Month: February 2021

But even with the shock of the pandemic, Forte wound up having a very good year. More than 100 brands tried using Forte in campaigns last year, and by the end of 2020, Forte data was used to drive “nearly half” of Vox Media’s display ad revenue, chief revenue officer Ryan Pauley said. (A Vox Media spokesperson would not provide a more specific figure)

That share figures to grow significantly in 2021, as brands and agencies familiarize themselves with alternatives to third-party cookies, which will likely be phased out sometime at year’s end. But even with its strong start, Vox Media is in a race to figure out what Forte is good at, how many ways its clients can use it — it has only executed a small handful of second-party data projects — and how widely it wants to make Forte segments available outside of its own ecosystem.

It will also have to begin proving that Forte can provide the backbone of consistent client spending. Pauley declined to answer a question about how many of those brands renewed deals or used Forte a second time.

“We were really focused on customer adoption [last year],” Pauley said. “As much for our partners to learn the value of our data as much as it was for us to learn about the efficacy of what we can drive.”

The bulk of the data Forte uses to infer audience interests and intent comes from the content Vox Media’s audience consumes across both Vox Media and New York Media, which Vox acquired in 2019. But it draws from other sources too, including offline data about people that have attended in-person events, such as Eater’s dinner series Young Guns, as well as subscriber data gathered from New York Media and commerce data gathered from New York Media’s commerce brand, The Strategist.

While some publishers, such as Slate, charge a premium for the audience segments identified using their first party data, Forte does not cost extra, in part because Vox Media wants to encourage as many clients as possible to try it out.

“There were some clients who were resistant,” Pauley said. “For those clients, we said, ‘Let’s run a side-by-side comparison at no cost.’”

And to date, endemic advertisers have been the biggest spenders on Forte, which makes sense given the strong intent signals Vox Media can pick up — a person reading iPhone and Samsung Galaxy reviews on the Verge is probably in the market for a new cell phone.

“Everybody wants to drive business outcomes,” said Megan Walton, vp of revenue products at Vox Media. “You’re not trying to reach a demographic; you’re trying to reach people who are interested in a particular type of content and a particular type of product.”

Getting advertisers to sample Forte’s audience segments is one thing, but building a robust appetite for them is another. While ad buyers said that Forte is off to a strong start, it still suffers from challenges that most publisher-focused solutions face on the path to becoming a must-buy ingredient in a media plan.

“It’s fantastic if there is alignment,” said Tom Swierczewski, the programmatic media director at Cramer-Krasselt, which has used Forte sparingly for clients in the past. “But it has limitations from a scale perspective.”

The coming tasting tour that brands will embark on in the coming year may help.

While many advertisers may be reluctant to commit too much of their budgets to new ad formats or proprietary audience segments, there is a measure of urgency in doing so now, because the window for comparing the effectiveness of a platform like Forte with the effectiveness of third-party audiences will soon close.

“The reason 2021 is important for our clients, from a research and learning standpoint, is we still have an opportunity to judge Forte audiences with some parity across the broader ecosystem,” said Peter Rice, associate director of strategic campaign operations at Kepler Group.

What several buyers want to watch is how widely available Forte’s audience segments become. At the moment, many clients are accessing the inventory via private marketplace or programmatic guaranteed deals.

“Where we’re seeing it used, right now, is really just as another highly aligned inventory source and audience segment,” Rice said. “Where it gets more interesting is as that availability potentially expands [into open environments]. Then these publisher audiences really continue to increase in value.”

Verify executives hope the expansion will improve consumers’ trust in local news, Ostrow said. Putting Verify’s brand in different formats and onto new platforms will allow its fact-checking content to reach more people in local communities vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation, which is false information spread regardless of intent.

According to a 2019 study by the Knight Foundation, 45% of people in the U.S. said they trust local news outlets “a great deal” or “quite a lot,” whereas only 31% said as much about national news outlets.

Tegna makes money from the articles and videos Verify produces by distributing them on its stations’ sites and selling pre-roll and display ads against them. Verify’s Snapchat Discover page, which launched in the summer of 2020, also makes money via a revenue partnership with Snapchat. However, going beyond these monetization efforts “isn’t the initial focus” of Verify’s roll-out, Ostrow said. The priority for now is to continue building the brand and the audience in other formats and platforms.

The decision to roll out Verify into its own brand comes after a boom of interest in its fact-checking: traffic on Verify’s content increased more than 400% in 2020 on Tegna’s station websites, according to the company, and attracted an average of more than 2 million unique visitors per month.

Among Verify’s top 50 performing stories from March through October 2020, 70% were COVID-19 or social justice related, according to Ostrow. During the fourth quarter of 2020 when it seemed all eyes were on the presidential election, 40% of the top stories were not political. Verify’s videos tackle claims like: Do COVID-19 vaccines contain microchips? Were bricks provided at George Floyd protests in North Carolina, Texas and California this summer?

Verify will be overseen by McClatchy and Washington Post veteran Jonathan Forsythe, who will serve as managing editor. He will hire 15 to 20 people on the Verify team, including producers and editors, digital journalists, motion graphics designers and product developers. Tegna has already hired two audience engagement specialists to lead Verify’s rollout on social media platforms.

The fact-checking space is competitive. Media entrepreneur Steve Brill and former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz tackled the issue of misinformation and disinformation when they launched NewsGuard in 2018, which rates online news outlets on their reliability, to fight fake news. Fact-checking site Snopes has been around since the ‘90s. Additionally, The New York Times’ Daily Distortions vertical tracks false and misleading information, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker was created in 2007 to hold mostly politicians accountable for false or misleading statements.

What differentiates Verify is that it focuses primarily on video, Ostrow said, though as the new team comes together they will also produce more articles. David Chavern, president and CEO of trade association News Media Alliance, noted that misinformation and disinformation is often spread in a visual format, so responding to such claims by sharing “a link to a 500-word article” may not be as effective as linking to “fact-checking content that is essentially native to social distribution,” such as a short video.

Verify began as a franchise that aired on Tegna’s local TV stations across the U.S. (Tegna now operates 64 stations in 51 markets and 49 newsrooms). Those stations’ corresponding websites, where the video segments are published alongside written articles, also reach a broad audience with 75 million visitors per month, according to the company.

The segments moved beyond TV to digital platforms in 2016, and Verify publishes new episodes to its Snapchat account weekly. It now has more than 160,000 subscribers and over 8 million unique viewers on the platform. More than 50% of the audience there is under the age of 24. “We are reaching an audience there that we don’t really reach on TV,” Ostrow said.

“Streaming and cable cord cutting is a real problem for local broadcasters,” said Chavern. “The question is, how do you expose your brand to young people who don’t have cable packages? … Having shareable social media-friendly news pieces that carry the local broadcast brand and exposes that brand to young people is really smart.”

While Crooked has dipped its toes into non-political and news waters before — a show called “Keep It,” which focuses on entertainment and cultural news, has been live since 2017 — it plans to diversify further away from politics and national affairs this year, looking to build momentum it started last year with new shows including “Hall of Shame,” about sports, “Unholier Than Thou,” a show about a search for spirituality, and “Wind of Change,” a show about rumors that the Scorpions’ hit of the same name was secretly produced by the CIA; it co-produced the latter show with Pineapple Street Media and Spotify.

Some of the new shows had been in the pipes for a while. In the fall of 2019, Crooked had plans to launch 15 new shows over the next two years. But some of what’s planned is new, brought on by new hires such as Jason Concepcion, an Emmy-winning producer who came over from the Ringer.

“Trump was incredibly narrowing,” said Tanya Somanader, Crooked Media’s chief content officer. “It was like, ‘We can’t talk about anything else!’ for four years. Now that he’s finally gone there’s an opportunity to explore and investigate a lot more of what’s going on under the hood.”

“When people say, ‘political,’ they mean [Washington] D.C.,” Somanader added. “But every industry has its own politics. When I say ‘political,’ it’s more like, ‘How do systems work, who has the power, and is this a fair way to look at what’s going on in this particular area?’”

As all-consuming as Trump’s presidency felt at times, it was good for news media companies. The so-called Trump bump boosted subscriptions as well as traffic (though a lot of content about Trump himself was tough to monetize) so much that publishers began to fret about what would happen to their traffic once his presidency came to an end.

So far, podcasters have yet to see a Biden slide, though many, including Crooked, had to reckon last year with an at least momentary drop in downloads, as audiences across the country figured out where to fit listening back into daily routines that had been disrupted by coronavirus restrictions. Even with that dip, Crooked managed to grow downloads across its network 35% in 2020, a spokesperson said.

That spokesperson did not share yearly download figures, saying only that Crooked’s shows have received 1.4 billion downloads since the company launched in 2017. Crooked told Digiday in late 2019 that it had accumulated almost 900 million downloads since its inception.

“Overall, we have seen news and politics pods hold their place in the charts post-election and post-inauguration,” said Dave Zohrob, the founder and CEO of Chartable, a podcast analytics service.

Even with that stability, the cultural climate Crooked operates in now is markedly different from what it was even a couple of years ago. Conversations about racial, economic and social inequality are much more visible, much more heated and much more diffuse today, giving the company more license to expand into different categories.

“There’s no way to separate sports and pop culture from some of the political movements we’ve seen stirring,” Concepcion said.

While Crooked’s strong politics haven’t made them radioactive to buyers – “Crooked Media is as brand-safe as it gets,” said Glenn Rubenstein, the CEO of podcast media agency Adopter Media — any podcaster focused on news and politics is naturally cutting themselves off from certain kind of risk-averse advertiser.

That aversion is likely to persist, no matter who occupies the White House, said Hilary Ross, vp of podcast media at Veritone One. “I do not foresee that changing,” Ross said.

“In 2020, marketers were wary of the stability of TikTok,” said Madelyn Lydon, associate director, public relations and social media at OH Partners. “It seemed like a big risk to invest dollars without knowing the future of the app. However, we’ve seen users are spending more time on TikTok than Facebook, and it is crucial for marketers to provide those users with content. Otherwise, they risk getting left behind.” 

Without the perceived risk, the overall perception of TikTok has shifted dramatically over the last 12 months, and in doing so shaped marketers’ sentiments, according to marketers and media buyers. This year, TikTok seems to be a “social partner that clients ask for, versus us having to push to get ‘test budgets’ in 2019 and 2020,” explained Carrie Dino, head of media for Mekanism. 

“Brands have shifted from viewing them as that fun/experimental platform to one of the big players,” said Brendan Gahan, partner and chief social officer at Mekanism. “As a result, we’ve been doing a lot of planning around ongoing content strategies. Clients are investing (or considering investing) in creating a community versus just doing one off activations like branded hashtag challenges or influencer partnerships.”

However, TikTok has yet to become a “staple like Instagram and Facebook, but the momentum is there,” added Gahan. “You can see how it could happen soon.”

While media spend on TikTok varies by brands, buyers say its still a minimal portion of the budget allocated to social platforms. Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing agency Digishop Girl, said that direct-to-consumer brands she works with now allocate roughly 5% of the social budget toward the app versus roughly 75% toward Facebook and Instagram.

TikTok’s investment to make ads more shoppable and push further into e-commerce has the potential to help the app become more of a priority in ad budgets, according to buyers. Constantine said that new e-commerce-focus ad units have clients eyeing the platform more and more.

“If they continue enhancing advertising platform at the same rate as last 12 months then TikTok has a strong place at the table to be 20% of the mix,” said Constantine, adding that currently it represents roughly 5% of the media mix. “That’s especially true for brands that are going after younger consumers.” 

Buyers expect marketers to continue to spend more on the platform this year, particularly as advertisers look to diversify their media mix due to an overreliance on Facebook and Instagram when it comes to social channels.

That said, as the platform continues to gain ground, buyers say advertisers will have to invest in creating content specific for TikTok’s highly engaged audience, who is not as apt to interact with material that’s not native to the app experience. Even so, buyers expect brands to continue to lean into TikTok as the burgeoning app, which AppAnnie expects to hit 1.2 billion monthly active users this year, is where consumers are spending more time.

“TikTok is the new beauty haul, a more dynamic unboxing opportunity, the virtual makeup counter or live runway, and it puts the tools in the hands of its users,” said Jess Richards, evp managing director, commerce at Havas Media. “Brands can gain a lot by finding ways to enable this experience in a meaningful, authentic way.”

And while these consistently viral videos are not known for their high-end production values, acting or even particularly good tips, the bright colors and over-the-top antics most importantly drives views.

TheSoul Publishing, which owns 5-Minute Crafts, the viral video brand responsible for these life hack videos, turned the made-for-social content into a revenue driver, posting a 45% increase in 2020 over 2019, said Victor Potrel, the company’s vp of platform partnerships. That’s in large part due to the fact that its business model resembles a media company in 2016 that just made the pivot to video.

The largest source of revenue for the company, according to Potrel, is from publisher platform solutions that Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and others offer. The services include selling ad inventory in the form of pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll ads around content while taking a portion of the earnings in a revenue share model. And the publisher’s Facebook and YouTube posts are riddled with ads. He would not disclose the exact revenue earned or how much these partnerships contribute to the publisher’s overall revenue breakdown.

Creator and publisher earnings from social media platform services can run the gamut depending on number of videos published and the subsequent number of views accrued. But Nick Cicero, the vp of strategy at streaming and social intelligence company Conviva, said one individual creator client, who he declined to name, is currently earning $35,000 per month on Facebook through its pre-, mid- and post-roll ads alone.

Cumulatively, TheSoul has huge followings on Facebook and YouTube, with a growing presence on other social platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok.

This month, the publisher’s largest brand, 5-Minute Crafts surpassed 100 million followers on Facebook and earned 24 billion views on Facebook videos in 2020, according to CrowdTangle. Potrel added that the number of followers on Facebook increased by 90% in the first six months of 2020 over the same period in 2019. 

On YouTube, the brand as more than 70 million followers, making it the fifth most-subscribed channel on the video platform. It has earned over 8.3 million followers on the newest platform it’s entered, TikTok, and has more than 130 million likes on its content there.

In addition to 5-Minute Crafts, TheSoul also owns Bright Side, 7-Second Riddles, 123 Go!, Avocado Couple, Frankenfood, Slick Slime Sam and Doodland, all of which follow a similar content strategy. All of TheSoul’s brands stick to light and positive content, according to Potrel, which helped provide an escapist outlet during the doom and gloom of 2020.

This is benefitting the company now for two reasons, according to Cicero: Brands want to be next to feel-good content for a change, and with Facebook changing its algorithm to not promote political content, community-driven, lifestyle content is going to have a moment of growth.

During the onset of the pandemic when people were primarily staying at home, marketers that were still spending their media budgets were pulling revenue out of out-of-home campaigns and other areas and placing it directly into social media advertising to take advantage of the captive audience spending a lot of time in front of screens, Cicero said.

TheSoul is also looking to diversify its revenue stream and grow direct-sold advertising to tap more of the marketers that are interested in branded social content, Potrel said. He added that December was a record month for the number of partnerships that the company has signed, but declined to share the exact number.

“You have to be passively monetizing through mid-roll and pre-roll and get [revenue shares from the platforms] but having a strategy to sell your [social] knowledge to other brands” is also important, Cicero said.

Beyond that, Potrel said the company is hoping to add a paid membership model and merchandise to reach super fans, as well as launch a CTV network as early as this year.

Driven by the forthcoming direct listing of Roblox, plus the juggernaut success of Animal Crossing and Fortnite, marketing services are setting their sights on gaming — a new and arguably belated recognition of the power that gaming communities can hold for brands of all stripes. Companies with direct ties to gaming, like headphone makers, are of course no strangers to the space, but many other brands have avoided marketing to gaming communities. Yet the rise of these agencies suggests that brands are finally eager to break into platforms like Twitch and into virtual, in-game universes in games like Fortnite.

One entrant, LiveCraft, a new branch of the marketing agency Podean, is focused on connecting brands with different axes of the live-stream shopping ecosystem — Twitch, Amazon Live, Instagram Live and so on —with a special eye toward gamers. Twofivesix, another agency, has worked with the likes of Warby Parker. New ad-tech companies like Bloxbiz are also popping up, while more established PR firms, like FleishmanHillard, have talked about focusing more on gaming.

Mark Power, the CEO of Podean, said that LiveCraft’s big bet is on gaming. Not only is Twitch, an Amazon-owned platform dominated by gamers, one of the most important live-streaming companies around, but he also said that LiveCraft will be pursuing “immersive shopping” opportunities in the near future. “What platform or what ecosystem out there is best placed to make that a reality? It’s gaming,” he said. Power recently set up a partnership between Elf Cosmetics and Twitch streamer LoserFruit, who used Elf products to recreate her Fortnite look, and he is also working on building out a branded world within Fortnite.

According to Jamin Warren, founder of the strategic consultancy Twofivesix, that shift has come more on the brand side than on the gaming side. Gaming’s massive reach is nothing new, and for years video game revenues have dwarfed even film and TV earnings. The difference now, Warren said, is that today “there definitely are more common touchpoints even for people who don’t play games.” Fortnite, Animal Crossing, Roblox and Among Us have swept mainstream culture to the point where even non-gamers know them well — reaching a kind of mainstream success rarely seen before.

Gaming itself is also on the rise — and its core audience has become both broader and more dedicated than before. According to a July 2020 NPD Group study published, 32 million more people played video games in 2020 than in 2018, and the average amount of time spent on gaming jumped from 12 to 14 hours per week. To many brands, the demographic of “gamer” no longer feels so niche.

Warren first began thinking about how brands and gamers overlap in 2011, when he started a gaming-focused media company called Kill Screen. To earn money, he worked with companies to create branded content for his site. He quickly realized that there was a bigger opportunity on the brand side. In 2017, he launched Twofivesix, which aims to help companies find their place in the gaming ecosystem. “It was pretty clear that even though gaming was [and] continues to be a really big deal, brands really struggled to see themselves in that space,” he said.

The problem that Warren has most often run into is that brands often show up with a limited understanding of what will work in the video game ecosystem. “What’s more common and what I see is that people pick something really big,” he said. He pointed to a branded Animal Crossing island as an example of the first thing many companies end up pitching. This is in part because those types of campaigns have tended to attract the most media attention. But a branded island — and other, similar approaches — is both time consuming to engineer and often limited in reach, said. Although it varies depending on the client, Twofivesix tends to focus much more on connecting brands to online gaming communities on Twitch, Reddit and elsewhere.

Other marketing companies are testing the gaming waters, too. A company called Bloxbiz is launching in the coming months as a Roblox-focused ad agency. Bloxbiz will start out by placing billboards or posters within Roblox games, with plans to share ad revenue with the developers behind each game. “The opportunity for brands is everything from product placement, to skins/characters, to themed parts of games, to full branded games,” Sam Drozdov, the company’s CEO, said in a message to Modern Retail. (In-game advertising isn’t a totally new idea — one company, Bidstack, has been offering that service since 2015.) Meanwhile, a research firm called Dubit recently began building branded Roblox games. And rather than work with retailers, some games are creating their own white-label lines for themselves, as Design Home did last year.

Not all of these approaches are likely to work, and Warren said that the brands poised to be the most successful are the ones that think hard about what specific slice of the gaming audience they want to reach. “It needs to be authentic,” he said.

But something in the ecosystem appears to have changed. For years, brands and agencies were caught in a self-defeating cycle, where agencies didn’t pitch gaming ideas to brands because they assumed brands didn’t know what to do with them. This year, said Power, more of his clients have expressed increasing interest in gaming. “You need a forward-thinking, high-risk-profile CMO slash brand who is the challenger, who is ready to take some risks,” he said.

Instead, managers are leaning into trust and empathy when it comes to supporting their staff. “This notion of actually caring is truly a commercial issue,” said Anne Erni, Chief People Officer at Audible. “Your people will give it their best when they know a company is there as a safety net to support them through these really difficult times.”

A major part of this renewed focus is that employers are placing a greater priority on empowering women and BIPOC workers to find success without having to compromise things like family life — in this new normal, firms like Verizon and Google are working toward fostering an equitable environment where employees can bring their authentic, whole selves to work without fear.

People over profit

Steve Hyde, CEO of 360xec, talked about the coronavirus crisis exposing companies who had “camouflaged” stodgy, legacy-based leadership structures. If the pandemic was a catalyst for change, the year ahead will be a stern test of whether companies have done enough to break the obsession with margins that tends to dominate c-suite culture in favor of a more people-centric approach that centers humanity within the workplace.

So what kind of leaders are best placed to navigate these transitions in the boardroom and across their businesses at large? “I think largely it’s applied common sense and absolute conviction,” Hyde said. But his top tip, via an encounter several decades ago with The Beatles’ legendary producer, George Martin? Seek out good advice. “I think the thing that for me makes leaders stand out is they don’t prevaricate, they take advice,” said Hyde.

Over at Audible, we heard head of Talent Ara Tucker and chief people officer Anne Erni flag a leader’s capacity to express vulnerability as a key strength. “We believe that leaders should be accessible and also vulnerable,” Tucker said. “We do our best to listen first, to understand without judgment. We want people to feel safe sharing exactly who they are and where they are and what they need to get to the place we need them to be. And I think that empathy and compassion are how you actually build trust.”

Flexibility first

Many leaders won’t be asking their teams to return to the office anytime soon. Speakers from organizations as different as UNICEF and Audible said work from home will continue until at least July, but basically will remain the default until they determine its safe to go back to the office. Even then, both said they’ll be implementing a hybrid model.

Shelley Diamond, CMO at UNICEF USA, said leaders need to ask themselves how to adapt the physical office space to fit the new way of working. “Do we need all these offices?” Diamond said. “We’re going to have half the number of people. Do we change the way we work as an organization and create space around that? Those are the conversations we’re having now.”

Erni said Audible is developing a “work from hub, work from home” model. Employees will be expected to live within commuting distance of the office, but may only actually go in every week or two. Even then, working from the “hub” will be determined by use cases where the task benefits from in-person collaboration. “It’ll be cross functional brainstorms, certain team meetings and projects, new hire orientation, mentoring interns and engaging in some of our ‘Activate Caring’ opportunities,” Erni said.

More than a healthy workplace

Flexibility extends beyond the boundaries of the physical work environment. Many of the leaders we heard from said new modes of work must be built around an insistence on the kind of flexibility and allowances companies have granted employees during the pandemic. Getaway founder and CEO Jon Staff said that starts with an acknowledgment that while work matters, it can’t be the core of a person’s identity.

“I don’t want to diminish the importance of having a healthy workplace and having a good job in your life, but we need stuff outside of work, be it our partners or friends or faith or volunteer activities,” Staff said. “You’ve got to have a support system, and work can be one of the supports, but it can’t be all of the support.”

This is particularly important when it comes to female workers and leaders. Shruti Jain of Google and Samantha Hammock, vp of Talent at Verizon, both said the effects of the pandemic could roll back years of progress. Many women have left the workplace under the duress of balancing professional and personal responsibilities, including not only childcare and other caregiving, but in many cases also managing schooling or virtual learning. As a mother, Jain herself said she had contemplated walking away several times through the pandemic.

“How do we empower women empowering other women?” said Hammock. “Showing those behaviors and practices and how we bring those along is going to be really important so that we continue to engage in this workforce.”

Overheard

“They know the customer better than anybody else in the company. If the company stops listening to the CMO because the CMO isn’t represented, are they truly listening to the customer?” — Steve Hyde, CEO, 360xec

Many organizations have not yet replaced CMO roles cut at the onset of the pandemic, or these roles have been merged with other positions and watered down as a result. Steve Hyde talked about the humanizing and balancing influence CMOs often have within the c-suite, but also their centrality as amplifiers of consumer sentiment. Leaders who fail to appreciate the contribution CMOs play may rue the oversight further down the line.

“I really hope just sitting in an office, in a cubicle with your headphones in, sending emails and Slacks, is not a thing we’re going to require people to do again. I hope that genie doesn’t go back in the bottle.” — Jon Staff, Founder and CEO of Getaway

“Even with a vaccine, many folks on our team — critical people on our team — won’t return to the New York area, and we will continue to have a portion of our workforce that will be 100 percent remote.” — Shelley Diamond, CMO, UNICEF USA

“Both sides have to evolve. Women need to get more confident asking for the compensation they feel they deserve, and then organizations need to find a way to make sure that there is equity in compensation, as well as in the benefits we create for women.” — Shruti Jain, Director of Global Acquisitions and Diversity Council Lead at Google

WTF

Diagonal thinker

For decades, we’ve thought of lateral thinking and linear thinking as being mutually exclusive, and applied these terms as such to characterize different types of personalities in the workplace. But in recent years, the term “diagonal thinking” has been popularized to describe the type of mindset — equal parts practical and analytical, imaginative and abstract — that often underpins success in creative industries. The term has its roots in the ad industry, but the concept applies equally to creative roles in tech and marketing firms. 360xec’s Hyde said these individuals fit the profile for the kinds of leaders organizations will need to steer them through this period of transition and holistic change.

Stats to know

• Black women make 66 cents for every dollar earned by non-Hispanic white men — Shruti Jain, Director of Global Acquisitions and Diversity Council Lead at Google, highlighted this data point from a study carried out by the Economic Policy Institute

Breaking it down: The work of dismantling barriers to people of color, women and other under-represented groups in tech, media and marketing continues, but at a frustratingly slow pace. As the Diversity Council Lead at Google, Director of Global Acquisitions Shruti Jain said one issue is that companies have to make sure the people working on DEI are actually representative of the workforce and understand the challenges colleagues face.

In particular, Jain said that across many industries, programs intended to advance the position of women in workplaces are often lacking when it comes to diversity. “Where are the Black woman in the conversation? A lot of a lot of the conversation around women often excludes Black women,” she said. 

• 768 million vacation days went unused by American workers in 2019, according to data from the U.S. Travel Association, Oxford Economic Research and Ipsos.