Month: August 2021

In a request for comment on the claims made in this Confessions, Activision Blizzard pointed Digiday to a statement from CEO Bobby Kotick to all employees, which had previously been released to other news organizations covering allegations of misconduct at the company.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Why did it take so long for Blizzard’s harassment issues to be exposed like this?

All of us were kind of powerless. That’s what it comes down to. You’d have to be pretty heinous in a work chat to get fired. And that did happen, people like that got let go. I have three friends, three women, who were relentlessly harassed by her [my manager]. From what they’ve told me, it took an incredible amount of reports for something to happen. They’re not sure how many it was, but they speculated it had been like 40. And for all that, they still let her go quietly.

How did the culture at Activision Blizzard change after the merger between Activision, Inc. and Blizzard holding company Vivendi Games in 2008?

It was still “frat boy,” but it was kind of less of that “frat boy fun.” It became more predatory once things started to become more serious. I felt like men were seeking out certain reps, and they were very young. There was one specific instance of a girl who was, I think, 19. At the time, the team manager really, really pursued her, and somehow she got guilted into dating him — and she was his direct report. A few years later, when we talked about it, she basically broke down and was like, “I was guilted into everything — sex, all of it — and I’ll feel shitty forever.” 

The culture of sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard has been widely reported. Were other forms of discrimination widespread at the company during your time there?

The trans community and gay community that was there at Blizzard, they did not feel safe, ever. One of my best friends was trans, and once she came out, that was it — her career just stopped. She had interviews upon interviews for other positions, because she is brilliant, and then it just completely stopped. She left before me, but she started way before I did.

There was racism, too. I definitely heard people being called [starkly racist slurs for Latin Americans], I heard that terminology come out of the North American floor. The Latin American team in general faced a lot of prejudice from the other representatives on the floor. 

I heard the “n-word” several times — we didn’t have very many Black people that worked with us, by the way. There was an interview where at the very end, the woman saw a photo of a Black family in the room, and she said “I didn’t picture many Black people working at Blizzard.” And one of the managers interviewing her was like, “she’s perfect.”

Have you heard of similar issues with the work cultures at other large developers?

I mean, what happened at Riot Games was very comparable to what was happening here, and it just got out sooner. And even then, it’s not fixed — that community’s still trash. All they did was pay off people. One of my friends who worked there was violently raped, and all they did was throw money at her. She moved across the country because she just didn’t want to be in California anymore, she wanted to be away from all of it. Now, she’s out of the industry completely because of what happened. 

Do you believe that this latest controversy will actually lead to a paradigm shift in the industry?

I think it’s too early to tell. And I’m hoping it doesn’t lose steam; I’m hoping that people will be angry enough that they just start to come out publicly about their experiences. But again, that takes a toll. As far as the [sexist] developers go, it’s just way too early to tell, because they’re the content creators, they’re the ones who bring revenue.

“AI will pull away some of the reliance on creative agencies,” said Tan. Once an agency creative department crafts an original concept, “they’re used for all these minor tweaks in copy, images and other things. [Instead], AI can create very meaningful derivatives, alterations that make perfect sense. And may in fact take into account other factors to ensure it’s a compelling headline or image that’s automatically selected.”

Tan pointed to AI-driven technology such as GPT-3 (generative pre-trained transformer 3, which is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text) as key to such advancements. With GPT-3, “you can get it to respond the way you want it to. It’s almost creepy how you can have AI talk to you like a human does,” he added.

AI tech has found its most comfortable and useful place in media on the data and analytics side. (Tan actually described what he dubbed “the media industrial complex” as generally resistant to trying out AI solutions in buying and planning.) Crossmedia’s managing partner Lee Beale said the agency’s data unit, Redbox, makes use of machine learning models for attribution measurement and predictive modeling. These techniques are applied to large data sets like log level data from universal ID graphs, as well as clients’ first-party data for modeling lifetime value multipliers or churn risk.

“These models run daily and, like AI promises, get smarter (more predictive) with increasing observations of events,” said Beale in an email.

Redbox also delves into optimizing creative use and execution as well “to tease apart the elements [that] drive results,” added Beale. “This involves the use of multiple AI platforms which discern physical and emotional components of static and video creative, breaking them down into a myriad of component part probability scores, which are then modeled against business outcomes.”

Third-party AI firms also help agencies uncover new insights for their clients. AI firm Helixa offers a SaaS product (used by a number of agencies including VaynerMedia, Rauxa and VMLY&R, as well as marketers and media companies it declined to identify) that sits between traditional research companies and social listening tools, but identifies actual behavior rather than through panels and surveys, to find complex patterns and connections.

A recent effort with VaynerMedia for a beverage client seeking to launch an energy drink uncovered a cohort — active adults 50-plus — largely overlooked by competitors in the segment, who tend to go after teenage gamers, said vp of marketing Laia Pescetto.

For another consumer packaged goods client looking to launch a baked product, Helixa steered the client away from healthy, vegan-leaning campaign toward an influencer-driven, donut-loving, design-friendly effort, said Christine Burke, Helixa’s vp of growth. “We enabled them with the data to show this is a viable option for growth,” she said.

Delving into this terrain does come at some expense, and it’s not for everyone. It “requires significant investment in time, specialist technology and people,” said Beale. “Organizations have to be clear what the incremental benefits (ROI) are to them of being able to work with large data sets for business outcome applications (within the world of media buying and analytics). Ultimately, clients have to be able to understand the benefits they are gaining from more advanced ‘AI’ solutions. That takes the right kind of client that values finding both waste and opportunity in their raw data.”

Still, the future is coming, and fast. Better to experiment now and have a body of knowledge than to be left in the dust, argued Tan. “I look at the history of tech, and any time a new one comes out, the world says, ‘Oh this tech’s gonna ruin the world!’  … and then we adapt.”

Color by numbers

Are younger generations ditching credit cards and opting for newer forms of payment for their purchases? According to a survey of more than 1,000 consumers between June 25-July 1 funded by GoCardless (which has a vested interest in the results it found), 63% of Americans say they are less likely to use credit cards for purchases now than before the pandemic. Among Gen Z and Millennials, the number is significantly higher: 76% among 18-24-year-olds and 74% among 25-40-year-olds. The survey also found that 77% are more likely to use their debit card than a credit card for purchases. Finally, 87% of Gen Z and Millennials say they would prefer to use no-interest installment payment providers (as in Klarna or Affirm) over credit cards.

Takeoff & landing

• WPP-owned digital and data agency Syzygy promoted director of media Matt Brown to managing director of U.S. and commercial director of U.K.
• Independent agency Exverus will handle media duties for Jovē Wellness’ launch campaign for its premium alkaline water, Jovē. 
• Industry buying veteran Kris Magel, most recently president of media clients for Dentsu international, joined video analytics firm Samba TV as vp, head of agency development.

Direct quote

“This is the era of artificial intelligence, and anything that can be automated will be. Machines will certainly be better at memorizing things and spitting back formulas and facts. We’ve been trained on rote memorization and standardized testing. That whole ’20th century’ approach is not going to be sufficient, especially for the skills that kids are going to need to thrive in the 21st century.”

Steven Wolfe Pereira, founder of education tech company Encantos, explaining what’s needed to prepare kids for the workforce of the future.

Speed reading

• I wrote about Horizon Media’s Big and Blue Hour agencies cutting a novel incentive-based deal with DTC firm Windmill.
• Digiday senior news editor Seb Joseph and I also examined the impact of Apple’s ATT changes on advertisers using Facebook, despite its minimal impact on the social giant’s massive second-quarter revenue haul.
• Seb Joseph also partnered with Digiday’s newest reporter Alexander Lee, who covers gaming and esports, to explain how brands are taking gaming in-house.

“We’re really taking a multi-pronged approach to TikTok now to really try to get it to be significant,” Travis said. “We’re giving it the love and attention that it deserves and hoping that it can become a major channel for us.”

Andie is just one of the many brands experimenting with TikTok as the industry pushes to diversify ad spend in light of traditional digital channels Facebook, Instagram and paid search becoming increasingly expensive and crowded with brands scrambling for pandemic-proof advertising channels. For marketers, it’s not a matter of whether TikTok will take over social media advertising, but when and how. 

The ByteDance-owned app has already surpassed Snapchat in the eyes of many brands and agencies, per Digiday research. It’s also expected to hit 1.2 billion monthly active users this year, per App Annie. But advertisers, Travis included, aren’t ready to chuck dollars into the platform’s expensive ad products the same way they do Facebook and Instagram offerings with better targeting capabilities and conversion rates, leaving TikTok in ad spend purgatory for now.

Instead, advertisers are betting on TikTok’s algorithm and paid influencers for a chance to organically reach the platform’s Gen Z and millennial user base and boosting top performing posts along the way. That’s at least until TikTok can convince advertisers that it’s a commerce-driving channel. Per previous Digiday reporting, U.K. chain Costa Coffee and U.S.-based backpack brand Brevitē, are just two examples of brands taking this approach.

It’s a strategy that a number of Brooklyn-based ad agency Quirk Creative’s clients are employing as well, says CEO Meryl Draper. 

Draper estimates, of its DTC brand clients, about 50-70% are starting to think about TikTok with potential ad dollars behind those campaigns. Of those campaigns, many tie in the platform’s trending audio and/or influencers, opting for paid strategy, but not paid ad units.

“Some of those brands are starting to take TikTok seriously because they’ve been able to go viral on the channel in the past (organically), and want to replicate that success,” she said in an email. Meanwhile, others are dabbling with small spend in hopes to scale, she said.

A TikTok ad can run advertisers as low as $20 a day, per Linda Johnson, president and head of strategy at creative agency SocialDeviant. For full page takeovers and larger campaigns, those can run between $1.5 million to $2 million per the strategist. The downfall, according to Johnson, whose client list includes business-to-business brand Deft and LabCorp, is the small spend on TikTok doesn’t garner the analytics advertisers are looking for. 

“The analytics [aren’t] there. The targeting isn’t the same as you would get on Facebook or Instagram,” Johnson said.

It’s no problem for big brands with big budgets like Pepsi and Hotwire. But for smaller brands, who buy media based on metrics, gambling for a chance to go viral on the app and scaling well-performing TikToks across Instagram Reels and other platforms may be more cost effective, she said.

“Paying for both production and media spend on TikTok has not been something our brands have been willing to do but they’re executing [content strategies],” Johnson said. 

But TikTok could get advertisers to shell out money on its ad products should the app meet advertisers’ laundry list of demands like better ad formats, better ad attribution and creative options beyond video. And as Facebook finds itself at odds with Apple’s crackdown on in-app tracking, leaving marketers scrambling to find alternative media channels, the timing may be perfect. 

“The app has such a rapidly growing level of data to feed its algorithm that brands have more opportunity than ever to serve seemingly seamless ad experiences within the platform,” said Faith Markham, vp of strategy and content at Hill Holliday, whose client list has included Frontier Communications, Strayer University and Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. “However, before it can speed ahead in terms of spend, there are a few more strategic decisions that need to be made and planned for.”

In the next 12 months, marketers predict there will be a bigger spend on TikTok. But if the app can’t commit to being a commerce-first platform, it won’t be enough to completely dethrone Facebook and Instagram, especially as other players like Snap and Amazon-owned Twitch push to take up more market share. 

“I think the question will be: As more brands flock to TikTok and the battle for eyeballs heats up, will ad spend continue to drive the same ROI we’re seeing now? If not, brands will start looking to the next big thing to put their dollars towards,” Draper said. 

Their first order of business is to create new brands and verticals to capitalize on traffic and revenue growth, the latter of which they say has doubled in the past year.

The brothers aren’t starting from scratch — both have had decades of experience in media. Eric, the elder brother by two years, spent 14 years at Bonnier (five as CEO). He was also an executive at Time Inc., Condé Nast, Mariah Media and Rodale. David spent nearly a dozen years at Rodale (it was reportedly a mutual decision not to renew his contract in 2012), and was formerly editorial director of Men’s Health, Women’s Health and Prevention.

Digiday spoke to both brothers on the phone from David’s home in Southampton (though he is based in New York City), where Eric was visiting from his home in New Canaan, CT.  — the two are working there to onboard Eric before he assumes his newly created role August 2.

David will stay “on the creative side,” while Eric is “adding more left brain to the organization,” David said, who energetically discussed the company’s recent growth and future; Eric was the more even-keeled one, answering questions with a well-crafted sentence or two — this wasn’t his first rodeo.

Eric acknowledged that he has “been responsible” for “unpleasant work paring down legacy media,” including with layoffs and closures. But he is motivated by his brother’s company and “the opportunity to nurture, develop and provide guidance and perspective to a small, efficient organization.”

Jason Kint, CEO of publisher trade group Digital Content Next, said he is not surprised by Eric’s move “after the tumultuous past year.” A media executive would “jump for new energy and opportunity including working with family and cultivating emerging media brands,” he said. 

There’s no question that media employees are looking for new or different opportunities, especially after the past 18 months. Many are feeling burnt out (a survey of 1,099 U.S. employees by the Society for Human Resource Management in May showed 41% of U.S. employees said they felt burnt out from work).

Galvanized specializes in evergreen, health-related content. Its two biggest digital brands are Eat This, Not That! (which ranks healthier food choices — such as the best ketchup for you or the unhealthiest salad to order at a restaurant — as well as health-related news) and Best Life (an advice and lifestyle website). Last week, the company launched a new brand called CelebWell, about celebrity health.

In June 2021, Eat This, Not That! had 15.4 million total unique visitors, a 34% increase year-over-year, according to Comscore data. Best Life had 10.4 million uniques, a 43% increase. All three brands have an average of two minutes spent on site per session, roughly marketers’ benchmark for average session duration, according to research by Databox, a business analytics company.

Galvanized, which is fully owned by David, is profitable, he said, and claimed revenues more than doubled year-over-year, but declined to share specific numbers. About 70% of Galvanized revenue comes from programmatic advertising and 25% from content syndication (such as with its travel brand Travelicious, a syndication partner of MSN.com). The rest of the business is made up of trade book publishing and affiliate fees. Galvanized is on Meredith Corp’s advertising platform, meaning the publishing giant handles its programmatic ad operations.

David attributed this growth to the “lengthy global pandemic, which increased interest in personal health, at-home fitness products and services. There was an explosion of interest in self-care.” The influx in traffic led to programmatic ad revenue growth, David said, adding that the company will work to maintain this momentum with “continued investment in editorial, new brands, and brand extensions — which Eric will help explore.”

The company has about 30 full-time employees. It will add five to 10 more full-time staff to its headcount by the end of the year, David said, mostly to grow editorial. It plans to create a portfolio of brands by creating at least two brands per year  — starting with personal finance and pets — to grow its scale and reach.

“It’s all going to come down to the audience numbers the company can achieve for each vertical,” said Clair Bergam, associate media director at Media Kitchen. Offering advertisers content that focuses on a specific vertical and running additional ads through a publisher’s network can be beneficial, but “if the audience numbers are really low the juice isn’t worth the squeeze,” she said. David declined to share vertical-specific traffic.

Eric wants to take advantage of the company’s first-party data, and launch premium subscriptions and newsletters down the road — and both brothers spoke of wanting to launch an e-commerce business.

“I have spent time working for other family-owned private companies and now I have a chance to work for my own family,” Eric said. “The mission really is personal for me.”

It’s unclear how Galvanized will handle the return to in-person offices; it had office space in New York, but let it go amid the pandemic. The company has an office in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where the Zinczenko brothers grew up. In an anonymous survey conducted by the company, Galvanized employees said they were more productive working remotely, David said.

“We are still thinking about next steps, but we won’t come back to an office environment at least through this year,” David said. They will also not consider location when hiring employees this year, “so that we can find talent and hire them unencumbered,” Eric said.

Now with the title vp, communications and remote working for Vistaprint and Cimpress, McKinlay is focused on delivering the CEO’s mandate to make remote-first working fundamental to its culture, in a way that gives it a competitive edge. He spends more than half his time leading the transition to remote-first working for the 8,000 staff members worldwide.

Such a big shift goes hand-in-hand with a robust communications strategy, he believes. “Real-estate, HR and tech leaders are stepping up to lead remote in their organizations. Why wouldn’t the incredible skills of communications and marketing leaders be equally applicable to the challenges of evolving to permanent remote-first working?” he said.

The evidence is certainly mounting for companies to invest in heads of remote. A study of 95 technology companies by real-estate and workplace advisory T3 revealed that the proportion with a designated leader for remote work jumped between August 2020 and February 2021 from 2% to 15%. 

That coincides with a 147% jump in jobs advertised as remote in the U.K. at the end of last year, according to online jobs marketplace Adzuna, and 42% of U.S. startup founders have said they will set up remotely.

Cimpress is one of a number of companies like Facebook, Dropbox, Okta, LinkedIn, LogMeIn and more that have recently hired specific leadership for remote working — a role remote-first software company GitLab claims to have pioneered.

And like Cimpress, Gitlab’s head of remote, Darren Murph, sits within the marketing department, which also includes a whole team allocated to owning and telling the company’s remote story.

Companies shouldn’t assume a head of remote is a HR role, Murph said. For those with a “solid level of remote fluency”, a head of remote may thrive in marketing and communications. Their core responsibility will be to evangelize new ways of working both internally and externally, he added — and storytelling is crucial, especially in the midst of the hotly tipped “Great Resignation”.

“Change without story is a mandate, change with story is purpose,” said Murph. “For firms making the remote transition, this becomes an immediate part of their identity.” Conveying the “why” of a firm’s remote transition, makes senior marketing and communication leaders ideally suited to pivot into heads-of-remote roles, he added. 

Marketing and communications execs are also getting the nod from HR and remote-work experts as the next chiefs of remote.

“More companies will be sharing their lessons on remote/hybrid, and much of that will require marketing support,” said Lars Schmidt, founder of executive search consultancy Amplify, and author of “Redefining HR.” 

Hema Crockett, co-founder of on-demand HR consultancy Gig Talent, believes an effective head of remote will communicate with all facets of the business, especially HR, when it comes to engagement, retention, total rewards and other facets of culture. “Without this, strategies can look disjointed and fragmented,” she added. 

However, Laurel Farrer, founder of remote working consultancy Distribute and the Remote Work Association, recommended companies analyze their requirements first.

“Do you need someone to advocate for your remote practices externally as a marketing tool to attract talent or promote your remote-friendly product? Or do you need someone to maintain your remote operations with a focus on employee experience?” she asked. 

“The former will lead you to hire a candidate with marketing expertise. The latter should be a virtual operations expert. If marketing your organization’s remote value proposition is essential to growth, having a head of remote that focuses on external advocacy, through speaking engagements and content development, will help you stay relevant and attract top talent.”

Yet there is also a counter-argument that heads of remote are most effective operating across multiple functions. 

“Communication plays an important role in ensuring remote workers feel integrated, but leaving it only to comms and marketing will fail to unlock all the benefits of remote working,” said Morten Bruun, North America managing director of freelance talent management platform Worksome.

Certainly, the role’s biggest challenges may not necessarily be tackled by marketing and communications skills. For instance, a newly hired head of remote has to quickly get up to speed on the business, teams and past operating structures to steer their strategy, according to Amplify’s Schmidt. 

“They also have to understand what messages have been sent to employees, and integrate employee sentiment into the design. That’s a lot to digest while under pressure to deliver ideas and strategies ASAP,” he added. 

Either way, a good head of remote needs a proven track record of leading change, as Cimpress’ McKinlay acknowledged — making the hottest, new, corporate-leadership role potentially one of the hardest to get.

3 Questions with Arthur Mamedov, COO, TheSoul Publishing

Explain why you banned meetings and what the result has been. 

We have more than 2,000 employees and 80% of that talent is remote. Due to the way we’re structured, we rely a lot on asynchronous communications. The goal of the no-meetings policies is to make sure everyone stays productive, minimizes distractions, and spends their time on focused work. Because of the many different time zones, in-person or zoom meetings aren’t just challenging to arrange — they’re ineffective for us. Meetings are much like large conferences: Speaking live to a group of people is never entirely efficient. Some people might get distracted in the moment. For others, the information may not be relevant, or might not be ready to digest well on the spot. Time may run out. Meetings can easily become a passive activity that wastes participants’ time. It can also be challenging for listeners to focus for long periods. Finally, the flexible working that many of us have become accustomed to, doesn’t always fit around conventional working hours. 

Why is asynchronous communication so important as a method of working in remote and hybrid setups?

Asynchronous communication is about removing methods of communication that reduce transparency. We all know how frustrating it can be when a member of the team holds key information and it’s not possible to reach them. That’s why we’ve banned internal emails as well as meetings. By sharing all relevant information on a mutual platform, everyone can access it as needed. You can’t expect people to perform as a team, when they’re not all on the same page. We find asynchronous communication actually boosts collaboration and productivity. When we take away the expectation of an immediate response, employees who rely on a last-minute surge of activity to get a task over the line are likely to come unstuck. It’s about collaboration that doesn’t happen in real time, yet produces a more efficient output. This doesn’t mean it’s slow, however. By aligning as a team at the start of a project and having clear deliverables, everyone knows exactly what they need to provide and when. How they go about it is up to them. 

What are the pitfalls of adopting synchronous and asynchronous communications? 

Many companies are understandably concerned that asynchronous comms will remove the human element. We find the opposite is true. When people work together, they tend to seek opportunities to socialize and communicate both on and around the project. Naturally, we’ve received feedback from new employees that the no-meeting model is unusual and a bit stressful in the beginning. But once they get into it, they feel liberated because their productivity skyrockets. For most managers, having a reduced ability to interact face-to-face with their team and reports can be confused with mismanagement or loss of control. In our company, our established corporate culture and well functioning processes proves that the opposite is true. While it sounds simple, rolling out a no-meeting policy takes foresight and planning as well as bearing in mind that how employees communicate is part of your corporate culture too. 

Number crunch

• 15% of 1,000 U.S. workers said they would take a 25% pay cut at their current or next prospective employer if that employer offered them the option of working remotely full-time, and 65% would take a 5% pay cut
  [Source of data: Breeze survey.]

• 45% of 1,200 working parents feel penalized for focusing on their families during the global pandemic.
  [Source of data: Qualtrics and Boardlist study.]

What else we’ve covered

• Offices are getting a full makeover as businesses embrace the concept of collaboration hubs over traditional layouts, and many have downsized their real-estate as a result. And when it comes to decisions around reallocating capital that would’ve spent on office space some experts believe they should be oriented around “work as a set of activities, not as a place.”
• From tunes that provided the backdrop for kitchen discos during lockdown to podcasts that made sense of the tumultuous political climate, a playlist for the pandemic has emerged. We asked ad execs to share what tracks meant the most to them through lockdowns.
• The pandemic has required a lot of creativity and new types of energy from employees in order to be successful in their jobs while working from home. But for those on the job hunt, capturing the attention of hiring managers and recruiters has required a whole other level of resourcefulness.

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