Month: June 2021

• Media companies will start a phased reopening of their offices in July.
• Companies will initially give employees the voluntary option to return to the office and, in some cases, will limit capacity.
• In September, companies will formally reopen their offices.
• Some companies will expect all employees to return to work from the office — at least partially — in September, while others will be more flexible at first.

In April, Digiday surveyed 329 media and marketing professionals in April and found that fewer than half of respondents said they would be willing to return to the office full-time over the next six months. Here is a closer look at some media companies’ policies.

BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed is starting with a “soft opening,” a voluntary return to offices starting around mid-July. 

BuzzFeed’s teams will set their own expectations for “a broader return” in September, according to a spokesperson. The company will allow for a hybrid work model with more flexible schedules. For most roles and teams, employees will be expected to come into the office “some days but not others.” Final decisions haven’t been made yet on which teams will be expected to come in and for how many days, according to the spokesperson.

Condé Nast

Condé Nast already gives teams the option to use the office over the summer, a spokesperson said. The company aims to bring most people back starting September 7. It will combine fully onsite and hybrid work situations.

Forbes

Forbes will reopen offices on the week of September 13, for anyone who wants to return, with a flexible schedule.

Forbes conducted a “Return to the Office” survey in April. Nearly 90% of employees responded, according to a June 21 memo from Forbes CEO Mike Federle sent to staff and shared with Digiday. The results of the survey showed “a mix of personal preferences,” of remote and onsite work approaches, according to Federle. “Our plan is to accommodate both models by adopting a hybrid workforce,” he wrote. 

Forbes managers will reach out to employees in the next few weeks to arrange one-on-one meetings with staff to discuss their preferred work schedule requests, according to the memo. This will help the company “prepare the facilities and tech support for an orderly return to the office,” Federle wrote.

Group Nine Media

Group Nine’s chief people officer Annie Trombatore updated all employees on June 25 about office reopening plans. The company will be opening its offices in the fall and will give staffers at least 30 days notice to prepare. In the meantime, Group Nine will launch a pilot program in late July for voluntary access to the office. A limited number of desks will be made available at Group Nine’s 568 Broadway office for employees to “check out” on a first-come, first-serve basis.

To prepare for this program, the contents of each desk at the L.A. and N.Y.C. offices will be packed up, labeled and stored, starting the week of July 5 (employees can pick up their belongings or keep them stored until they return to the office) so the office space can be reimagined. The company is still evaluating which roles will be eligible for fully in-person, hybrid or fully remote. Group Nine is also sending an anonymous employee survey on topics like voluntary returns and vaccines and will hold information sessions for employees.

Hearst

Hearst Tower and several of the company’s office locations are open for employees to use. Hearst will officially bring staff back to the office in September with a hybrid model, letting employees work some days at home and some from the office.

Leaf Group

Leaf Group (which owns lifestyle brands like Hunker and Well+Good) has already re-opened its offices for those who want to work onsite while letting staffers work remotely if they prefer. So far, the majority of staff continues to work remotely on a daily basis, but a spokesperson said anecdotally that they are seeing more and more people come into the office.

Some Spider Studios

At Some Spider Studios, the plan to bring people back to the office is still in the works. The company won’t reopen until closer to the fall, said Mary Kate McGrath, COO at Some Spider Studios. A recent survey at the company was conducted to check in and gauge employees’ feelings about remote work and the timing for a potential return to the office.

The New York Times

The New York Times expects to bring most people back the week of the Labor Day holiday but will use the month of September to give staff time to figure out their routines, child and elder care arrangements, housing and commute, and let them “ease in” by coming one to two days a week if needed, said Jacqueline Welch, evp and chief human resources officer at the Times. A more regular routine will come together in October, she added.

The Washington Post

The Washington Post will begin the phased reopening of its offices on July 6. In September, all employees will be expected to return and work from the office at least three days per week.

Trusted Media Brands

Starting in September, Trusted Media Brands employees will be given the option to come back into the office part-time, likely one to three days a week.

“Flexibility is going to be key to see what works and what doesn’t and we will adapt as we go,” said Jen Tyrrell, chief people officer at Trusted Media Brands. “Rather than risk losing great talent, we will look to accommodate individual preferences where it makes sense based on their job duties.”

Some employees have continued to work in the office during the pandemic, such as some of Taste of Home’s culinary team and the Trusted Media Brands visual studio. And half of the company’s recent full-time hires were hired to be fully remote, according to Tyrell.

Vice Media Group

Vice Media Group’s U.S. employees will return to the office in September after employees were surveyed and feedback was provided in focus groups.

Vice is developing “multiple” return to work models, based on variables like an employee’s role and their comfort level, due to the fact that employees “prefer a balance of remote and in-office work,” a spokesperson said. Remote employees will work a set number of days depending on the needs of the company and their role.

Vox Media

Starting on July 6, vaccinated Vox Media employees can come into the office on a voluntary basis, at a maximum of 10% capacity. In September, the company expects to “resume full office operations,” a spokesperson said.

Now — despite the fact that most of the eight firms in the inquiry provided little or no detail about the companies they send ad data to — information from Magnite and Twitter reveals that they have partners based in countries of concern such as China, Turkey, Russia and the United Arab Emirates. 

Because governments in those countries could access programmatic ad data about people in the U.S. and use it in ways that threaten national security, Wyden’s staff believes the information validates legislation he expects to propose in the coming months that could place restrictions on ad-tech data flows outside the country and penalize violators.

“There’s a misunderstanding in the [advertising] industry of the dangers posed by ad tech,” said Margaret Hu, professor of law and international affairs at Penn State Law and School of International Affairs and part of the school’s College of Engineering Institute for Network and Security Research faculty. 

According to letters sent in response to the Senate inquiry obtained by Digiday, Magnite listed partners including China’s Mobvista International, Turkey’s Turkticaret and U.A.E.’s AdFalcon. In Twitter’s response, the company pointed to a publicly available list of firms that partner with its mobile ad network MoPub and said it works with Russian firm Hybrid as well as China-based firms MobVista and Pangle, which is run by TikTok’s owner ByteDance.

“There’s a clear national security risk whenever Americans’ private data is sent to high-risk countries like China and Russia, which can use it for online tracking as well as to target hacking and disinformation campaigns,” said Wyden in a statement sent to Digiday. “Advertising companies have shown little restraint or judgement when it comes to putting their own profits over Americans’ privacy and our national security. That needs to end. I’ll be introducing legislation in the coming months to address this threat and prohibit exports of Americans’ data to high-risk countries.”

The senator also admonished Google, AT&T, Pubmatic and Verizon — none of which provided any names of ad tech partners or countries where those partners are based. “No U.S. company should be sharing Americans’ sensitive information with our adversaries, but it’s especially outrageous that AT&T, Google, PubMatic and Verizon are concealing their foreign partners from Congress and the American public,” said Wyden. 

Two other firms included in the inquiry, Index Exchange and OpenX, also failed to cough up any names of firms they partner with. However, Index Exchange did list all the countries in which its partner companies are located, and OpenX provided a partial country list. Some companies that did not reveal names of partner firms, including Google, said non-disclosure agreements prevented them from doing so. 

Data anonymization may not be good enough 

As part of a broader effort to rein in the dissemination of personal data from commercial enterprises to foreign governments or other entities for whom that data may not originally be intended, Wyden plans to formally introduce the Protecting Americans’ Data From Foreign Surveillance Act of 2021. The legislation, made available in April in draft form, would amend the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 and restrict the export of certain personal data of U.S. nationals and individuals in the U.S. The bill calls on appropriate federal agencies to determine a list of data categories, a threshold for data quantity and time parameters for personal data export to ensure that it is not exploited for intelligence purposes by foreign governments to the detriment of U.S. national security or redistributed to other countries. If formally introduced and passed, the bill would subject violators to criminal penalties or private right of legal action.

The digital ad industry often relies on data anonymization as a shield from regulations on personal data, but notably, the draft of the legislation states that anonymized personal data cannot be treated differently than identifiable personal data “if the persons to which the anonymized personal data relates could reasonably be identified using other sources of data.”

The bill serves as an extension of export regulations that prevent trafficking of tech and tech knowledge to foreign countries that could leave the U.S. at a disadvantage and create national security vulnerabilities, said Hu. “Wyden is trying to shift the legal framework of what is being regulated from the tech and tech knowledge to the data itself — the sale of the data, who is going to have control over the data in these foreign countries,” she said.

The limits of contractual limitations

In their responses to the Senate inquiry, most of the ad tech companies stressed that contractual agreements with foreign partner firms prohibit any use of bidstream data for anything other than serving digital ads or purposes like enabling caps on ad frequency.

Magnite — the most forthcoming of all the companies that were sent questions about their bidstream data practices — stated in its response that the real-time data it passes along the bidstream includes user identifiers and specific geographic latitude-longitude coordinates. “Magnite has consistently prohibited the sale of its data by bidders and has never waived the provision of its contracts prohibiting the sale of such data,” the firm wrote. Like some other respondents, the company also said it has obstacles in place to deter entities with no intention to place ads from siphoning bidstream data for ulterior purposes. “Magnite has historically imposed an access fee on advertising buyers that do not satisfy a minimum monthly spend requirement,” said the firm.

While some of the companies said they have internal auditing processes in place to detect contract violations, Hu and others argued that legal contracts among ad tech partners are not enough to stop the potential use of bidstream data for foreign surveillance purposes. “The problem is the enforceability,” said Hu. “Who does the investigation? Who’s responsible for the oversight that the contract is being properly adhered to? I think that blind faith and just accepting in good faith that these contracts are being honored is potentially naive.”

Why bidstream data could threaten human rights and civil liberties

Legislators, human rights advocates and others worry that foreign governments could compel, coerce or pay someone in another country to disclose data, such as location information, that might be used to trace someone’s whereabouts. In China, for example, a new initiative calls on private firms and government agencies to exchange data; according to a Protocol report published earlier this month, firms including Baidu and state-owned telcos have set up data exchange platforms to facilitate data distribution.

When people like Hu want to illustrate the national security and civil liberties risks of data flowing through ad tech systems, they allude to a well-known quote from retired four-star General Michael Hayden, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency under the George W. Bush administration. “We kill people based on metadata, but that’s not what we do with this metadata,” Hayden said during a 2014 debate about NSA data use exposed by intelligence agency subcontractor Edward Snowden. Hayden added a caveat: “One could make the argument that it may or may not be legal.”

The Senate inquiry letters to ad tech firms noted, “few Americans realize that some auction participants are siphoning off and storing ‘bidstream’ data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them. In turn, these dossiers are being openly sold to anyone with a credit card, including to hedge funds, political campaigns, and even to governments,” stated the senators’ letter sent in April to the ad tech firms. That same language showed up in a July 2020 letter sent to the Federal Trade Commission by a bipartisan group of legislators including Wyden asking the agency to determine whether ad tech data practices violate the FTC act. 

And now, the entire real-time bidding industry is under fire from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. Earlier in June, the nonprofit organization filed a lawsuit against the industry’s global trade body, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, arguing that the RTB industry has enabled “the world’s biggest data breach” and is responsible for “building secret dossiers about every person.”

The ad industry does not realize the risks of data dissemination through RTB systems, said Hu. She noted that Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s use of telco metadata showed how seemingly benign information — such as location data intended to geographically target an ad in one instance — can be used to find the location of a targeted individual and even be used for targeted killing. “Increasingly, actionable intelligence is based on this type of metadata and geolocational data,” she said, adding, “The intelligence potential cannot be underestimated of having the geolocation pinpointing that is made possible through ad tech.”

“I really loved the idea of building products for people at scale,” says DeBaun, creator of content for Black Americans and millennials, in the latest episode of Talking Shop, Google’s series of one-on-one conversations with underrepresented entrepreneurs, retail pacesetters and business leaders. Building Blavity was “an incredible opportunity for me and my friends to make something that is for us and leverages this moment in time [by using] platforms, the internet and technology to actually build something at scale for Black people in this country.” 

Like many entrepreneurs, Butler founded The Lip Bar, her vegan beauty brand, out of her home. “So many Black entrepreneurs are starting in their homes, in their kitchens,” she said, noting that entrepreneurs shouldn’t feel stressed if they are figuring out how to run businesses and need help. “As an entrepreneur, you think you’re supposed to have it all figured out. [But] when you realize that you don’t necessarily have all of the means to get to the next level, then you reach out for mentorship.” 

When she was scaling The Lip Bar, Butler and her team leaned heavily on Google Search and paid ads across a variety of platforms to reach their customers. But as entrepreneurs are scaling their businesses, DeBaun says that entrepreneurs should center everything around the customer — while also planning for the future. 

“You have to have deep customer empathy, be able to describe them to a T and be very specific,” said Butler. “And you have to have some sort of future strategy because a lot of times, you can’t just be reactive to today; you have to be ahead of the game. It’s about taking bets and taking risks and being ahead of the curve.” 

Check out the entire conversation between Butler and DeBaun in the video above and learn more about the steps they took to grow their small businesses to sizable brands, insights that helped them build their communities and how tech influenced their reach with customers.

This article originally appeared on Think with Google.