Month: May 2021

“[TikTok] is definitely great testing grounds,” Pace said at Digiday U’s event on May 12 that explored how brands found enough success in experimental channels to make it part of their permanent strategies.

Flighthouse’s Mission: create popular content on TikTok

Pace’s experience working at an ad agency kept him in the know of what was happening on Musical.ly, a lip-sync video service that later merged with TikTok. He then acquired a company that caught his eye, called Flighthouse. Within a year, the company grew to about 15 million followers on TikTok, at which time it began rolling out original content.

Now, the company has grown to more than 27 million followers on TikTok as it specializes in what Pace calls “short-form game shows” featuring stunts where guests finish the lyrics of a song or guess what the other person is dancing to, based on popular TikTok dances.

“It’s one of those apps where there’s something for everyone,” Pace said.

“A lot of it was experimentation,” Pace said, adding that the company tried out “four or five different formats” before landing on the style of video the company now realizes is successful among its fans — a minimum of two people in front of a colored backdrop playing short games.

Short-form comedy skits and scripted shows were left on the cutting room floor, Pace said. “Like with anyone, it’s a process of creativity and experimentation,” he added.

Pace called TikTok  “good testing grounds” for experiments because it’s “low pressure” enough (because not all content will necessarily be pushed to every follower) which makes it “less intimidating” than a competitor like, say, YouTube, Pace said.

“As brands start to find success on the platform, it’s a good opportunity to recognize that little bit of success and potentially ramp it up if anything particular works,” Pace said.

Pace watches how views perform across content on TikTok, as well as engagement on the videos themselves. But brands should keep in mind what exact KPIs they would like to see out of a campaign.

“With marketers and TikTok, before saying ‘oh I’m too old for TikTok’ just spend some time on the app,” Pace said. “It’s not that hard of a platform to navigate.”

Put a (flexible) plan in place. All while spending time on the app, experimenting with it — and caring enough to follow up when there are successes and failures, Pace said.

Flighthouse managed to grow its TikTok following by more than 10 million after it established a strategy to “become the BuzzFeed of TikTok.”

“Anybody could have thought of that idea,” Pace quipped. The company maintained mostly an organic growth strategy, but Pace said he could see paid being an opportunity, especially when it comes to the DTC space — particularly to track conversions.

“You want to be careful with paid,” Pace said, adding that he recognized it had its role, especially in A/B testing. “I’ve seen brands go by the wayside, get flamed on the internet because they use too much paid.”

Marketing departments should also think thoughtfully about their teams. A marketer that is “rocking solo” and looking to learn how to use TikTok or YouTube, Pace suggests you “put yourself out there, make an effort.” Conversely, a marketer who is running a team and does have access to additional resources, “pluck someone out of college.” “There are so many ambitious kids out there that are down to help,” Pace said.

Experiment as much as you can. “There’s no secret sauce when it comes to TikTok, literally,” Pace said. “Anything can potentially work.”

Keep in mind a diversified strategy — especially as competing platforms roll out similar features as one another. “Be on multiple platforms,” Pace said.

That being said, Flighthouse is “still bullish on TikTok.” “It’s one of the best platforms for what it does,” Pace said. “In general, we’re looking to create more content, better content, diversify the platforms we’re on. The goals are multi-pronged.”

“It has always been our job to be equal parts coach, mentor, enforcer, therapist, manager, expert and sometimes, lawyer,” said Jamie Coakley, vp of people at the New York-based IT firm Electric. But amid the COVID-19 crisis, she added, “I felt some days that I could go work for FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency], maybe a crisis organization, or go into the medical field as a next step with how quickly things escalated. Some days I was an amateur nurse documenting employee symptoms, other days I was just a helpful ear.” 

As its role is to be directly responsible for employees and employee-related issues, the HR job is inherently challenging. Dealing with individuals and their unique needs, all the while managing the execution of company and government policies, often means bridging a gap between what a person needs and what the organization can do. But making employees feel safe has been uncharted territory. “My job really pushed the boundaries of providing some level of physical and mental health care for employees,” Coakley said.

Last March, when the media started to warn of an impending public health crisis, consumers were bombarded with misinformation, leading to widespread feelings of stress and anxiety. Coakley’s firm swiftly communicated to its employees that their health and safety were the company’s first priority. It made weekly updates and check-ins a priority, and accommodated flexible hours around childcare needs. “We have continued to take the stance that if an issue in the outside world is affecting our employees, then it is an employee issue and we need to be a part of the solution,” Coakley added.

She believes the role of HR has changed forever with the pandemic. “In the coming years, we will continue to see HR in the most progressive organizations prioritize the personal health, mental health and general well-being of their teams,” she said. “There will be increased awareness around mental health, therapy, childcare and time-off policies in months to come. And for years to come, I believe we will see healthcare provided onsite and access to medical care for all workers.”

Kim Nguyen, director of people operations at the New York-based fintech firm Alloy, noted that HR professionals have not been immune from the difficulties all employees in an organization face. She found herself consistently emphasizing the need for her company’s employees to take PTO — even as she ended up taking very little herself.

While HR people have been in charge of figuring out how to maintain any sense of workplace normalcy and employee wellness, she observed, no one has really been checking in on them.

Noting her involvement with organizations of HR professionals during the pandemic, Nguyen said, “You could really see people getting tired, burned out, drained of energy and enthusiasm. It went from ‘We can do this!’ in the beginning to ‘You know what? I need to take a little pause for myself here.’”

To take better care of herself meant re-evaluating her own day-to-day schedule. She now has blocks on her calendar for personal time, drawing a clear line between work and home hours. She also noted the importance of accepting that she didn’t always have the answers — which is ultimately a positive thing. “A lot of things went out the window when COVID hit,” Nguyen said. “When you admit you don’t know all the answers, you can drop the ego, and seek out others to be more innovative and thoughtful with solutions.”

It is also essential that HR people ask for help themselves when they need it, she added.

Nguyen’s firm has employed policies to aid employees during the pandemic including free therapy sessions and regular messages to the staff from the CEO. It also regularly reviews PTO for all its teams, and if it notices someone is not taking enough time off, they get nudged. It is also important for companies to adjust perspective and shift away from goals that are set in stone – keeping empathy top of mind and setting expectations around realistic objectives instead. 

Also, companies and their employees must not hesitate to shake up their routines. Nguyen noted that on a recent morning, she realized she hadn’t been out of the office for four straight days. So she proposed to her boss that they do their weekly one-on-one meeting that afternoon in a nearby park instead of over a Zoom call. 

Kristi Roe, head of healthcare experience at Medallia, a global customer and employee experience company based in San Francisco whose clients include Mercedes-Benz, Sephora and Samsung, observed that HR officers have gone from the shadows to front and center during the pandemic. 

“There became this sense of urgency in regard to remote work — how were we going to keep people safe, help them take care of their families?” she said. In the early days of the crisis Roe became somewhat of a “childcare guru,” helping employees with their family needs. “People in HR worked tirelessly. We worked weekends. So much landed on our plates,” she added. Being at the center of this new work arrangement meant lots of flexibility and communication. Now HR is transitioning from running as fast as it can to “going deep. It’s not a race anymore. It’s about getting it right.” 

Typically, most employees don’t regularly interact with HR. But that has now changed dramatically as they’ve had to become adept at communicating with, and listening to, employees, added Roe.

Mental health continues to be a priority, and something HR reps have had to learn fast. Paying attention to the wellness of employees is tied directly to employee goodwill and retention. “If we are your employer, you are expecting us to do more in the way of mental health,” Roe said. “What programs do we offer? What is our benefits structure? Do we have a culture that supports well-being? It’s an opportunity for HR to become transformative.” 

Now that the focus is on bringing people back into the physical office, “employees see the role HR plays in their lives,” she said. “There’s an incredible opportunity for HR to lean into that.”

3 Questions with Jon Schleuss, president of the Newsguild

What’s the biggest variable your shops are dealing with around returning to an office?
Safety is at the very top. You can look at different employers — we have probably 200 different news media employers — and if the workers are vaccinated, and the vaccines do appear to be working, then I think there’s a personal choice to do more work. We’re trying to find ways to prioritize the health and safety of people like photographers, who have to go into spaces like hospitals. In the actual physical newsrooms themselves, it’s making sure people are adequately spaced and that the ventilation systems are improved. The biggest thing for our people is making sure they do really effective surveys of people. The local union we have in L.A. did a survey of members there and found that only 2% wanted to come back to the office five days a week. A big part of that is the traffic in L.A., and the office being in El Segundo, but people have saved time and that’s allowed them to do more of their jobs. 

Do you think that in the future, newsrooms will be more distributed?
I definitely do. People, for most of the last year, have worked remotely. They’ve gotten pretty comfortable with that. At the same time the company needs to ensure their health and safety. Companies need to provide ergonomic chairs and desks so they can do their jobs. There are far too many people who are hunched over a laptop at their dining table.  

Do you think that the pendulum now begins to swing back toward what we knew in early 2020?
I was one of those people who thought things would be better by the summer. I moved to D.C. to do this job, and then three months later we shut down the union offices. I’ve worked from home pretty much ever since. It does seem like the vast majority of employers are looking to return to work in limited capacity this year. This comes back to what’s the most effective thing for journalists looking to do their jobs. They could be working from home. If it makes them a better journalist and it gives them time have a life outside of their job, that’s a good thing. Journalists are bad about having lives. We need to think about how and when we work from home, there are things in place that make it possible to turn off Slack or put your phone on airplane mode when you take a day off. — Max Willens

By the numbers

• 54% of 2,400 knowledge workers surveyed in January said that fatigue from being overworked during the pandemic will effect their intent to stay at their current company.
  [Source of data: Gartner’s 2021 Hybrid Work Employee Survey.]

• 48% of 1,004 remote workers surveyed said they have had been the target of a phishing/cybersecurity attack at least once. Over 40% of these remote employees experienced data breaches as a result.
  [Source of data: VPN Overview’s Cybersecurity Report.]

• Data from a survey of 2,000 tech employees showed black and hispanic women continue to see the widest wage gap: 59% of the time, men were offered higher salaries than women for the same job title at the same company in 2020, compared to 65% in 2019.
  [Source of data: Hired’s 2021 Impact Report – Wage Inequality in the Workplace.]

What else we’ve covered

• The trials of the last year have left a deep imprint on many and as such, the prospect of returning to the office is causing a wide spectrum of feelings from excitement and relief, to stress, fear and anxiety, according to Digiday Research.
• Fashion brands in the U.S. are working hard to reopen stores, they’ve been slower to move their employees back into offices. But, now that vaccinations are becoming widespread some are looking to reinvest in office space.
• In some countries, like the U.K., governments have introduced shared parental leave policies, as a way to help balance gender equality. But uptake remains very low, leading to demands for an overhaul. Ad agencies in particular want to push to establish more effective policies that encourage more men to take SPL.

This newsletter is edited by Jessica Davies, managing editor, Future of Work.

The following conversation has been edited for clarity and space.

How are Wavemaker and Mindshare similar and different?

At both Wavemaker and Mindshare, ultimately it’s all about the team, a team that’s committed to driving transformation through different lenses, and doing so in partnership with our clients. At Wavemaker, that transformation was taking two agencies [MEC and Maxus], and from that creating a culture, defining the new capabilities for the future and then delivering on that by year three for current clients, as well as winning business.

Mindshare is at a different point in both scale and connectedness across a number of businesses, which creates some complexity but also so much opportunity when we think of the transformation of our organization. We want to better connect the U.S. and Canada. We want to drive the transformation around our capabilities and the work that we’ve done, in the space we call “Precisely Human.” It marries both rational and emotional data to help drive our clients’ business growth.

Where specifically are you focusing?

Clearly, commerce is front and center for every client’s business and for new opportunities in the DTC client space. We are shifting from not only having deep retail media expertise, which we have in our Shop-Plus team (something we’ve built since 2015, so it’s got maturity and scale) but also more deeply integrating that into our strategies in how we’re taking on full-funnel approaches for our clients.

Is there a mission to share learnings across GroupM?

It’s less about centralization — that’s not the goal here. It’s more about deeper collaboration and each agency having a distinction in our brand and capabilities. It’s also an opportunity to collaborate more deeply on the biggest challenges of the industry. We see that come to life with Mindshare’s commitment to intentional media and to being very proactive when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion. Even developing products like our Black PMP, and PMPs rolling across a number of communities.

That’s something that other clients can benefit from across the GroupM portfolio. We’re looking to not only increase our percentage of investment against minority businesses, but also think about diverse voices in communities and how we can accelerate that across clients. It’s a requirement for our clients to grow their business, to lean into broader audiences and be more relevant to specific communities. That requires a different approach to media — one powered more by data and insights, as well as a different approach to messaging that understands context and culture. Because our clients’ businesses won’t grow without it. 

How will data inform what you do for clients? 

The shift that’s been happening in our environment has put a spotlight on the need for clients to own their first-party data. That’s our position: the client should own that first-party data [as well as] the relationships they have with data and technology partnerships. Our role is to enhance that data, scale the data further and ensure that the insights can be gleaned from those experiences and reapplied to more empathetic, relevant “precisely human” marketing.

There’s a shift in thinking, not only at Mindshare but across the industry as well, of more of a hypothesis-led mindset. How do we continue to put a hypothesis out there, then quickly test it, learn, reapply, and then move onto the next opportunity? We see that mindset as part of a performance culture as well, where we don’t talk about performance as just about biddable media and optimizing there, but thinking about a test-and-learn mindset where we’re always innovating, always bringing those learnings into the next opportunity. And doing that with more agility and speed than in the past.

What keeps you up at night?

My biggest worry is we will not take advantage of this moment to drive change further and faster. Whether that’s change related to diversity and taking the impact we can make in media to impact society. Or whether it’s at the client level of not changing fast enough not only into new channels but new ways to connect with consumers with a long-term view versus a short-term sales lens. Or as an agency not changing fast enough to build more consultative capabilities that our clients need for their best future. We need to move faster than consumers.

Color by numbers

MMA Global, an industry organization that helps marketers solve their digital challenges, last week released its latest Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) study, looking at its impact on media spend and ROI. The verdict? Many of the 267 respondents say they continue to face data-related challenges to further adoption. Standout stats include:

• 81 percent of marketing organizations currently use MTA or plan to do so in the future. But less than half (46 percent) of marketers believe MTA is still the future of attribution, while 21 percent of respondents say MTA is unrealistic given the realities of advertising 
• More than a third of companies (36 percent) that are in the process of implementing MTA have unsuccessfully attempted to do so previously 
• 54 percent of MTA users still don’t have a clear sense of ROI
• 43 percent of MTA users say they don’t use MTA to assess their total media spend because of the lack of individual level data available for traditional media;
• Among non-MTA users, a lack of evidence regarding MTA’s value jumped from 20 percent to 29 percent as a key reason they don’t use it.

Takeoff & landing

• Dentsu lost two executives last week: Jared Belsky, CEO of digital-first agency 360i, is leaving after 13 years at the company, but didn’t indicate his next job. And Coleen Kuehn, executive vp of the travel, media and entertainment practice at Merkle, has moved to Horizon Media, where she will be executive vp, chief business solutions officer.
• Two agency holding companies landed big deals last week: IPG rolled up all of healthcare company Cigna’s business, with Initiative, Kinesso and Acxiom picking up media and data-related duties. And Omnicom consolidated all of electronics maker Philips’ business, with OMD handling media.
• At its annual conference last week, the Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) released its first guide to buying digital OOH video, which includes info on different ad formats, audience segmentation, location-enhancing content, measurement and attribution data, along with case studies from McDonald’s and Turner Sports.

Direct quote

“For many advertisers that are big linear spenders, this year this upfront year is going to look different and that we really need to embrace different video channels and different means because consumers’ behaviors are changing … We’re seeing new partners emerge. We’re seeing reach in different places and spaces, and it’s becoming far more competitive. It’s also becoming more competitive for where you can reach your consumers within ad-supported environments.”

— Beth Weeks, vp and group director, media at Digitas, discussing with Beet.TV the shift by consumers toward CTV/streaming, and the need for advertisers to shift accordingly.

Speed reading

• Digiday senior editor of research and features Max Willens reports on the rise of contextual advertising in the rapidly expanding CTV and OTT space.
• In his Future of TV briefing, Digiday senior media editor Tim Peterson details how the IAB is working to add more flexibility for buyers of digital advertising, video in particular, in future marketplaces.
• And in his Media Briefing, Peterson details how many media companies’ DE&I efforts on behalf of BIPOC are perceived by some as relatively empty gestures.

Smith Hatmaker founded the agency five years ago after feeling othered as a queer woman working in Silicon Valley. Since then, the agency has grown to include social media and influencer marketing services, as well a pro-bono program for Black and brown businesses. Digiday caught up with Smith Hatmaker to talk about intersectionality in DE&I, diversity (or the lack thereof) in public relations and how the industry should be thinking about change.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

You say Rebellious PR is the most diverse agency in Portland, Oregon. What does that mean? And what pushed you to found it?

I came out of Silicon Valley, where I had worked for about 10 years. I’m gay and I frequently felt really othered in most rooms that I was in. Not so much with clients, but definitely with the agencies I was at. I was the token gay person. I’d have really awkward conversations with co-workers, where they’d tell me about a second cousin removed who was gay and that was the only time they’d ever talk to me. It was really a big driver for me to initially want to leave PR altogether.

It sort of just turned into the opportunity to start [freelance] working for myself for the first time ever. Within the first year, [work] is booming. My little freelance projects, experiments before I get my next real job, is all of a sudden an agency. Five years later, we’re a million dollar business and have almost 20 full time employees. 

It wasn’t like I want to work with a bunch of queer people because that’s my community. It was like I want to work with everybody who has ever felt othered at other PR agencies. We describe ourselves as a band of misfits. But we’re kind of the secret sauce for most of our clients. The reason they’re out there in the world is because they’ve got people from all different backgrounds and ages and geographies and races and sexual orientation, telling their stories in this way that is relatable to everybody.

We can make donations. We can make pledges. But really being able to offer an organization our services and superpowers to help get their word out when they can’t afford PR. That felt like this is how we can actually help. 

The events of 2020 has really forced the industry to take a hard look at DE&I efforts. How does Rebellious PR fit into that landscape?

For agencies, DE&I is their main pain point and they’re having such a hard time figuring out what initiatives they should use. The way they talked about it was mind blowing and I was like, just hire more people of color and then figure out what’s going to make them stay to retain them. It just felt like they were trying to go around the moon and do book clubs and training and all these things.

For us, we’re not having to retroactively look at ourselves, and we were so DE&I aware before people were using DE&I as a common term. For us, I was very aware of PR being a really white industry and not interested in that, [instead] building in diversity at every single level. We definitely have a lot of white, queer employees, but I think it’s really as simple as being really aware of your pool of candidates that you’re bringing in.

Even if a company is hiring more diverse candidates, they don’t think about the retention factor. I think the retention factor is what they should actually be concerned about, and figure out ways to build community within the organization. 

Your client list — at more than 40 clients currently — has doubled since this time last year. What do you attribute that growth to?

Last year, a lot of people were cutting services, having to streamline budgets for Covid and so much uncertainty. We saw some of that in March and April of last year when [it] was looking pretty dire. But then we started seeing this turnaround where people wanted better partners but really needed help to tell a 2020 story. How do we get into the news cycle when there’s a presidential election, a pandemic and a civil rights movement and we still have to sell products?

We’d tell clients people aren’t going to care about your news. They care about how your product or service is going to help people right now during this time of need. We set the boundary with the client that we know best. Success kind of attracts more success and all of a sudden, our agency doubled in size. 

When marginalized people are hired at some of these other agencies, there’s the propensity to be the token person. What are your thoughts on that?

Don’t ask me to weigh in on Pride month.