Month: June 2021

As companies migrate back to their headquarters and set up long-term hybrid work arrangements with employees, some are taking a hard line when it comes to flexible work routines.

As a not-so-subtle headline in The Guardian put it: “Goldman Sachs Boss Wants Bankers Back to Their Desks ASAP.” David Solomon, the investment banking firm’s CEO, called working from home an “aberration,” “not ideal” and “not a new normal,” as the paper reported.

Solomon isn’t alone. Morgan Stanley’s chief executive James Gorman suggested that employees who work remotely and in locations outside big cities like New York could not expect to earn New York salaries. As he was quoted as saying: “None of this, ‘I’m in Colorado … and getting paid like I’m sitting in New York City.’ Sorry, that doesn’t work.”

Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase told employees in a memo: “We would fully expect that by early July, all U.S.-based employees will be in the office on a consistent rotational schedule, also subject to our current 50% occupancy cap.” And PwC said its U.K.-based employees would transition to an arrangement where they would spend about half their time working from home, the other half in the office or at meetings with clients.

Compare those approaches to that of Deloitte, which just empowered its 20,000 U.K.-based employees to determine “when, where and how they work.” Said CEO Richard Houston: “We will let our people choose where they need to be to do their best work, in balance with their professional and personal responsibilities.”

Marc Andreessen, the tech entrepreneur, went one further, declaring in a blog post that remote work was a “permanent civilizational shift” and suggesting it is an even more important development than the internet itself.

Employers who fail to be as flexible about flex work as Houston and Andreessen may well find themselves on the wrong side of history when it comes to work trends —and, in the more immediate future, on the losing side of employee retention.

As Digiday recently reported, the “Great Resignation” is well underway, as a wave of employees not getting what they want and need from their bosses are choosing to simply walk away. The enormous market for talent now emerging is presenting unprecedented opportunities for employees seeking greener pastures — and greater expectations than ever that bosses will facilitate the working preferences of their people.

Still more workers could be poised to join the ranks of the disaffected. In a recent survey of 8,800 frontline employees, office workers and business leaders by Fuze, a Boston-based cloud communications and collaboration platform, 75% of respondents saw flexible work as a must-have, not some special benefit, with 65% saying they would consider changing jobs for greater long-term flexibility.

“Companies that truly embrace a flexible work model, which includes flexibility in terms of both the where and when people work, will have a competitive advantage in attracting, winning and retaining talent,” Lisa Walker, Workforce Futurist at Fuze. “After the experience of the past year, employees are reporting feeling more trusting, productive, and engaged towards remote work, which means they will demand it moving forward, and if they don’t get the flexibility they are looking for, they will find a company that offers it.”

Rigid hybrid work models — including mandating that employees be in the office a given number of days and taking away the power of workers to operate according to a schedule that best fits their personal and professional responsibilities — “will undermine the trust built between employees and management throughout the pandemic, and force many employees to look for new jobs,” predicted Walker, who urges management to listen to employees to determine what they want in the way of flex work.

And what workers want is a mixed bag. In its survey, Fuze found that 20% of respondents want to return to the office full-time, while another 20% would prefer to work fully remote and 60% lean toward a hybrid setup. “This fear that everyone wants to remain 100% remote is just not true,” Walker said.

For their part, marketers appear to be leaning more toward the Deloitte model than the Goldman Sachs one.

“The biggest mistake that leaders and executives crafting back-to-the-office strategies can make is approaching the issue from a top-down perspective,” said Ruth Bernstein, CEO of the agency YARD NYC, whose roster of brands includes GAP and Tanqueray. “In order to create something meaningful — something that keeps talent from looking elsewhere — the process must be employee-centric, with freedom and flexibility built into the design.”

That thinking is echoed by Christofer Peterson, svp of People & Culture at the Atlanta-based agency Dagger, which works with clients like Aflac and Boys & Girls Clubs of America and which is preparing to move to reopen its office and shift to a hybrid model this fall.

“We’re embracing work in the post-COVID world not as a transition but rather a transformation,” he said. “We’re not assuming what the team needs — we’re asking them, constantly evaluating how our operating system should evolve, rigorously gathering feedback, rolling out updates and new programs, providing support, and ultimately helping us scale for growth.”

After all, as Peterson sees it, “If we’re not taking care of our people, they’ll find a company that will.”

As lockdowns ease, ad companies are going the extra mile for summer parties 

Without the typical, expected trip to the French Riviera for Cannes Lions this month, June has felt somewhat flatter than usual. But ad agencies are refusing to drop the ball when it comes to maintaining strong culture, whether it’s in a physical or virtual setting.

Some of those businesses are revving up their summer plans after 18 months of continuously trying to reinvent new ways to keep staff engaged and connected. This month, Xaxis has (literally) gone the extra mile. To keep people connected with each other, while boosting morale, and getting people away from their desks and their endorphins pumping, the agency has kicked off a worldwide, virtual fitness challenge this month. 

The target: 71,856 km and stopping at ten of the cities Xaxis has an office in. Whether you’re a hard core marathon runner or consider exercise to be whipping a vacuum around the living room — everyone is being encouraged to join in. Each person must pick a form of exercise, whether it’s a run, a cycle ride, a swim, lifting weights, surfing, and count how many km each takes. They then add those to the total, to see how far the team can progress on the map.

Around 150 people have joined from its offices around the world, and more keep joining, according to Leanne Mackee, Xaxis’ director of marketing for EMEA, who came up with the challenge. People can take their kids with them (one Xaxis employee took her kids for a walk around LegoLand, and was able to add that to her count.) Others have watched Netflix while on indoor bikes. Then each office from the ten cities selected can create a video and add whatever virtual assets(recipes, city maps etc) they have to give people a flavor of what it’s like to live in that town. 

“The idea came in January, which was such a horrible month because of going back into lockdown and kids coming home from school,” said Mackee. “So a group of us from the London office got together to plan it and the idea of virtually traveling around the world seems to appeal to people … more are joining from outside the U.K., across our South America, Canada, the U.S., Nepal, India and other European countries.” — Seb Joseph

By the numbers

• 25% of 2,199 U.S. adults think the rise of automation will increase job opportunities in the country, up from 20% in a May 2018 poll.
  [Source of data: Morning Consult poll.]
• 100% of 423 marketers want the option to work remotely going forward; two out five want flexible hours and one in five want to have a choice in the projects on which they work and 63% of them are planning  job change this year. 
  [Source of data: We Are Rosie report.]
• 80% of 1,000 managers surveyed worry about using the wrong language when addressing issues like mental health, race, gender, and other sensitive topics.
  [Source of data: Verizon Media and Culture Co-op report.]

What else we’ve covered

• The 80,000 office workers PepsiCo employs worldwide, will never again have a traditional, 9-to-5 working week. Instead, the drinks and beverage giant has empowered its managers to determine when their teams come into the office and when they work remotely. And to make that work, they’ll need to lead by example and undergo training to prevent proximity bias creeping in, according to PepsiCo’s talent chief.
• The professional workforce, particularly millennials and Gen Z, is increasingly rejecting the concept of a full-time job and a single boss in favor of something that’s being dubbed “polywork,” or having multiple jobs at once.
• As more firms transition from remote working to a long-term hybrid setup, bosses are exploring the next wave of tech options for getting down to business. And scores of tech platforms are rolling out tools that meet these new requirements.

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

The main reason Viacom/CBS outpaced rivals NBC Universal, Fox and Disney in CPM increases is that buyers couldn’t place all the dollars their clients asked them to secure on those other networks — putting Viacom/CBS in the position of getting what its sales folk asked for. Possibly at the expense of relationships with the buying side.

“You might say, that is good [for CBS] due to supply constraints in linear, but you don’t know how their stance impacted their digital dollars and future relationships with advertisers,” said one buyer. “I can say for us, it had and will have great impact.” 

Buyers largely acknowledged this is the most insane market they have experienced in their careers. And networks take heed: when buyers talk about impact, they mean they don’t plan to let this happen again.

“We’re starting to explore other options for 2022,” said another buyer. “We can’t let this happen again.”

“I believe many clients will see the rates of change (ROC) being settled on in the upfront and will decide that they are not willing to do business in this way,” said the first buyer. “They will understand the ROI is no longer there for them and decide to either cut and/or move money to cheaper alternatives across all media types.”

That will likely start to happen in the scatter marketplace, which includes all ad inventory not sold in the upfront as well as inventory that’s been put aside for makegoods (when networks have to return either ad time or dollars back to buyers due to ratings shortfalls — one of the major contributors to limiting networks’ inventory because ratings on linear TV have fallen precipitously). Scatter starts with fourth-quarter 2021 inventory that network sales execs start selling in September.

Early forecasts suggested scatter CPMs could rise as much as 40-50 percent over upfront rates, but buyers don’t yet have a clear sense yet, much less of first, second and third quarter 2022 inventory. Fourth-quarter is complicated by the holiday selling season, which commands its own type of demand. And then first quarter of 2022 includes the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl, which also eat up ad dollars and inventory.

They do know they plan to take as hard a line as possible on pricing. Factors that could work in buyers’ favor:  

• By August, buyers will have sat with their clients to go over the upfront ad commitments they made. When clients see the sticker shock buyers expect they will experience, it is possible some of those “holds” (commitments in principle) will not translate to “orders” (actual purchasing of the inventory), leading to cancellations of some commitments. That could free up inventory to be sold in scatter, opening up supply and reducing demand.
• The networks dropped their ratings estimates for the new fall season, given ratings erosion in linear TV for the last year or more. By doing so, the networks may not need to use as much of the ad time they have put aside for makegoods, again freeing up inventory to be sold in scatter.
•  Finally, because they had to cough up such high upfront increases, buyers will be on the lookout to spend scatter dollars elsewhere when possible. “The responsible thing to do is find alternatives to scatter,” said another major buyer. “Whether it’s YouTube, cinema advertising, streaming or something else. It’s the only way we can bring back balance to the marketplace.”

“I think what [the networks] did was take advantage of a misaligned marketplace that allowed them to capitalize on the supply-and-demand dynamics that were presented to them in the linear marketplace,” said Geoff Calabrese, chief investment officer with Omnicom Media Group. “I have always believed in holistic media buying and for me, that means you can still reach your audience and get their attention through different and, more often than not, more effective investments. One really good example of this is with a partner like YouTube, who from a connected TV perspective continues to prove themselves as a true linear TV replacement … the alternatives are there. You just have to be willing to take them,” said Calabrese. “I need to continue to push forward the narrative of the viewership shift from linear and show clients why and where they can get better ROI.”

Color by numbers

Since summer 2020, ratings provider Nielsen has been tracking cross-media viewership across the TV and streaming landscape. But a threshold was crossed when Nielsen announced viewership for May 2021 in its Gauge report: streaming in aggregate attracted more eyeballs than broadcast TV. Here’s a breakdown of Nielsen’s numbers among persons 2-plus:

•             Cable:  39%
•             Streaming: 26%
•                         Other streaming: 8%
•                         Netflix: 6%
•                         YouTube: 6%
•                         Hulu: 3%
•                         Amazon Prime video: 2%
•                         Disney+: 1%
•             Broadcast TV: 25%
•            Other (VOD, gaming, DVD playback, streaming via cable set-top box, etc): 9%

Takeoff & landing

• The Association of National Advertisers last week announced a partnership with research firm Comscore to test a cross-media measurement initiative. The first of a series of tests, the Cross-Media Measurement initiative (CMM — not to be confused with CIMM, the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement) is emphasizing privacy as a driving factor in its development, with the creation of a Virtual ID for viewers across TV and digital. Testing will commence in Q4 2021 or Q1 2022 and is being overseen by ANA’s executive vp Bill Tucker.
• Havas Media Group named Ben Downing to serve as global managing director of Ethical Media and Strategic Partnerships, based in London and reporting to global chief strategy officer Greg James. Downing most recently led the rollout of HMG’s Social Equity Marketplace and served as global head of biddable.
• Mat Baxter, most recently bumped up to chairman of IPG’s Initiative after serving as its CEO for five years, was named global CEO of sibling agency Huge, replacing Raj Singhal who will take on a different role within IPG. Also at IPG, media agency UM won media AOR duties for NYC & Company, which is responsible for marketing New York City.
• Dentsu International named Damien Lemaitre its global commerce director, working with Dentsu shops Carat, iProspect and Dentsu X. He was most recently senior vp of media product and innovation for Dentsu Canada.

Direct quote

“In some sense, Google is like all of us … I’m going to give up cookies for summer… um … well not this summer… maybe in a few years. Which will eventually turn into, what!? who me? I never said I would give up cookies.”

— A tweet from Joshua Lowcock, chief digital officer, UM and chief brand safety officer, Mediabrands, reacting to Google’s delay in deprecating cookies.

Speed reading

• Digiday’s platforms, data and privacy reporter Kate Kaye had an extremely busy week last week, as she explained why Google delayed cutting off cookies till late 2023, as well as how advertisers will shift their testing of post-cookie solutions.
• Senior news editor Seb Joseph broke down how Apple’s ATT safeguard against app tracking is shifting ad spending toward Android devices.
• Senior reporter Kayleigh Barber offered up a guide to understanding Gen Z’s media consumption habits.

They put the O2 Arena inside the Fortnite game. 

For a few days last week, fans got to explore the London-based venue ahead of a virtual gig by the Island Records-signed pop band easy life. 

Before the event, fans could take part in mini-games, go on rides and hang out with friends in breakout areas across the venue. Once the event started, they got to take part in what amounted to a 20-minute interactive gig where they could visit six areas inspired by a different track from the group’s debut album “Life’s a beach.” Players who completed the entire experience unlocked an exclusive track for the game. 

Then the venue shut. 

When it came to a one-off experience like this timing was key, said Simon Valcarcel, head of brand and consumer marcomms at O2. So the decision was made to launch it on June 24 and end it on June 27. Many of the best brand tie-ins with Fortnite are limited edition, creating an urgency among players to engage. The limited nature of these integrations also gives marketers like O2 a chance to experiment with different types of integrations, getting a better sense of what success looks like and the partners that drive the deepest adoption and traction within games.

“As music to many has become a virtual on demand experience, it’s natural to see live events migrate to this format as well,” said Greg Castronuovo, chief operating officer at global marketing services network Two Nil Holdings. “Why would we limit our experiences and how we enjoy life to a carbon based world when we can extend those experiences and that joy to a digital platform where we can manifest into whatever avatar suits us? A platform like Fortnite that has a very relevant audience at scale is a savvy way for the music industry to find innovative new opportunities to extend their products (concerts) to fans.”

Even though the focus was the concert, it was important that it didn’t try to replicate a live stream of the band, said Valcarcel. The experience could be richer and more layered because O2 built it within Fortnite, he added. “It built a world within the real world where play and fantasy come to life for the people who step through those gates, said Valcarcel. It’s this suspension of normal reality for the time spent in those places that make them so memorable. The online game worlds are similar,” said Valcarcel.

The marketing potential of activations like this cannot be underestimated. It’s harder than ever for today’s artists to reach Beyonce levels of stardom now that music has a shorter shelf life in the streaming era. Most albums come and go like stories in a news cycle. Fortnite et al are a great opportunity for brand exposure, given how music and gaming audiences converge. The virtual arena may have shut down after the gig, but unlikely for good — especially given the involvement of O2’s ad agency VCCP. 

“We’ve built the venue now — the O2 Arena is in Fortnite,” said Valcarcel. “Yes, we’re switching it off but the code is still there — it’s just not publicly facing. And so the ambition will be that we switch it back on again for new experiences.” For now, any follow-up activations will all be about marketing — marketing both the O2 brand as well as artists. But in the future, all bets are off. After all, Fortnite is a platform in gaming not only getting it right for users but also monetizing effectively. Working off of a micropayments model and not an ad model, user interactions there are fluid and only need to pay to enhance their experience, closely simulating real-world scenarios.

“Look at the stats from the Travis Scott concert and the money made from the merchandise around it,” said Valcarcel. “It just shows you the future potential when the activation is authentic to the gaming experience.”

Virtual concerts aren’t new. In fact, it was first popularized by Second Life — a virtual environment not too dissimilar to Roblox that drew attention from the music industry almost two decades ago.

It’s just the idea gets more traction now among younger people that are spending more time in those environments. Scott’s concert tested how far experiences can be pushed in those environments. Over 12.3 million concurrent “Fortnite” players participated live in Scott’s “Astronomical” virtual performance.

To put those figures into context, ITV’s broadcast of the finale for the top TV show “The Masked Dancer” earlier this month drew an average audience of just under four million viewers, with a peak of closer to five million.

The key details

Channel changing

Amazon has been on the hunt for more inventory it can offer advertisers, both inside and outside the walls of its own ad ecosystem. Digiday reported earlier this year that the e-commerce platform plans to launch an identifier that will allow advertisers to follow consumers’ movements across Amazon’s growing media ecosystem, which includes not just the retail media available inside its website but also advertisements shown on Twitch, inside Prime Video and inside Amazon Music, its streaming music platform. 

Podcasts, which about 80 million Americans listen to every week, represent another channel for advertisers to use in multi-channel campaigns. 

Sound clash

In some ways, Amazon’s acquisitions are just about keeping up with the joneses. After years of being mostly indifferent to podcasts, the world’s tech platforms — as well as the largest terrestrial radio broadcasters — have grown interested in them as they battle on every front of the digital ad market. 

Spotify, which started hunting for original podcasts back in 2017, has seen the medium turn into a key source of ad revenue and user growth; it is expected to surpass Apple as the largest source of podcast consumption this year. Google’s podcast app has been downloaded over 100 million times.  

Those battles have intensified as the budgets that brands and agencies are committing to podcasting have grown. Last year, Omnicom Media Group made headlines when it announced it had committed to spending $20 million on podcast ads with Spotify.

In this year’s upfront negotiations, TV networks sought to strike a balance between securing ad revenue in advance without selling out so much of their linear TV and streaming inventory for the next year that they will not be able to reap even more money from the so-called “scatter” markets, where linear TV and streaming inventory leftover by upfront advertisers is sold for higher prices. 

“You don’t want to be oversold in the upfront. You want some money in the scatter market to play where advertisers have [a] need and you are able to sell to a premium in a scarce marketplace,” said a second TV network executive.

For at least one TV network, this year’s upfront deals are expected to represent roughly 20% of the total money it plans to receive from advertisers over the next year, according to an executive at that company. However, that amount is more of a guide than a rule as TV networks may bring in even more money from the scatter markets for both linear and especially streaming, where networks have more latitude.

“I wouldn’t want to say we’ll utilize X percent of inventory in streaming because it’s still growing,” said a third TV network executive. “Unlike linear where there are X number of commercial units per hour of programming and you have a sense of how many commercials to sell, streaming is constantly growing.”

Despite that growth, agency executives have said there is a lack of TV-quality streaming inventory on the market. They attribute that dearth to the lower-than-linear ad loads on TV networks’ streaming-only services as well as the relative nascency of those properties, which are still accruing audiences. The situation could change, though, as TV networks find ways to inject more supply into the streaming ad market.

“As more programming is launching on streaming first, that gives us the opportunity to test and learn ways to create even more pockets of inventory during periods of high demand or lower the price of [streaming service] subscriptions to get people to sign up. There are a lot of toggles that didn’t exist in the linear world,” said the third TV network executive.

An increase in supply doesn’t necessarily mean a decrease in ad prices, though. TV networks already succeeded in getting upfront advertisers to agree to streaming ad price increases, and the surging demand for TV-quality inventory on linear and streaming puts them in position to press for even higher prices from advertisers outside the upfront. “We expect a healthy scatter market,” said the second TV network executive. Ad prices for linear scatter inventory are already 40% higher than their usual rates, according to Brad Geving, vp of media at TV ad buying firm Tatari.

The pressure on the linear and streaming scatter markets is pushing advertisers to lock up inventory early. Tatari is already buying inventory through the third quarter and talking to clients about fourth-quarter plans to pounce as soon as that inventory becomes available, Geving said. Others are looking even further out. “We’re having conversations [with clients] about Q2 of next year already,” said Bill Durrant, president of Exverus Media. 

Advertisers are feeling pressed to secure TV and streaming inventory as early as possible in order to ensure they are able to reach as many people as possible and, for digital-native advertisers in particular, to relieve their reliance on social platforms and search where prices are also increasing and campaign performance is maxing out, Durrant said. In addition to prodding advertisers to push up their scatter buying strategies, the supply-demand dynamic pushed some advertisers into the upfront market.

A number of automotive, quick-service restaurant and retail advertisers participated in this year’s upfront for the first time, said a fourth TV network executive. This person attributed their entries to advertiser fears about “availability and price in the scatter and programmatic market for streamers.”

Depending on how many scatter advertisers made that move — and how much inventory TV networks put on ice — it could have ripple effects on linear and streaming inventory availability and pricing that, for now, remain to be seen. “The big question looking forward is how much of scatter was pulled forward… What will that market look like?” said a fifth TV network executive.

The balance of power could shift, though. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has investigated the competitive implications of Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals, and on June 11, the government regulator announced Google had agreed to facilitate the CMA’s participation in the initiative. The CMA’s involvement could make the Privacy Sandbox process more equitable, according to Rosewell, who also leads a small advocacy group of “just shy of 20” unnamed members called Marketers for an Open Web.

“The CMA has power over Google,” said Rosewell. On behalf of Marketers for an Open Web, he has lobbied the government agency to take a more aggressive part in overseeing the way Google is remolding the technical underpinnings of how firms like his gather and use data for advertising. “The CMA’s involvement changes the dynamic of Google’s engagement with the rest of the industry including the W3C,” Rosewell told Digiday, adding that the agency “can be there and just call foul, and give in the red card, using soccer terminology.”

‘A substantial investment’

The CMA could end its investigation of the company if it approves Google’s commitments to be more transparent, open and fair in its Privacy Sandbox efforts. For that reason, Google’s decision announced on June 24 to extend its deadline for killing off the third-party cookies was driven in part by pressure from the government agency. According to the CMA’s analysis of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, “Some market participants have claimed that Google’s engagement with stakeholders, through the W3C, has been limited and of a very technical nature, which limits the potential for participation and examination of Google’s proposals by third parties.”

Google promised the CMA it will take several actions to make sure it doesn’t force new ad techniques on the industry that benefit its business while harming others. If the CMA accepts those commitments, they will become mandatory under a court of law. One of those commitments: “Google will, at the CMA’s request, seek to facilitate the involvement of the CMA in discussions on the Privacy Sandbox in the World Wide Web Consortium or any other fora.”

The regulator is making “a substantial investment” and dedicating people, including data scientists, to oversee the Privacy Sandbox efforts going forward, said Simeon Thornton, director of the CMA, speaking at a June 17 conference on data privacy policy held by Centre for Economic Policy Research, a nonprofit group conducting research on issues affecting the European economy. “Under the commitments, the CMA will be closely involved in the development, implementation and monitoring of the [Privacy Sandbox] proposals including through the design trials for example.” 

Government welcome in W3C, but some question their involvement

Still, the CMA has yet to dispatch any diplomats to the W3C group developing Privacy Sandbox tech, according to Wendy Seltzer, strategy lead and counsel at the W3C. For now, as the CMA assesses Google’s promises, it has welcomed input from interested parties on how to be involved in the W3C process.

The W3C is not a governmental body, though it has ties to governments around the world. Its primary mission is to serve as an international community of member organizations, full-time staff and “the public.” And Seltzer said, “W3C welcomes participation from government entities and agencies, as users of standards, public stakeholders in their outcome and reviewers.” However, there’s no indication that the W3C would give the CMA — a singular government agency — some sort of special influence in final decisions about Privacy Sandbox tech.

There are examples of government involvement in past W3C standards development, though. Both the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Europe’s independent privacy body — the Article 29 Working Party — took part in the fraught development of Do Not Track tech standards, for instance. But for now, there do not appear to be any government-affiliated members of the W3C group overseeing the Privacy Sandbox efforts, the Improving Web Advertising Business Group. 

W3C does have some governments and government agencies as members representing the U.K., U.S., China and other countries. The U.K.’s government — listed as “HM Government,” as in “Her Majesty’s” — is on the list, along with several U.S. agency websites. The consortium also gets funding from government bodies including the European Commission and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

But the involvement of the CMA in the W3C — which does not allow for public meetings, for instance — could be scrutinized by open-government advocates. One privacy technologist who spoke on condition of anonymity said the fact that W3C meetings exclude non-members, with only meeting minutes provided for public use afterward, is problematic. This person said that, if the CMA gets involved in the W3C’s Privacy Sandbox process as part of its Google oversight, the consortium’s process should be a public one because “taxpayers fund your salary, and you are attending meetings with corporate interests and where policy is made.” 

• Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post do not have summer Fridays, which is when an employer allows staff to take a paid half-day or full-day off on the Fridays usually between Memorial Day and Labor Day. 
• However, most of those companies have chosen to give employees additional flexible paid holidays.
• Condé Nast, Leaf Group, Meredith and Vice Media Group have had summer Fridays policies in place for prior years, and they will continue this year.
• BuzzFeed and Vox Media do not have company-wide summer Fridays, but they are letting individual teams determine how to give more time off to their staff this summer.

“Summer Fridays have been part of our company culture for a couple [of] years now, but the program certainly feels even more impactful now,” said Jill Angel, Leaf Group’s evp of people. “We’ve seen the positive mental impact a couple [of] extra hours of weekend time have provided our people.”

The neverending news cycle presents a challenge to media companies’ summer Friday policies. Sometimes it is not possible for an employee to take advantage of Fridays off, so publishers are trying to find a balance between enabling employees to take care of their work and ensuring they take care of themselves.

At BuzzFeed, some teams have set up rotations so employees get a certain number of Fridays off and others will have half days or flexible work hours. Addy Baird, a politics reporter at BuzzFeed News, said staffers have a monthly self-care day available, unlimited sick time and generally flexible work schedules, which she hopes employees will take advantage of this summer. Another BuzzFeed News employee said their team does not get Fridays off, but the employee often uses their monthly mental health day on a Friday.

Teams at Vox Media are given the flexibility to establish their own summer work hours “to encourage time off,” a spokesperson said. That often means alternating summer Fridays off or taking off another day of the week. This year, Vox Media has also made Friday, Sept. 3, a company-wide day off, extending the three-day Labor Day weekend into a four-day one.

A Vox Media manager who asked to remain anonymous said their team started having a summer Fridays policy last year. Though employees already get unlimited PTO, now they can take 10 half days or five full days off for 10 weeks in the summer, from June to September. 

The Vox Media manager said they are flexible with staff to ensure they get the time off when they can take it. Sometimes, the manager has to push employees to take the time off.

“We all get to a point where we get fixated on our jobs. The people who do this work, want to do their work, and are very dedicated,” they said, citing people earlier in their careers as being more inclined to keep working, adding, “It’s dependent on me as a manager to say: ‘no, you should take this time off.’”

Hillary Dixler Canavan, Eater’s restaurant editor, said summer Fridays and additional days off are “great,” but added that publishers should also consider “going totally dark for a week or two to allow employees the chance to totally unplug without having to think about how their work will be getting covered or how their absence will impact their publication,” especially after the past 18 months “journalists went through where our jobs were in jeopardy as we lived through and relentlessly covered a global health crisis.”

Custom: To date, approaches to blockchain in programmatic marketing have amounted to something like a layer of ad tax because they haven’t offered the speed bidders need to compete for inventory. How have new technological advancements addressed this issue for publishers and advertisers?

Ben Putley: Blockchain solves a lot of the issues right now, but so far iterations of products that were using blockchain only represented one part of what it might have been. Traditional blockchain technologies, while groundbreaking, have been lacking for industries such as advertising — where a vast amount of transactions need to be processed in a short finality window, and at low cost. A programmatic bid request taking 30 minutes to be filled (like a Bitcoin transaction) would obviously lose every single time. Similarly, a high transaction fee (e.g. Ethereum “gas” fees) to deliver every single impression would bankrupt a business in hours.

We’re the first project to be incubated by Constellation, a distributed network designed to enable fast, scalable solutions for organizations needing to process and transfer data quickly and securely. At the core of Constellation’s technology is the Hypergraph, a fee-less decentralized network. Hypergraph technology is the only existing technology that can match the cost and speed requirements of hosting an ad auction on a blockchain. The Hypergraph’s interoperability with existing systems and applications means that we can connect to existing endpoints via OpenRTB 2.5 and Prebid, and to existing ad tech solutions (e.g. DSPs) These kinds of advances are enabling programmatic teams to go to market with pipes that feel the same, integrate the same but that perform wildly differently — cheaper, more efficient, more effective pipes for you to trade in the way that you’ve always traded if you’re an advertiser.

Custom: Will these blockchain advancements ‘clean out’ the programmatic ad exchange system? What would be the first three ways you’d say it’ll do this?

Ben Putley: I wouldn’t necessarily say clean out; the metaphor I use is that, at the moment, advertisers and publishers have inventory that they sell and they’re just kind of peeking through the letterbox. They’re like, ‘Oh look, I think that’s what’s going on, I’m going to make a decision based on what I think I can see.’ I think the first step following the advancements underway will be transparency of data, which will then allow much better use of that data — allowing an advertiser to think about their strategy. It’s going to be a revelation. If you can crunch those numbers, then what can you do now? You can see way more of what’s going on and who is a good partner, a bad partner and which channels perhaps are working for you better than others. 

This ability to see all the data and have interoperability between your data sets means that for the first time you can say, ‘OK, my digital audio campaign performs better than my display campaign at less than the budget for display. Let’s team that with our digital out of home. And then, how does that tie into our video or connected TV strategy?’  

Custom: What are some specific ways marketers will be able to improve engagement and ROI with this type of system?

Ben Putley: As it stands, 49 cents of every advertiser’s dollar is spent before they reach a publisher, and one-third of the supply chain costs are completely untraceable. I think if we can come to market and provide some more yield back into that system, it might be that publishers can have much larger creative teams and more engineers working on the UX of a website to create a better experience for people visiting it. Or, they can have more money to then put back into their journalism. They can have fewer ads that are more engaging and achieve better performance because the user experience on the whole has improved.

Custom: As with any new technology, the adoption process can be a bit challenging. What kinds of companies — in terms of size and industry — will take the lead on implementing this new type of ad exchange?

Ben Putley: Any publisher or marketer who wants to get a better steer on the digital supply chain, the margins that their partners are generating and the degree of fraud that is occurring in each transaction would benefit from working with these new ad exchanges. We want there to be fewer, better ads which will lead to improved user experience and increased engagement with advertisers’ creatives, so any business aligned with this mission should embrace blockchain as it evolves. 

Custom: What will the future look like — for users, publishers and advertisers — when this new ad exchange system is up and running and widely adopted?

Ben Putley: For the user, I see a world where they have sovereignty of their data — they control who does and who doesn’t see it. And then, by making data interoperable, by making it tradable, you create a new revenue stream for marketers. Meanwhile, publishers will be able to offer better, more compelling advertising because there’s fewer ads on the page — and if we’re able to reduce the amount of third-party JavaScript, websites will load even faster. It’s going to usher in this world where there’s more accountability, more transparency. Everyone is now rewarded for playing together in this model — the rising tide raises all ships, as they say.

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