Month: November 2020

Instead of a big office bash, Vox Media and BuzzFeed will both host smaller, team-specific gatherings on Zoom. A cross-organizational team at Vox built a resource guide with recommendations and suggestions for how to host a virtual get-together. Meredith will host a company-wide toast on Zoom next month to celebrate the achievements across various departments, a company spokesperson said. Business Insider, which normally covers its offices in tinsel for the holidays, is having a virtual party this year, hosted by a comedian who specializes in magic tricks, and raffling away prizes.

In some respects, the substitute celebrations are just one more adaptation media companies have had to make this year. But they are also part of a bigger challenge that media and agency employers will face well after 2020, as remote work continues to become more common.

“You’ve got employees that are feeling much more isolated than normal,” said S. Chris Edmonds, the CEO of Purposeful Culture Group, a consultancy that helps companies with their workplace cultures. “This time of year, there’s a drive to tell everybody that they appreciate their efforts. I’d say, ‘Don’t wait til freaking Thanksgiving to show them you care.’”

While the traditional holiday party is usually confined to one day, some employers are looking to spread the cheer out over a number of days this year.

For example, the Martin Agency, which likes to go all out on its holiday party — last year, it hired a band, rented outdoor tents, created a separate aesthetic theme for each floor of their offices, and offered smoky drinks to employees, as well as their plus ones — is going for something a little more experiential.

Starting this week, Martin Agency employees will get a box of gifts chosen by agency leaders, which reflect the company’s work and its values, chief culture officer Carmina Drummond said. The items, part of what the company is calling “Martin Days,” will be opened one at a time over several days in December. On Dec. 10, the entire company will get together on Zoom to open a mystery gift.

Drummond declined to share specifics about what the gifts were because the boxes were still headed to some employees. “Think great conversations, inspiration, a fun, functional thing, and just really kind of a delight in who we are,” she said.

Others took holiday stresses, both typical ones and 2020-specific ones, as their point of inspiration for care packages. The agency DiMassimo Goldstein, for example, gave each of its employees a Turkey Allowance this year to make up for the fact that most people wouldn’t be traveling home to see their families, and last week it sent employees a “Behavioral Health Pandemic Holidays Emergency Kit,” which included free subscriptions to lots of client products, including connected fitness apps and Weight Watchers.

While it’s unlikely that virtual celebrations will replace in-person ones once it’s safe to hold the latter, the increased focus on employee recognition might lead to different shows of appreciation in years to come.

This year, the Martin Agency is also closing its doors for the final two weeks of the year, to recognize how much the company got done, adding new clients and turning a profit in a year when most agencies struggled mightily.

Moving forward, more companies will have to treat those holiday plans, whether they are care packages or extra time off, as investments.  “Culture’s not something that is going to be beneficial unless you invest in it,” Edmonds said.

So to reignite the spark of excitement that experiential is meant to offer, some publishers have begun testing the limits of hybrid events. Atlas Obscura, for example, is planning U.S.-based road trips to uncommon locations, PopSugar hosted a drive-in premiere in Los Angeles and Pop-Up Magazine is working to make the at-home space more engaging by breaking the virtual fourth wall with outdoor activities and products mailed to audience’s homes.

“We’ve been trying to crystalize the problem for a while of why [virtual] experiences don’t feel fun or joyous,” said Sarah Priestman, president of experiential agency Sense New York. “There is this lack of serendipity in our lives currently. So much of this at-home life is really predictable and frictionless and a lot of events that have been created virtually” have been created to be smooth and frictionless as well, she added. 

The negative outcome from creating these smooth, but remote events, Priestman said, is what we now know as “Zoom fatigue.” This results from continually staring at a screen without the participatory elements or sensory moments that provide connection to the speakers and to the audience or the feeling of doing something out of the norm of the day-to-day. 

“There is no surprise and delight,” Priestman said. 

Warren Webster, CEO of Atlas Obscura, said that Nissan was looking for an opportunity to get back to events that “capture the spirit of exploration” to promote its Rogue model. The Rogue Routes event series was built, giving attendees a road trip itinerary to one of five locations over several different days in the fall of 2020 and winter 2021. Once there, they are able to stay in their cars and watch performances from artists, musicians and industry experts.

The in-person part of the event series is limited to 100 to 200 cars, with each four-person group paying $55 for registration. But with the locations in remote areas of the U.S. (Camp Colton, Ore., Joshua Tree National Park, Calif., North Woodstock, N.H., and Fountain, Colo. ) the events are also live streamed for free to global audiences to get the scale that cannot be achieved with virtual-only events right now, Webster said.

PopSugar took a similar approach to congregating its readers through a drive-in style event for the premiere of ABC’s The Bachelorette on October 13. The event was able to accomodate 200 people, who stayed in their cars and were given branded snack bags by tuxedoed male servers.

The event was free to attendees who RSVP’d ahead of time and was focused on building an experience that they would want to post about on social media to create added impressions beyond the couple hundred people who were able to attend.

At the moment, “there are fewer clients that are willing to experiment with the hybrid concepts,” said Geoff Schiller, chief revenue officer of PopSugar’s parent company Group Nine. “But clients don’t want to be in the mindset of simply checking off the virtual box. We are thinking about what can we do to break through the clutter.”

Both Atlas Obscura and PopSugar saw KPIs change a bit from the orignial in-person event model and the virtual event model. Instead of viewing a large gathering of attendees as a determining factor of success, the online audience is just as important.

Because the attendee list was limited, Schiller said that social amplification of the event on Instagram in particular became a main goal for sponsor ABC.

“This is the first time that we’ve woven all the elements [of virtual and in-person events] together,” Webster said, adding Atlas Obscura was able to charge a higher rate for this sponsorship than its been charging for virtual events lately, though he declined to disclose hard revenue figures.

The drive-in model works in L.A., where everyone has a car, Priestman said, but it is also expensive and not a feasible event option for other big metros like New York City where having a car is less common. Also, depending on the scale of the drive-in event, they can be just as expensive, or more so, to host as any other in-person events. 

This is why many of these hybrid events have been built for sponsorships, like the Rouge Routes and The Bachelorette premiere.

There are “simpler ways to have a less physical infrastructure and still do more for less money in the at-home space,” Priestman said, like sending products in the mail ahead of time or encouraging people to leave the screen and do an activity. 

That’s the approach that Pop-Up Magazine is taking. As a publisher that’s known for hosting performances that incorporate everything from smell to taste while stories are performed on stage, moving to virtual meant losing all senses aside from sight and sound. 

That is until its fall issue in October encouraged people to step away from the screen and go for a walk at the same time as 400 other people around the world, according to co-founder and president Chas Edwards.

Connecting via Zoom ahead of the walk, people introduced themselves and showed their walking paths before shutting off the camera and listening to a Pop-Up Mag podcast at the same time. Afterwards, they gathered together again virtually to talk about the story they just listened to.

But beyond that, Edwards’ team is building a $70 “issue in a box” that fans can purchase and gives them activities and products designed to bring stories to life in non-traditional formats once again. Based around the theme of food, each story in the included magazine that’s in the box has keepsake like a tea towel or a coaster that is shared and an added activity to get people cooking.

One story requires audiences to call chef Samin Nosrat, who reads her per-recorded story about cinnamon from different parts of the world that they can taste while she reads to them.

These sensory elements are what attracted Instacart to be the box sponsor, Edwards said, and rates for the Issue in a Box ended up being much higher than a sponsorship that Pop-Up Mag could get for digital video.

“The more that we can create stories with interactive prompts that connect with people in a way that’s not just a commercial or logo, but an interactive aspect of the experience is much more valuable for the sponsor,” Edwards added.

“In previous years consumers have been trained to wait for the deal, but not this year; brands have been offering unprecedented discounts all year long,” said Ruth Bernstein, CEO of creative agency Yard NYC. “Even the most promotionally-driven retailers must behave differently this year in order to compete.”

But even if it’s a logical move to stretch out discounts typically reserved for Cyber Monday, some industry analysts say that it can create a more difficult environment for marketers and that the day could be less relevant going forward. Of course, some say that evolution was already happening. 

“Cyber Monday had a good run,” said Mathieu Champigny, CEO of full-service content agency Industrial Color. “Cyber Monday has become Cyber November, even Cyber December. It’s not special anymore.” 

Reasons vary: In recent years, the lines between Cyber Monday and Black Friday have blurred as Black Friday sales have been available online and Cyber Monday deals have been touted ahead of time. Those lines have only gotten blurrier this year. With that being the case, shoppers now expect to get a deal wherever they shop. With discounts expected — and expected to last for days on end — discounts don’t help brands stand out and, in some instances, can be a race to the bottom. 

That’s why some agency execs say that they expect Cyber Monday to evolve this year and going forward with marketers not only offering discounts but new perks or limited edition merchandise for the day to stand out. 

Of course, Cyber Monday wasn’t always about discounts. In 2005, after tracking the rise in online shopping on the Monday after Thanksgiving, Shop.org execs coined the term “Cyber Monday” and put out a press release about it. The term was meant to define a phenomenon of people shopping online at their offices the Monday after Thanksgiving, taking advantage of the high-speed internet as well as the ability to shop without loved ones snooping, according to Scott Silverman, co-founder of CommerceNext and former Shop.org executive director. 

“It didn’t exist as a promotional item on the calendar,” said Silverman, adding that after the release the term was used by the Wall Street Journal and then media coverage of the day “snowballed” from there. “Going into 2006 the retailers decided to hop on the Cyber Monday bandwagon and begin promoting sales for it.” 

The day has since become a staple for many retailers and brands with planning for sales and advertising around the day happening months in advance.

Even as the concept of Cyber Monday evolves past a single day, industry analysts expect that enthusiasm for sales and discounts during and past the coronavirus will remain. Figuring out how to stand out as sales last longer will be the challenge for marketers going forward.

When it comes to this year, “the brands that will win the holiday season will be the ones that don’t focus on sales or deal messaging, but instead connect through emotional stories,” said Bernstein. “Making customers feel comforted and understood during this difficult season will inspire people to feel good about buying gifts from your brand online all season long.”