Month: August 2021

“Productivity is so through the roof that we are an entire year ahead on our product roadmap. The team is happier and more committed to the mission because they actually get to work on it,” said Sheffie Robinson, Shamrck’s founder and CEO. She instilled the notion of being meeting-less into the company’s 100% remote team since it was established in 2018. 

Bi-weekly and quarterly team meetings are the exception, with the organization defaulting to Slack, and a weekly check-in form as key communication tools. 

It’s a much-needed antidote to the still widespread corporate “micromanagement” attitude, Robinson added.

“Companies think frequently meeting keeps people accountable, when it takes time away from them to do their actual job,” she said. 

“My partner is in an industry with meeting overload. I seriously have no clue how they do any actual work with five or six meetings a day. I’m determined to treat my team like adults, not children I have to monitor.”

More companies, Robinson summed up, need to embrace asynchronous communication, which involves defaulting to emails, documents and videos to share information to which people can respond when they’re ready.

That’s the approach TheSoul Publishing has embraced across its 2,000-strong, 80% remote, global workforce. Meetings are held if co-workers have reached an impasse asynchronously, but require a mandatory agenda, a 30-minute time limit, and the outcome and recording stored alongside other relevant project information. Emails are also only used for external communication, with internal conversations taking place on Slack.

The company’s COO Arthur Mamedov cites data revealing that business leaders spend nearly 24 hours per week in meetings, with more than 70% of managers feeling meetings are inefficient and unproductive. 

And according to MeetingScience, which helps organizations improve the value and impact of meetings, the 55 million meetings which happen in the U.S. daily cost $1.4 trillion and leave 89% of attendees unhappy.

“Meetings cause undue pressure to be working on one particular task at a specific time — but that’s not how people thrive,” said TheSoul Publishing’s Mamedov. “Everyone’s productivity peaks at different times and time zones are becoming a challenge as you become more global. Employees should be able to engage in heads-down work at a time that’s ideal for them, and answer colleagues’ questions on their schedule rather than when interrupted.”

Most new joiners are surprised and pleased by the concept, he added. “They are so used to being bogged down by mountains of calendar invites that our policy comes as a breath of fresh air. Teams have flourished without being burdened with meetings.”

For those not ready to commit to a full-scale no-meetings policy, a growing number of companies are successfully designating meeting-free days. 

Enterprise video platform Qumu’s meeting-free “Focus Friday” is saving teams three to five hours of meetings a week, it said. Momentive, formerly SurveyMonkey, has seen similar results with its own Focus Fridays, building on that with adopting 15-minute meetings where possible. Meanwhile, 90% of dating app Hinge’s 130 employees say having no meetings on Tuesdays helps them accomplish more.

New York City-based Fischtank PR even reports receiving more job applications from candidates in larger firms looking for greater flexibility, despite not having yet officially announced its new meeting-free Wednesdays, which it launched following demand from 90% of its employees. 

“Many companies, especially PR firms now publicaly mandating a return to the office, have lost the plot and will soon lose more employees,” said founder and CEO Eric Fischgrund.

The tech industry is responding with a rise in meeting management platforms. Katch, which coordinates ad hoc calls through an app with the aim of eliminating scheduled meetings, has recently raised $4 million in investor funding. Team Huddle’s ScheduleIQ app is in beta mode, claiming to be the world’s first smart scheduling platform built around when users prefer to schedule meetings.

“As people begin to make this shift toward fluid time, many find they can eliminate some of their traditional meetings,” said Katch co-founder Alessandra Knight.

Yet Team Huddle founder Rob Smith is adamant that meetings aren’t the root cause of burnout.

“It’s tempting to say it’s just the meetings — we’re having too many and they are poorly organized and executed, but that’s only part of the problem,” said Smith.

“Most employee burnout is a result of being overwhelmed with tasks, unrealistic expectations, ineffective communication and inability to keep pace.”

The true source of burnout, Smith ventured, is failing to treat employees as human beings by prioritizing work-life balance. Likewise, added TheSoul Publishing’s Mamedov, meetings are a key piece of the puzzle, but getting rid of them isn’t a magic bullet.

Companies with burnout problems need to address the work environment as a whole, ensuring there’s enough of everything to support the workload — and that includes people.

3 Questions with Jane Evans, founder of The Uninvisibility Project.

How has the pandemic compounded the narrative of midlife women? And why is now the right time to launch VisibleStart?

The Centre for Better Ageing [charity] put out a report in August 2020 saying one in ten men over the age of 50 years old will lose their jobs at the end of furlough and eight in ten women aged over 50 will be out of work. I obviously had to act. So, [WPP CEO] Mark Read and I spoke in September 2020 and now we’re up and running before the end of furlough, with this project that aims to raise the profile of women over the age of 50.

Can you outline how the VisibleStart initiative works? 

The [online] course is open to all women over the age of 45 in London who are actively seeking to build or rebuild a career. We will give them the basic tools to gain an entry-level job in a media agency. WPP has ring-fenced 20 media roles for graduates with further training, career advancement and a solid pension plan.

Women over 40 years old seem to face a harsher dose of ageism wrapped in sexism. How should the industry keep pace with how to deal with women with in-depth experience and confidence?

Stop the practice of making midlife women the first to go in redundancy rounds. Then go back and get the generation you are missing out on. There’s a lot of talk about menopause in the workforce but what nobody is talking about is what comes after it — business is missing out on the superpowers of older, wiser women.
— Seb Joseph.

By the numbers:

• 80% of 2,000 U.S. adults have lost power in the middle of a Zoom meeting when working remotely, causing them anxiety.
  [Source of data: Omnicharge report.]
• 93% of AI-driven recruitment marketplace Hired’s candidates have requested roles that can be worked remotely: 82% are open to remote, 11% only want remote and 7% want no remote.
  [Source of data: Hired data.]
• Just 30% of 1,000 employees at companies with poor culture report being satisfied with their jobs.
  [Source of data: Skynova survey.]

What else we’ve covered

• While the continued spread of the delta variant has caused widespread delays to office reopenings in the U.S., many workers are already back at their desks on a voluntary basis. For some that have returned, it’s been a surreal experience to find themselves with an entire floor to themselves. But for others, the experience has been positive.
• Agency bosses are welcoming back their people with great fanfare after the seemingly endless hiatus necessitated by the Coronavirus. Despite the rising threat of the delta variant, doing business face-to-face is (cautiously) coming back, though not with a roar as we had all hoped. 
• As employees embrace a new, more flexible way of working, many workers are inspired to cast their nets wider, no longer constrained by daily commute times and strict working hours. For employers, a hybrid model allows them to tap into a wider, more diverse talent pool.

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

One longtime media observer who declined to speak for attribution said he believes the relationships from back then also played a hand in luring Walmart back. Though many of the senior executives who led Walmart’s business have moved on (for example, Steven Wolfe Pereira, who was the client lead for Walmart for a period has since started his own education company, Encantos), some of the mid-level people who did much of the grunt work have moved into senior positions — at least those that haven’t moved on.

That said, the broader Publicis Groupe is a much different company today than it was a decade ago (full disclosure–I briefly worked for Starcom Mediavest Group in 2011). Besides the media-side reorgs, the company also now owns data giant Epsilon, which not only offers tons of customer-loyalty management expertise, but also can deliver on integrating data from multiple sources, and making use of clean-room technology — an essential ingredient to any data-heavy operation today. A Publicis representative confirmed the media-side relationship with Walmart cuts across all of Publicis, not just media.

Besides the other holding companies (Omnicom, Dentsu et. al) that were jockeying to win Walmart, the biggest loser in all this is Haworth Media, the Minneapolis-based media agency that grew around building Target’s retail business, but lost Target in 2016. Why? Well, in 2014, WPP’s GroupM took a 49% stake in Haworth, in part because Haworth was a hot shop at the time based on the award-winning work it was doing for Target. Two years later, GroupM lured Target away to the GroupM mothership two years later. That opened up Haworth’s chance to take what it learned for Target and apply it to Walmart. But even that’s gone now. Haworth did not respond to an email seeking comment.

One central figure who is said to have operated behind the scenes for years and was instrumental in directing Walmart to Haworth at the time is Michael Francis, according to one executive who spoke on condition of anonymity,. Francis was the longtime CMO of Target until 2011, when among other positions, he started a consultancy that counted Walmart as a customer. Francis is said to have been instrumental in convincing Walmart that Haworth could handle its significantly more complex media needs than Target’s were. This executive speculated that, after five years, Walmart realized it needed more than Haworth could deliver. Francis could not be reached for comment by deadline.

Finally, an intriguing possible side-plot: Just two weeks ago, Publicis also announced a partnership with TikTok, the exploding social platform that’s turning the heads of any marketer looking to sell their wares to young consumers. It seems only a matter of time before Walmart exploits that opportunity, given its stated desire “to build a business model that will define the next generation of retail,” as its joint statement with Publicis read. 

Color by numbers

The Tokyo Summer Olympics may be in the rearview mirror and the Beijing Winter Olympics only six months away, so what to make of the dismal ratings? NBCU and its numerous networks delivered only 15.5 million viewers on average per night, a precipitous 42 percent fall from the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. To its aid, streaming reached a record 5.5 billion minutes across all NBCU’s social and streaming platforms — and the company claims the games were “very very profitable,” according to NBC Sports chairman Pete Bevacqua. Observers expect the Beijing Winter Games will suffer further ratings erosion, the result of a consistent drop in live-sports ratings, and a streak of anti-Chinese sentiment bubbling in the U.S. on a number of levels. Will NBC enjoy the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat? We’ll know in seven months.  

Takeoff & landing

• Dentsu last week said it plans to reduce the payment time to minority media companies from 60-120 days down to 30 days, effective Oct. 1, citing cash flow challenges for many small Black, Hispanic, Native American, Asian-Pacific and Asian-Indian media companies.
• The IAB Tech Lab last week launched its Transparency Center, a central warehouse of information that it hopes will help digital buyers, sellers and ad-tech companies see which standards media companies have adopted, as well as levels of compliance and certification programs they’ve done. 
• MERGE, a tech company focused on health and wellness last week acquired Blue Moon Digital, a performance marketing agency. 

Direct quote

“While the ‘solve a problem with me’ during the final pitch is one interesting take – I think if there’s five finalists, that agency comes in second, and the biggest well-known (aka safest) still comes in first. I don’t know a solution to the RFP process, but there’s such a huge need for consultants right now, it’s unreal. We just got another one — not a huge budget at all, but their RFP read like they stole the content off our site. It was media-only — they have design in-house.  I just learned last week that the business went to a design agency whose website doesn’t even mention media. I’d love to say that’s the first time it’s happened, but I think what happens with smaller accounts that can’t afford an agency consultant is that they don’t know 100% what they need, but they know they want something. Once they do the RFP, they then realize they need other things as well.  And while it all works out for them in the end, it is a complete waste of time for every other agency involved.”

Michael Hubbard, CEO of Media Two Interactive, on the state of RFPs and the need for consultants

Speed reading

• Digiday’s marketing reporter Kimeko McCoy explains how new forms of out-of-home advertising are attracting more advertisers who feel digital display ads no longer deliver sufficient value. 
• Nielsen is ditching third-party accreditation for its national TV ratings service, and Variety explains what that might mean for its customers
• TechCrunch explains the details of the redesign Twitter unveiled last week, including a new font called Chirp.

In general, though some publishers have shown interest in testing Google’s emerging tech, many of them have believed the platform’s timeline for development and implementation of it has been “too aggressive,” said Rob Beeler, the de facto leader of the fledgling publisher collective and founder of Beeler.Tech, who helps publishers navigate the complex world of ad tech.

“It’s been clear in these meetings that publishers have had a lot of things to answer before they were on board with any of these solutions,” he told Digiday. 

Publishers have in many ways been left out of Google’s efforts to redesign how digital ads work without third-party cookies. This is despite the fact that they produce and distribute the content that comprises the open web, which Google and others say they aim to preserve when the great shift away from today’s tracking technologies goes into effect. Now, the regular meetings between a small group of top-tier publishing execs and Googlers are intended to give publishers a louder voice in the discussion.

Neither Google nor Beeler would name publishers involved and two group participants Digiday spoke with for this story asked not to be named. Google and the publisher participants have made a point of keeping the meetings hush-hush, in part because none wants to alienate smaller publishers who might feel left out of a process that already has most of them feeling sidelined. Beeler said participants of the new group were selected because they are “in a position to have some influence as things get rolled out.” He also said meetings with a larger group of people might become too unwieldy to be productive.

“We are committed to open dialogue with publishers of all sizes as they develop strategies for the transition to a more privacy-centric web,” said a Google spokesperson. “We take every opportunity to engage with publishers and to listen, share information and solicit feedback on how we can build for a better future.”

A more accessible forum than the wonky W3C

Many industry players criticize Google for wielding too much power in the transition away from third-party cookies and development of new tech intended to replace them in a more privacy-preserving way. The aspects of that work that Google has made public have happened inside the W3C, or Worldwide Web Consortium. The international web standards body serves as host for engineers from companies including Google, Facebook and other ad tech firms hashing out complex elements of Privacy Sandbox tech development through jargon-laden web forums. 

Although some bigger publishers such as The New York Times and Hearst have dispatched staff to W3C meetings and forums, many publishers find the environment an impenetrable labyrinth, keeping them away despite handwringing over how the tech developed by W3C participants will affect their businesses. 

“The W3C is very technical,” said a participant of the recently-formed publisher group who represents smaller media outlets and spoke on condition of anonymity.  

Rather than circumventing the W3C process, insiders said Google’s recent monthly meetings with publishers (which, of course, take place on Google Meet) are intended to provide a more accessible setting for publishing execs to learn about what’s in development, voice concerns and perhaps eventually acclimate to the idea of having their own representatives play more active roles in Privacy Sandbox efforts at the W3C.

Google itself has lamented a lack of engagement from publishers in its Privacy Sandbox development. Chetna Bindra, who leads Google’s product development for third-party cookie replacement in its Chrome browser division, told this reporter for The Drum in November 2020 the company was “hoping for more participation” from publishers “as we come up with a workable solution for everyone that is privacy-forward.”

What’s on the agenda — and what isn’t

Thus far, meetings have entailed discussions of technologies such as FLoC — Google’s recently-tested but evolving cookieless ad targeting method and how it might affect publishers, for instance in relation to creating inventory packages. First-party sets — which would affect how domains owned by the same publisher are defined in context of data collection and use via web browsers like Google Chrome — were a topic on the agenda at the July meeting. But the first half-hour was devoted to discussion of Google’s morphing timeline for rollout of Privacy Sandbox tech. 

“A lot of these conversations are just like level-setting,” said the unnamed smaller publisher representative. 

Beeler, who also helps run a similar recently-formed group of EU-based publishers meeting with Google to discuss the same sorts of issues, said he and other publisher reps help determine the meeting agendas. 

Still, some topics that could have significant impacts for publishers continue to be relegated to engineer-centric spaces. For instance, participants in the new meetups said changes to FLoC which Google is mulling and were recently presented at an engineering research event have yet to make the publisher meeting agenda. 

“It always amazes me how these things get reported in random tweets, blog posts or non-endemic conferences like an engineering research event,” said another exec participating in the new publisher meetings with Google who asked not to be named.

Andbox, the esports organization that operates the NYXL, is owned by former New York Mets owner Jeff Wilpon, and New York spirit is a core part of its DNA. “I heard that New York had a team,” said Tiffany Chang, leader of 5 Deadly Venoms, an NYXL supporters’ crew. “And of course, I have to cheer for a New York team.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Andbox doubled down on its connection to New York. It hosted virtual watch parties that recreated elements of the in-person experience, including drop-ins from faraway players and team staff, and developed a virtual “T-shirt cannon” that gave participating fans opportunities to acquire NYXL merchandise by popping onto the team’s social media channels between games. 

Andbox wasn’t the only hometown esports org to pivot to digital versions of real-life experiences during the pandemic. The Pittsburgh Pirates- and Steelers-backed Pittsburgh Knights developed a custom matchmaking and queueing tool for its Discord server, giving its fans in Pittsburgh an opportunity to meet each other and forge local friendships while maintaining a healthy social distance. Eventually, the organization plans to host an “all-star game” to celebrate the best players in Pittsburgh who use its matchmaking tool. “We wanted to stay Pittsburgh-focused,” said Knights president James O’Connors. “We wanted this to be for the city.”

According to Andbox head of partnerships Kai Mathey, offering merchandise with strong New York sensibilities (such as its New-Yorker-style NYXL tote bag) was a significant way for the organization to express its connection to New York during the pandemic — a strategy reflected by the throng of jersey-wearing fans at BrookLAN. Baking local flavor into merchandise is a significant facet of the Knights’ strategy as well; the team’s merchandise is directly based on Pittsburgh’s notable buildings and landmarks, “because we believe that Pittsburgh is so foundational in who the Knights are,” said Angelica Sirabella, the team’s director of marketing and communications.

In addition to merchandising, localization allows teams to directly and organically connect fans with their brand partners. Though Immortals Gaming Club is a global brand, the LA-based organization partnered with Southern California Toyota at the height of the pandemic in May 2020 to host the IMT University Showdown, a collegiate League of Legends tournament featuring Southern Californian schools. “Having them be local and having that flexibility to produce some of that localized content took what was inherently a national or global entity and highlighted elements that would only be possible if they were located within that region,” said Brian Banks, a vp at Davis Elen Advertising, which worked with Toyota on the campaign. 

Maintaining a hometown connection during the pandemic has allowed some esports organizations to collaborate with more local brand partners as well. “Part of the gaming lifestyle is to go to [regional food chain] Sheetz, get some food and keep gaming,” O’Connor said. “And so I think we just tell that story, and we’re going to continue to do so.”

It remains up for debate whether localization in esports will pay off in the long run. Still, for organizations such as Andbox, Immortals and the Pittsburgh Knights, staying close to their local communities throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has given them expanded merchandising and partnership opportunities while teaching them how to translate in-person events into virtual activations. If the delta variant forces the world back into lockdown, these organizations are now well-positioned to keep their hometown fans satisfied.

“Localizing things was our biggest challenge, but it forced us to be creative,” said Immortals vp of marketing Max Bass. “And I think that’s where some of our best ideas lived.”

Server-side conversion tracking allows ad tech servers — like Facebook’s and Google’s — to connect directly to the servers that host an advertiser’s or retailer’s site. In the same way that a cookie or tracking pixel does today, the process sends information from an advertiser’s site to those tech platforms’ servers, telling them that someone clicked a product page or bought something, essentially showing that an exposure to an ad led someone to convert.

So, if it does what pixels and cookies already do, what’s new here?

Bypassing the browser. The fact that the advertisers’ server is communicating directly with Facebook or Google without the web browser getting in the way is what’s new. Those cookies and pixels — which must be set on the browser — are already not working as well as they used to and eventually will stop working all together. This is a way to circumvent browser blockades to ensure that ad platforms can access the data advertisers rely on to measure campaign performance now and in the future when a website’s server can no longer set trackers on the user’s browser. The browser is also referred to as the “client,” as in “client-side” tracking.

“Pixels and cookies still work for now, but you can also say, ‘I also want to send the same data to the server,’” said  Farhad Divecha, founder of UK-based digital marketing agency Accuracast.

What ads can I use this for?

In the Google and Facebook contexts, the types of ads that are measured varies. Google’s server-side tracking allows advertisers to track how ad exposure ties to conversion for inventory bought in all types of channels including Google or Facebook ads, ads bought through demand-side platforms and via e-commerce platforms like Shopify. Facebook’s Conversions API, on the other hand, is used for tracking ads purchased through Facebook. 

Ad tech companies including Mixpanel, TransUnion’s Signal and Twilio Segment also offer server-side conversion tracking for ads purchased from any ad seller.

OK, but how does the ad platform know an ad exposure led to a conversion?

Well, the process requires a piece of data to match an ad exposure to a conversion, so the advertiser has to pass along an identifying piece of data of some kind — an email address, phone number, IP address or some data point associated with the person who made a purchase or converted — to Google or Facebook. And, Google or Facebook can make the connection because it’s likely that person who saw the ad and converted is logged in to those platforms.

Isn’t this just an old-school audience matching?

Sure, firms like LiveRamp have enabled advertisers to upload offline or online data to gauge ad performance for years. But this server-side conversion method requires that data linkage to happen via a direct communication between the big tech platforms and the advertiser through their servers.

Wait a minute. So, now these platforms want more data?

Depending on how they implement the connection — either through a partner like Shopify or using their own in-house servers — advertisers have varying levels of control over what information is passed to Google and Facebook. 

“The server-side option was built as part of our ongoing work to give advertisers more control over their users’ data,” said a Google spokesperson who noted that the company has rolled out regular updates enabling various aspects of server-side conversion tracking since launching server-side conversion tagging a year ago.

Facebook, which refers to its server-side conversion tracking as CAPI, or Conversions API, also says it is designed to give advertisers more control over what data they share and when the mechanism is implemented separately from the Facebook tracking pixel.

Ummm, what about privacy?

To look at it one way, server-side tracking keeps certain data out of the browser — especially sensitive stuff that advertisers want to make sure is secure. And ad agencies, which are encouraging their advertiser clients to implement server-side conversion tracking, said the information is encrypted.

In general, brands implementing server-side conversion tracking are relying on existing privacy policies and terms and conditions that note that people’s personal information might be shared with marketing partners, particularly if they already share data for purposes such as audience matching with Facebook and Google, said James Parker, chief solutions officer of data and planning at digital agency Jellyfish. 

“Given the general practice of sharing data with the ad tech vendors right now, most marketers have covered this in one way or another already,” Parker said. However, in some cases, other requirements for people’s consent could prevent the necessary server-side data sharing. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation “can be quite a roadblock,” said Parker.

So, is this a way for Facebook and Google to get around Apple’s privacy updates?

Not quite. While agency execs including Parker and Divecha say advertisers that have implemented server-side conversion tracking are detecting conversions they may have missed as a result of tracker deprecation, it won’t fill in the gaps Apple tracking changes have created.  

“There are still details [advertisers] can’t get,” said Ty Martin, founder of Audience Kitchen, which helps advertisers uncover targetable audiences on Facebook and Instagram. “It’s still an incomplete solution.”

For three years, El DoDo relied primarily on pre- and mid-roll ads on Facebook and YouTube to achieve this profitability, Kim said, without providing exact growth figures. The annual growth rate for this business is 119% year over year, according to the company, which did not provide CPM rates.

“For the advertising business, scale is king. So we knew that we had to have some kind of stopgap measure before building a scale to be able to attract advertising partners [to the] El Dodo channel,” Kim said.

In June, El Dodo claimed it earned 800 million views between Facebook and YouTube, citing internal figures. According to Tubular Labs, however, El Dodo garnered 188 million views on Facebook and 37 million on YouTube for a total of about 225 million views that month.

That month, Tubular Labs also ranked The Dodo as the 20th most viewed creator in the world across all social media platforms, aside from Instagram, which the data analyst no longer analyzes.

All of El Dodo’s content is originally from The Dodo with written translations and captions of the audio interviews. All of the Spanish translations are written in a conversational tone by El Dodo editors in keeping with other coverage areas, according to Nicole Hendrickson, vp of social at The Dodo.

While the translation strategy works well for a media company that does not have the resources to build an entire bureau in another country — which has not always been the most successful strategy for other digital publishers, like BuzzFeed — there are cultural nuances that get looked over by redubbing the content that was initially created for a different audience, said Nick Cicero, vp of strategy at streaming and social intelligence company Conviva.

The Dodo has also recorded some interviews in Spanish as well as in English. El Dodo also collaborates with Spanish-speaking followers and influencers to tell their stories on Facebook Stories or in the community pages.

In the fall, however, El Dodo will release its first Spanish series as an extension of its English-language series called “Faith Restored.” It will be distributed on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok and will cover animal rescues, a topic that Hendrickson said gets a lot of views from the target audience already.

El Dodo has a five-person team that started with a platform manager and later added a community manager and three video editors and producers. While the plan is to continue growing the team, Kim said that El Dodo’s staff will remain based in the U.S. and will work on cultivating partnerships in other countries in Central and South America with shelters and content creators. As Kim’s team grows, it will train colleagues on content that resonates.

El Dodo is starting to experiment on new platforms as well, including TikTok where it currently has under 1,000 followers, with a goal of reaching an audience like The Dodo’s 1.4 million followers. Content on both channels is personality and character-driven, crucial for platform growth, said Cicero.

What’s even more crucial for growing a new foreign language brand on TikTok and other social media platforms is having on-screen talent and behind-the-camera creators who understand the audience that they’re making this content for, Cicero added.

The focus for the next growth phase will remain on digital video and content production, but Kim said she expects the other revenue lines that The Dodo has honed over the past seven years — book licensing, OTT extensions, events, and even a pet insurance licensing deal — will eventually be applied to El Dodo in due time as well.  Kim did not say how much money these individual revenue channels brought in. 

“El Dodo is The Dodo, just a year or two behind,” said Kim.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

Why did you choose to go into the office?

I never felt comfortable working at home. There are lots of distractions. I’m sort of a social person, and I always liked going into the office. All of my friends were there. Then the pandemic happened, and it was bad for my mental health. I live alone. I really missed going into the office. I really needed to not be home all day. I will take a nap, I will sleep, I will watch TV. I don’t want to do this forever, if I don’t have to.

I was actually kind of excited about going in not all the time, because I found I was starting to enjoy not having to get dressed and stuff like that. But I was excited to have a place to escape to. I started my job during the pandemic, so I did want to actually meet people in person.

What was it like going into the office for the first few times?

I had to relearn small talk. I had to be perceived by new people. Those aren’t things we’ve been doing much recently. We all did the “Wow, you’re tall” and “Wow, you’re not” kind of dance — the height game. It was a fun icebreaker. Figuring out how to be productive in an office setting was a relearning experience. In the old days, I would just stick my headphones on, but I felt a sense of obligation to not do that, to get to know people in person. Other people wanted to catch up with people in person too.

Is there anything you didn’t expect about the transitioning from working from home?

It’s harder than I expected. I’m so removed from my routine and needing to get up at a certain time and getting out of the house. It’s very hard to get back into that mode. I thought it would be so fun and a ceremonious moment of everyone reuniting, but barely anyone is going in because everything is still weird. Things are still up in the air. A lot of people are still very anxious about the virus, which is fair.

Do you see yourself going into the office regularly?

I was in the office a few days ago, and no one else was there for most of the time, so it was still kind of strange. At first I wanted to go in twice a week — and I did manage that for one week — but otherwise I’ve been going in about once a week.

When we first started this voluntary phase, you didn’t have to wear a mask in our office as long as you’re vaccinated, which was nice. I thought, ‘OK great, I don’t have to be here and wear a mask all day.’ But now, with the delta variant picking up and some COVID cases in the building, we are required to wear masks and do social distancing. So now it’s not an attractive option. 

I don’t think I’ll be going in much, unless I have to do something, until they drop the mask stuff. I think it’s good at the moment, to try to be protective. Maybe once things calm down, I’ll go back, but I don’t see myself going in next week, for example.

Do you think not having a lot of other coworkers there when you come into the office has an impact on your interest in going back?

At the beginning, I thought, “This is great, to be able to leave the house and socialize again,” but things are still so strange and inconsistent at the moment that it’s kind of frustrating because it’s still not adding any normalcy or consistency to my life. I’m looking for some kind of consistency in reopening the office.

Obviously we want the flexibility, but it is weird when it’s so flexible and open and very possible that no one else will be there at the office and there is no unified thing to encourage people to come in at the same time. Even if there’s one other person in the office, I’m not getting any energy from it, so I’m just there wearing shoes and pants.

What do you think could get more people to come into the office voluntarily?

The company needs to incentivize it. There needs to be snacks, or a real push or directive or mandate, for people to come in. I do like the more hybrid method, where I can work from home some days and from the office some days. Some days I get to sleep in and not wear pants.

I do wonder: when will the office open and when will my job be what it’s supposed to be? I don’t want this to be my normal.