covid and the unemployment that we’ve seen. I’m talking to my team every morning. We’re trying to sense, understand and appreciate the moment we’re in. That plus effectiveness data helps us govern what we do. 

When do you think marketers will start spending like they had been? 

It’s going to be very industry and company dependent. The one thing the marketer controls is how strongly she is aligned with finance and what a command she has over the effectiveness of her dollars. If you don’t have strength in marketing it’s very easy to say, “We’ll just cut marketing and solve our budget problem.” But that has long-term consequences for revenue.

Granted, some of those branded messages are more thoughtful than others, but ultimately they’re all saying the same thing in the same way. They all say they’re fighting racism, but few call out the white supremacy that underpins it. In fact, most of those messages have even failed to acknowledge the life-threatening force wielded by police on black people. It’s far easier for these companies to talk about racism as an act of hate than it is to take a stand against the deeper more systemic ways black people experience racism. It’s this ignorance of the effects of racism that’s made the messaging from many of these companies sound hollow. 

L’Oréal told its followers that it stands in solidarity with the black community but in 2017 ended its partnership with model Munro Bergdorf over comments she made calling out racism. But the cosmetics giant isn’t the only one. Nike was one of the first companies to condemn racism in the wake of the protests but planned to sell a trainer that featured an early version of the American flag used by the American Nazi Party. For companies who have profited by and aligned themselves with black culture, their audience is watching how they handle this situation. 

“We need to move past the ‘stand by you’ statements that only win in marketing circles to tangible meaningful action for people of color,” said Leila Fataar, founder of cultural marcomms company Platform 13. “Some brands and categories don’t have a traditional connection to black culture or their audience are not predominately made up of people of color.”

If anything, those are the compare that should be educating their audiences on the reality of white privilege, instead of putting out generic statements or not saying anything at all.

Ben & Jerry’s has called on Americans to “dismantle white supremacy” and “grapple with the sins of our past.” It also urged the U.S. Department of Justice to rejuvenate its Civil Rights Division, and for Congress to pass a bill that would create a commission to study the effects of discrimination since African slaves first arrived in North America in 1619. It’s a clear attempt by Ben & Jerry’s to educate its customers on the historical roots of white privilege. 

The ice cream maker is among the most outspoken companies on social issues, even though it is part of a big conglomerate like Unilever. It’s the only Unilever company with its own CEO and its own board of directors. As such, the company has the independence to speak out against the issues that are most important to its own values and where it can have the most impact. 

“Ben & Jerry’s aren’t scared to say the words ‘Black Lives Matter’, or name the victims of police brutality,” said Hannah Shelley, a new business and marketing executive at Engine U.K. ”The company is looking at long term as well as short term action and proving to be a true ally to the cause. However, activism is not exhaustive and there are more always more ways in which they can continue to help this fight.”

One of the main reasons why so many companies have found it tricky to comment on the protests is the well-documented lack of diversity at senior and decision-making levels. Burger King’s CMO Fernando Machado alluded to this issue in a tweet earlier this week when he blamed a lack of diversity across the ad industry for its disconnect with what’s happening at the moment. 

Machado’s post read: “Dear creative community, please do not send me another idea for a stunt to show that we support the African American community. Instead, hire more African Americans for the agency. Or help us evolve the diversity agenda here in my company (cause we need it). Actions, not ads.”

Senior marketers like Machado have the power to make this a reality for his agencies. If more were to insist they won’t spend as much money with agencies that can’t do better on diversity like Unilever’s global evp of marketing and chief diversity and inclusion officer Aline Santos has done then Machado’s call for widespread reformation would seem more feasible. As it stands, however, there’s a long way to go. 

“The agency I work at now looks like it has a diverse workforce but that’s only up to a point,” said a senior media planner at a global media agency on the condition of anonymity. “At a senior level, there aren’t many people who look like me.”  

The number of employees from an ethnic minority background at agencies in the U.K. sat at 13.7% in 2019, down slightly from 13.8% in 2018, according to a census of 199 agencies conducted by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. While ethnic diversity was highest at junior levels where it reached 17.7%, up from 16.9% in 2018, just 4.7% of C-suite roles were occupied by individuals from an ethnic minority background, down from 5.5% in 2018. The glacial progression here makes it hard for agencies to advise marketers on an issue they seem to pretend doesn’t exist. 

“The people of color who need to be part of the conversation when a company decides to talk about racism aren’t normally in the room when those messages are put together,” said Gary Coichy, CEO of POD Digital Media, a multicultural podcast network. “It’s a situation that means attempts to address diversity and inclusivity aren’t properly supported.”   

There’s a disconnect between what is happening at this moment — a mass uprising against police violence toward black people, triggered by the death of George Floyd while in custody last month — and what is being said by these companies. The muted response to Facebook’s stance on President Donald Trump’s controversial post is further evidence of this. The post suggested violence against the protesters and in doing so quoted a racist 1960s police chief. And yet many of the same companies that said they stood with the protesters continue to buy ads on Facebook. 

In fact, there is only a handful of advertisers
who have decided they can no longer fund a platform whose moral compass runs
counter to their own. 

Ashby & Graff Real Estate, an independent
California real estate brokerage, made the decision to halt their five-figure
Facebook ad budget back in January 2019 after a 2018 filled with chaotic
missteps by the social network and its leadership, including incidences
involving holocaust denialism, and privacy breaches of user data. Now the real
estate company is getting rid of its entire Facebook business page.

“Ultimately, our company had to decide if we
were okay paying toward the bottom line — regardless of how minuscule — of a
corporate behemoth whose main export seems to be the exacerbation of political
polarization and discord, tugging forcefully on the very seams of our
democracy,” said John Graff, CEO of Ashby & Graff Real Estate. 

“Do we get value from having the page and does that value mitigate the dangerous seeds of discord being sown by Facebook? The answer to both is ‘no’,” said Graff. “And even if there were enormous value to us, how could we possibly value our business more than the cohesion of our United States?”

In conjunction with a new research report exploring marketers’ and publishers’ evolving strategies and approaches to the current state of video ad formats, Digiday and GumGum interviewed three experts in video advertising and formats. 

In this video, you’ll see:

-Taylor Wiegert, VP and planning director at The Martin Agency, talk about the ways publishers, ad tech providers and platforms can work together to create new video-ad experiences

-Vikram Bhaskaran, global head of vertical strategy and marketing at Pinterest, highlights the “five dimensions of inspiration”

-GumGum CEO Phil Schraeder prompt brands to pick innovative video-ad formats that can follow striking pre-roll creative with a meaningful extension of message