Month: September 2021

“Tesla changed the game. Their no-dealer model has really affected what consumers expect,” said Scott Schwartz, managing director, business lead at Omnicom’s PHD. “They don’t advertise. What they do well is they foster fandom — they’re creating experiences, moments and this fandom. And it pushes [the entire auto] industry to figure out how to tap into a little bit of that magic. It’s going be hard to recreate what they did, but we can look at their playbook a bit.” Among other accounts, PHD handles Volkswagen’s media.

That magic, it seems, is being sought more and more on digital channels, at the expense of some traditional media. “Manufacturers are working on building brands with long life cycles, which tends to require sustained [ad] spending, with more of a digital skew,” said Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence at GroupM. With used cars in some cases generating more value than new cars, dealers are looking to reach prospective buyers online, which Wieser said can come at the expense of local broadcasters. 

“In certain times and channels, the consumer wants to be inspired or educated or assured. We go beyond the channel mix to focus more on the consumer journey, and right now that journey is more digital, streaming, and influencer focused than ever before,” said Kimberley Gardiner, senior vp of marketing for Volkswagen of America. “Given the supply issues and all the production challenges in the auto space right now, channels that allow for maximum flexibility in regards to both flighting and creative certainly have an advantage.”

The shift toward digital in all its forms — search, CTV, website — seems indisputable to Gordon Borrell, founder and CEO of media analysts Borrell Associates. Borrell’s own research shows that in 2019, of the $8.4 billion local and regional auto dollars spent, 65 percent was spent on digital. In 2021, Borrell forecasts that, of the $7.1 billion expected to be spent by auto on local/regional, 73 percent will be on digital. 

Yes, you read that right, local auto dollars are expected to drop over time, and all sources reached for this story pointed to the consolidation happening among auto dealers, the result of more car buyers choosing to forgo the dealer experience in favor of pre-ordering cars that are customized to their needs — even if that means having to wait a few months to get the car.  

Phil Case, president and chief client officer at marketing services agency Max Connect, said he’s seeing slightly reduced budgets with some of his auto clients, as well as instances of manufacturers opting not to send new cars to dealers, beyond what’s needed for the showroom. Still, dealerships aren’t going away anytime soon. “We’re a decade or two away from that — 90 percent of cars are still purchased from dealerships,” said Case.   

There’s also a lot of unspent consumer demand that spells promise for the auto industry, added Case. “There’s $12 trillion in consumer spending power, and those [carmakers] that embrace changed consumer habits will benefit from that pent-up demand,” he said. 

In the end, the changing consumer expectations will drive the most change, said Amy Lanzi, executive vp, North America practice lead with Publicis Commerce. “The auto industry is ripe for disruption when it comes to the shopping experience. Brands like Carvana and Tesla have made the process as easy as buying your favorite product on Walmart or Amazon,” she said. “At some point in the near future the experience needs to be about matching a car to a person like the algorithms on marketplaces today that predict what is best for you.” 

Color by numbers

Borrell Associates, which analyzes media and marketing, mostly with an eye toward local, just issued its Local Agency Survey on Sept. 9. Conducted between April and June, 2021 with 701 respondents, major findings include:

— Social media was the top-ranked media service for clients in 2020, at 77 percent; the highest traditional media was radio, ranked fourth at 69 percent.

—Within social media work, Facebook remains the most used social platform at 90 percent, with 58 percent of respondents saying it’s very or extremely effective. Twitter usage dropped from 45 percent in the prior survey to 39 percent, while TikTok rose from 7 percent to 17 percent over the same span.

—Finally, most agencies that buy TV also buy advanced TV features such as CTV and digital video; 71 percent of those advanced TV budgets came from other media, mostly traditional TV.  

Takeoff & landing

• Unilever last week announced it kept the lion’s share of its $3.3 billion media business with WPP/GroupM’s Mindshare, which will handle all media in the U.S., as well as major markets in Europe, South Asia and China. Omnicom’s OMG will handle Canada, German-speaking Europe, the Middle East, Africa and select Asian markets. IPG gets Russia and two other East European markets, Latin American and Greece. And finally, Havas Media Group will handle France, Spain and Japan. 
• Clare Chapman has joined Dentsu as CEO of Carat UK, moving from GroupM’s Essence where she was most recently executive vp and head of media for EMEA. 
• Digital agency SYZYGY landed fitness product developer TRX as a client, and will be responsible for expanding customer acquisition through e-commerce and direct-to-consumer work in both the U.S. and U.K.

Direct quote

“What I found on the agency side … I wanted more transparency in the ecosystem. I had clients who were frustrated by how opaque it was — I was frustrated on their behalf … and I felt there was an opportunity for a player to be out there who could really open the kimono and A. make clients feel comfortable in terms of how their money was being spent, but also B. share that data with clients and agencies so that they could really understand what was happening in terms of how algorithms were working, how bids were working, where they were winning and losing, so they could optimize what they were doing.”

— Kasha Cacy, global CEO of agency group Engine, talking with BeetTV.

Speed reading

• Though it’s a small agency win, I looked into how embracing DE&I efforts helped a North Carolina agency beat out several competitors to win a new account. 
• Digiday media reporter Sara Guaglione covered the IAB’s Podcast upfront, and cataloged the challenges to podcast advertising, from the limitations of host-read ads to measurement challenges. 
• If you haven’t watched it yet, laugh and learn from Digiday senior media editor Tim Peterson’s WTF video explaining what Ad-ID is. You won’t regret it. 

The key hits:

• While its COVID-killing properties have been debunked, ivermectin’s accepted uses for humans complicate combating misinformation about it.
• The rules companies like Google and Facebook have put in place to prevent the spread of ivermectin misinformation and stop companies from monetizing from it have been enforced haphazardly at best.
• Because the biggest social media platforms have attempted to counteract ivermectin misinformation by pointing to the very health agencies many vaccine skeptics question, their approaches may actually reinforce distrust of government authorities, egging on interest even more.

Ivermectin gradually emerged last year as a topic of conversation in anti-vaxxer, natural medicine and right-wing political circles via social media livestreams, videos and other viral content. But it’s not just social media platforms that have buoyed the rise of ivermectin, establishing its credence among its proponents. Hype has been fueled by the appearance of one of its primary cheerleaders, Dr. Pierre Kory — the de facto leader of a group of self-proclaimed “world renowned Critical Care physician/scholars” — at a Senate hearing and on the popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast. And Wall Street Journal opinion pieces have questioned the failure of federal health agencies to take advantage of ivermectin’s questionable effects for treating COVID. 

Prescribed and distributed legally around the world for years, it is commonly used for veterinary purposes as a dewormer for livestock or small pets, prompting several reports highlighting its equine uses while downplaying its longtime sometimes-lifesaving use for humans. But currently there is no conclusive research that shows ivermectin works to reduce the harms of COVID-19, and off-label use of the drug could have harmful side effects. 

“The case of ivermectin should probably not come as a surprise as it repeats a pattern we saw earlier with hydroxychloroquine,” said Katherine Ognyanova, associate professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University and co-lead of the COVID States Project, a joint research initiative of Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University and Northwestern University. “Experts are recommending that they not be used to treat COVID, while public figures with no medical training are promoting their use. So this not a new scenario — we have seen this type of public health threat before. Even so, we may not be as well prepared to deal with it as we should be,” she said.

Why the ivermectin issue isn’t a simple misinformation problem

Cautionary labels abound on posts about ivermectin. When Joe Rogan was trending in relation to ivermectin recently on Twitter, the right panel of the site included a notice citing the Food and Drug Administration, stating that ivermectin is not an authorized for treatment for COVID-19.

A YouTube video from 2020 featuring an interview with Kory regarding “Emerging Evidence For Use of Ivermectin in the Prophylaxis and Treatment of COVID,” is labeled with a notice about COVID-19 facts from the CDC, which links to the agency’s page proclaiming, “Get Vaccinated!”

Facebook points to its use of labels that link to what it considers legitimate COVID information. When Dr. Simone Gold — a public face of anti-vaccine group America’s Frontline Doctors and another prominent proponent of both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin — has posted about topics such as vaccine side-effects and coronavirus treatments on Facebook, those posts have been marked with notices referencing the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, citing the World Health Organization. Facebook said it has labeled more than 190 million pieces of COVID content rated by its fact-checking partners. 

Along with Merck, an ivermectin manufacturer, the FDA and Centers for Disease Control have warned against its use to treat COVID-19. The WHO has cautioned against using it to treat coronavirus outside of clinical trials, and the National Institutes of Health said the jury is still out on its effectiveness as a COVID-19 treatment. Meanwhile, poison control centers across the U.S. recently have reported increases in overdoses and people experiencing adverse effects from using the drug off-label as a supplement to or even a replacement for to the vaccine.

But ivermectin is recognized by government health authorities as a safe treatment for human parasitic infections such as River Blindness. And although believers in ivermectin’s COVID-killing properties have cited now-debunked studies in support of their theories, research of ivermectin as a possible COVID-19 treatment is underway today at Oxford University.

It’s those nuances that lie in the cracks between outright false claims and curiosity or genuine discussions about the need for more robust studies for ivermectin’s use as a low-cost COVID treatment that plague social media content moderation algorithms and human monitors. 

“Drawing the line between potentially harmful claims about ivermectin versus what could be a beneficial discussion is really hard,” said Scott Babwah Brennen, a senior policy associate at the Center on Science and Technology Policy at Duke University. “This isn’t people drinking bleach; there is at least some reason to discuss it, so moderating content is really difficult and it isn’t as clear cut as other examples of misinformation,” he said. Still, he emphasized that he thinks social media platforms should be held accountable for contributing to the spread of misinformation even when it comes to complex topics like ivermectin.

Another risk: reinforcing distrust

Ultimately, marking information with notices citing public health authorities might backfire, actually reinforcing distrust in the vaccines and, in turn, solidifying support for unproven treatments such as ivermectin. “One of the key factors at play here is trust in institutions,” said Ognyanova. “Americans who do not trust the government, mainstream media and the healthcare industry are more likely to be vaccine-resistant, more likely to believe health misinformation and to ignore warnings by medical experts,” she said.

When Facebook, Google and Twitter remove posts and hashtags or slap a warning label on them, it actually has a counterintuitive effect, said Isaac Simpson, associate creative director at PrecisionEffect, a branding and marketing agency that runs social media influencer campaigns for emerging medical tech clients. “The more alienated these influencers become from the mainstream, the more they’re censored by the Googles and Facebooks,” he said.

And, because the fundamental basis behind efforts to promote ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment “is the theory that a global medical establishment is pushing for widespread usage of the vaccine, both for the purposes of control and profit,” said Simpson, “This censorship actually helps to makes their message even more digestible and convincing to the vaccine skeptic, even if the message itself is invalid or unsupported by evidence,” he said. “The more ‘authority’ used to debunk it or question it, often the stronger it becomes.”

That apparent disconnect may have been exacerbated by an FDA tweet in late August that not only failed to take people who are curious about ivermectin seriously, it demeaned their intelligence, suggesting that they don’t know the difference between ivermectin for human use and the stuff for livestock that comes in a tube and is sold a farm supply stores. “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” quipped the tweet, which featured an image of a vet with a horse. 

“This doesn’t exactly address the informational divide, or the humans on one side of it, with respect or understanding,” said Simpson. “Rather, to me, it feels like it’s mocking them and will likely only make vaccine skeptics all the more certain about their reactive position,” he said. He argued that “What’s needed are more influencer voices that can acknowledge the gap, take it seriously, and de-escalate the culture war through respectful recognition of the uncertainty of an unprecedented pandemic situation, rather than insisting on aggressive certainty.”

How ivermectin rose to fame inside — and outside — social media

A report finding that just 12 people are responsible for nearly two-thirds of anti-vaccine content percolating through social platforms prompted members of Congress to call for the removal of those so-called “disinformation dozen” from Facebook and Twitter. The thing is, some people on that list do not appear to have pushed ivermectin, according to a Digiday analysis of the dozen’s social media posts. But perhaps more notably — ivermectin pushers including Kory, Gold and Rogan — are not on that list. Thus, merely removing those dozen accounts may not have affected the gradual spread of pro-ivermectin messaging.

Kory’s testimony at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing in December 2020 helped launch the slow-drip discussion around the drug. His message and that of the other “physician/scholars” in his Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance collective revolves around a cocktail of treatments for managing hospitalized COVID patients. Their so-called I-MASK+ Protocol calls for daily immune-system-boosting doses of Vitamin D, zinc and weekly dosing of ivermectin as preventative measures intended to stave off COVID-19. 

The chair of that Senate committee, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson co-wrote an opinion piece published in the print and online editions of The Wall Street Journal this April touting the safety records of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine — another drug the FDA has warned against as a COVID treatment — arguing that federal agencies should devote their efforts to confirming results of research involving repurposed drugs “instead of chasing new, more expensive drugs.” The WSJ in July ran another opinion piece purporting the promise of ivermectin as a COVID treatment co-written by a Stanford University research fellow and pharma industry consultant titled, “Why Is the FDA Attacking a Safe, Effective Drug?”

Talk of ivermectin also has been propelled by entities that, though fueled by social media, exist outside it. A livestreamed “World Ivermectin Day” event in July drew thousands of viewers to watch speakers from across the globe, including Kory. 

Yet Rogan has done much to move the topic deeper into popular cultural zeitgeist. He had Kory along with another ivermectin backer, evolutionary theorist Bret Weinstein, on his show in June. In part because of their influence, he took ivermectin recently to treat the virus when he contracted it, telling his podcast audience that he thinks it helped him recover. “CNN was saying that ‘I’m a distributor of misinformation,’” he said during the Sept. 7 episode of his show, wondering aloud if he should sue the media giant. “They’re trying to make it seem as if, like, I’m doing some wacky shit that’s completely ineffective.” 

Google and Facebook are not reining in ivermectin ads

That hype from the contrarian hero seems to have had a significant impact on interest in the drug. Rogan told his audience on Sept. 2 that he had tested positive for COVID-19 and was taking ivermectin. That same week, Google search queries for the term “ivermectin” peaked, according to Google search trends data, hitting a high point between Aug. 29 and Sept. 4, after rising steadily since July 4. 

And, despite efforts to tamp down phony ivermectin claims on YouTube and Facebook, that boost in interest in the drug has generated ad revenue for Google and Facebook. Indeed, the two largest digital ad sellers are not only collecting ad dollars from increased interest in ivermectin, they are making it easy for people to get a prescription for its off-label use.

• A simple Google search for keywords such as “ivermectin prescription” results in paid ads, including one from Push Health, which has advertised its service to “Request an ivermectin prescription online and get ivermectin medication near you” since at least August 15, according to multiple Google ivermectin-related searches conducted by Digiday.
• On Facebook, ads from telehealth platform Seven Cells specifically promote its sales of ivermectin. But there’s a nuance in the language that seem to help them skirt Facebook’s rules. Though the ads mention the drug by name, they merely note that, “Ivermectin is being studied as an effective supplement to help combat certain viral infections and reducing symptoms related to C-19,” and encourage people to “Get treatment today!”
• Those SevenCells ads have run on Facebook since August 27 and were still up on September 10 as this story was being reported. The SevenCells.com homepage features a special notice promoting ivermectin which links to a product page where a bottle of 20 capsules costs $165. Because the drug is in such high demand, states the page, “Pricing for raw materials continue to go up.”
• Amazon also is running Google search ads linking to its online pharmacy homepage when people search for “ivermectin prescription,” though those ads do not promote ivermectin by name. And, like a warning on a pack of smokes, when people search for ivermectin in the Amazon Pharmacy, it turns up a page featuring a warning label at the top: “The FDA advises against the use of ivermectin to treat or prevent COVID-19.” 

Google and Facebook do have advertising rules in place that address ivermectin in particular. When asked whether it has rules regarding ivermectin advertising or content, Google told Digiday its advertising policies prohibit ads that promote harmful health claims, or content that relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus, including claims promoting unapproved treatments or cures for Covid-19 such as ivermectin. 

The company also said it removes content that recommends the use of Ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19, or content that categorically claims Ivermectin is an effective treatment for the virus, though it may make exceptions, for instance, when content mentions ivermectin in the context of clinical trials.

And despite the SevenCells ads running on its platform, Facebook told Digiday it removes content that attempts to buy, sell, donate or ask for ivermectin and said it does not allow ads promoting ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.

Flaws of legislative fixes

Some lawmakers believe government intervention is the right prescription for curing the ills of COVID-19 related misinformation. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat and vocal critic of the increasing power of the big tech platforms, along with Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat from New Mexico, in April asked Facebook and Twitter to remove the accounts of the disinformation dozen, even while people who weren’t on that list including Kory and Gold were promoting ivermectin as a possible vaccine alternative.

The two legislators in July co-sponsored the Health Misinformation Act, a bill that would remove the legal protections afforded to the tech platforms by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act during a public health emergency. If passed, it would hold them liable when their algorithms facilitate the spread of health misinformation — as defined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, relevant federal agencies and outside experts. 

But it’s just not clear that such a reform would have altered the trajectory of the rise of ivermectin, said Cathy Gellis, an independent San Francisco-based internet lawyer who has opposed other proposed alterations to Section 230 intended to assuage societal ills amplified by social media platforms. In fact, she said it could have forced even more promotion of the still-questionable treatment. 

“Sen. Klobuchar’s bill is designed to empower [the White House] to decide which are the favored messages, but that means if this law had been in effect during the last administration, that administration could just as easily have decided to condition social media platforms’ Section 230 protection on facilitating only the pro-ivermectin messages and suppressing the anti-ivermectin messages,” she told Digiday. “In other words, rather than serving public health, this bill itself could cause it to be undermined.”

“There are more people that are wanting easy ways to shop for things that inspire them on social,” Durkin said. “Tying that into our TikTok strategy made this a perfect fit for us.” 

This next phase of Walmart’s TikTok strategy leverages both paid and organic content, tapping into TikTok influencers, trending content and producing editorialized videos around do-it-yourself decor with Walmart products and celebrity home tours. The TikTok channel, which launched mid-July, has amassed more than 130,000 followers and nearly 400,000 likes. On its main brand account, Walmart has at least 1 million followers and has racked up nearly 5 million likes. 

Interior design was an untapped market on TikTok with no single retailer heading up the space, giving Walmart room to capitalize on that audience, according to Kelsey Arnold, head of U.S. brand partnerships at Kyra Media.

“Editorially, we’re looking at our strategy for next year and finding different editorial pillars that we can tap into,” Arnold said. “Everything will be home-centric, but just other pillars that we can tap into to make sure that we’re meeting these people where they’re at.”

Durkin declined to say how much Walmart spent working with Kyra Media for its interior home initiative. Per Kantar, Walmart spent nearly $300 million on media during the first quarter of this year, compared to $96 million this time last year. Those numbers don’t include Walmart’s social media spending since Kantar doesn’t track it. 

For social spend, social intelligence and analytics platform BrandTotal said that at least half of Walmart’s digital ad dollars go toward Facebook. The remaining budget is spread across YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn — but not TikTok as BrandTotal doesn’t track TikTok spending.

An active presence on TikTok is key, explained brand analyst and co-founder of Metaforce Allen Adamson. But in terms of brand awareness, it’s less about how often a brand appears on the platform, and more about how well the brand appears on the platform that will lead audiences to associate editorialized videos with the brand.

“I liken it to Super Bowl ads,” Adamson said. “People remember the funny commercial, but have no clue who it’s for and it doesn’t make you want to buy a product because it has nothing to do with the product.”

It’s quite a stretch for big, traditional retailers to win shoppers on a channel like TikTok where culture moves fast, Adamson said. In Walmart’s case, they’re on the right track by firing on all cylinders. But the more the retailer stays true to its brand, the better, he said.

“I don’t think they should shoot for the home run. They should go for lots of singles,” he said of the retailer’s current strategy. “Because if they go for the home run, it’s likely they’ll do something so irrelevant to who they are that it won’t make a difference.”

The newly blossomed partnership with Kyra Media only builds on Walmart’s already massive TikTok footprint. The global retailer initially launched on TikTok back in 2019, hosting live stream shopping events and branding songs — it even encouraged employees to post while at work, per previous Digiday reporting. Looking ahead, Walmart plans to continue to build out its live shoppable experience across social media. 

“We have to figure out how our customer is picking up the phone throughout the course of the day,” Durkin said. “We have to embrace that and figure out the right way to provide the experience that the customers are looking for and a way that adds value to their lives.” 

Many of these users are gamers.

In addition to the 30 million monthly users who play games on the app via Snap Games, gaming content is a constant presence on Snapchat’s Discover page. The platform has launched almost 60 new gaming and esports shows on Discover this year. “Snapchat offers gaming and esports brands a powerful way to reach and engage with our valuable, mobile-native Gen-Z and millennial audience,” said Clayton Peters, head of U.S. verticals at Snap.

Upcomer, an esports news site that launched in April 2021, has experienced the benefits of Snapchat’s increasing gaming audience firsthand. The company’s video department produces two Discover-native series: “Livestream Fails” and “Rage Quit,” both round-ups of amusing or noteworthy clips taken from Twitch or YouTube streams. 

Following its release in May, the second episode of “Rage Quit” quickly drew more than 3 million views, and the two series collectively have over 190,000 subscribers, according to Upcomer director of video content Colin McNeil. “We’ve seen a lot of success on YouTube — the growth trajectory is like this,” McNeil said, pantomiming an exponential curve. “And yet, compared to Snapchat, it’s peanuts. Snapchat is explosive.”

McNeil views Snapchat as fertile and largely untilled soil for high-quality episodic gaming content. “I don’t think that a lot of people have fully realized that Snapchat has curated, produced, episodic content,” McNeil said. “So when we create something that’s got a high level of production, or that is episodic and reliable, it’s like — ‘oh, wow, this is something interesting. This is special.’”

Furthermore, McNeil said, he’s found it easier to work with Snapchat than other video platforms, despite the fact that Snapchat requires partners to put their Discover shows through a pitch-and-approval process. “We’ve never had difficulty getting something posted, whereas speaking or working with YouTube is a nightmare,” he said. “Even if you have a YouTube rep, which not everyone has, they have limited utility, limited ability to help you.”

And Esports organizations are also beginning to take advantage of Snapchat’s gaming audience.

Prominent orgs such as FaZe Clan have brought their creator-first strategies to the Discover page with personality-centric series such as “Challenge Sceptic” and “FaZe Fights.” Immortals Gaming Club, which recently picked up players specializing in the popular mobile title Wild Rift, is doubling down on its mobile investment by producing Discover videos and Snapchat lenses. “Snapchat’s going to be a really key part of our growth strategy,” said Immortals president and chief commercial officer Jordan Sherman.

Unlike Upcomer, Immortals’ Discover series are shared across other video platforms, including YouTube. The crux of the organization’s Snapchat strategy is its Wild-Rift-themed lenses, which Immortals created with the blessing of Riot Games. “The majority of Wild Rift players skew young, which is the piece that really makes Snapchat relevant to us,” said Immortals vp of marketing Max Bass. “I would wager that they have a large group of people in the 13 to 17-year-old range, and we believe that that young demographic is going to recognize mobile gaming.”

With esports media companies of all stripes diving into Snapchat content, advertisers are spending more money on the platform than ever before. Ad spend on Snapchat rose by 92% between the first half of 2020 and the first half of 2021, according to Standard Media Index — though these figures represent the spending of all national advertisers, not just gaming and esports brands. Snap counts endemic brands such as EA, Sony PlayStation, Activision and Epic Games among its partners, according to a Snap spokesperson.

Moreover, esports journalists, organizations and advertisers alike are beginning to take advantage of the growing gaming audience on Snapchat. As the number of active mobile gamers continues to rise, companies and brands looking to reach them are likely to continue this trend.

Indeed, opening up their applicant pools has helped the publishers to hire more people of color and to find qualified employees whose primary shortcoming may be where they live. However, although the openness to remote hiring can help diversity, it can complicate equity depending on how companies handle the salaries of employees based in and out of major cities.

Bigger net, better applicants 

Quartz opened up hiring to “all applicants everywhere” last summer, as part of the hiring policy changes implemented to improve its process as well as diversify the applicant pool and subsequently staff. “Nothing compared to how fast and strong an impact opening up our applicant pool to remote applicants had,” said Quartz CEO Zach Seward.

“The quality and diversity of applicant pools [for] most positions increased dramatically,” Seward said. People of color now make up 42% of Quartz employees overall, up from 31% last year, and 50% of its editorial employees. This improvement happened “faster than I expected,” he added.

Brian O’Keefe, deputy editor at Fortune, said hiring people in different locations “allows us to hopefully have a larger pool of candidates and find great candidates for all the hiring we are doing.” Since the beginning of the year, Fortune has hired 22 full-time employees across the company. Almost half of those new hires are people of color, and half are outside of New York, according to Mike Kiley, Fortune’s svp of HR & talent. The company recently hired people living in Arkansas, Alabama, Virginia and North Carolina.

The expanded hiring pool is not just a change prompted by the pandemic. Seward and O’Keefe cited the tight labor market and competitive media industry as reasons for casting a wider net to find talent.

While there was “hesitancy” from management at first to let people work from anywhere and hire people from anywhere — “with this war for talent, especially for our more senior level positions, it’s much easier to fill if you’re more flexible,” Kiley said. 

And it can increase the amount of qualified applicants per opening, Kiley said. Historically, a Fortune job posting might get around 50 to 150 applicants, for example. But since opening up postings to applicants around the country, Kiley has seen double the amount of applicants for some job openings. A recent job posting for the role of vp of people operations at Quartz had 800 applications from “truly qualified” candidates, Seward said.

“We were putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage” by not hiring more remote workers, Kiley said. “If you say [a job] is New York-only, you’re really limiting who you can hire.” When a media company hires in one specific market, its staff will only look like that one market, Seward said. Business and product employees across the country may not have big media companies in their area, but opening up a job to remote workers lifts that “arbitrary barrier” and brings media jobs to other regions, Seward said.

Fortune opened up a brand new office at the end of 2019, just months before the pandemic hit and everyone was forced to work from home. When employees leave their jobs and those positions need to be filled, Fortune still gives some priority to applicants in the New York area, according to Kiley, as ultimately the idea is that they could work from the new office when the pandemic dies down.

That’s not the case at Axios. “As we hire, we hire remote. We do not have any roles that are fully based in the office,” said Axios chief people officer Dominique Taylor. “We are location agnostic for the most part.” Before the pandemic, Axios had employees living in 16 states and now has employees in 31 states.

Axios is expanding its local newsletters to eight more cities this year, in places like Austin, Nashville and Philadelphia. The company hired as many people in 2021 as it did in 2020 and 2019 — about 160 people — evenly split between business and editorial. About 75% of those jobs are new roles at the company, which has a total headcount of around 400 people this year, Taylor said. Just over 40% of them are people of color, roughly on par with previous years.

Hiring outside of major cities may mean not paying major salaries

While the expanded applicant pool can help media companies improve their organizations’ level of diversity, it risks affecting the level of equity among employees. Hiring people outside of major cities does affect salary offers. Some company salaries are adjusted based on the market an employee lives in, and employees residing in areas with lower living costs often receive lower salaries. “It’s not a lot lower,” Kiley said. 

Axios and Quartz do not adjust salaries when employees relocate to another city. This might not remain the case at Axios forever, however. “We are still trying to think about what our philosophy is,” Taylor said, adding that it “doesn’t behoove us to penalize” employees for moving right now, given the ongoing pandemic. One idea is to adjust pay based on regions, such as whether an employee lives in a city, a suburb or a rural area.

“We are trying to find the best people. It’s been one of the great things we have really unlocked in the past year,” Taylor said. “The greater access we have to more candidates, the better.”

“I have not had a client ask about cookie deprecation again,” said Snowman who works with clients ranging from car dealer groups to regional banks.

Already, publishers said they are feeling the lack of momentum behind cookieless ad products and tech they’ve spent the last year or more building. “I don’t think we’re losing steam as much as there’s less urgency to migrate to them,” said Blair Tapper, senior vice president at The Independent U.S. regarding the publisher’s new contextual audience segments built from its first-party data.

Publishers, in general, took a deep sigh when Google pushed the deadline for killing off the cookies they’ve relied on to bring behavioral ad dollars to their sites. Indeed, many publishers said they just were not ready to wean themselves from cookies entirely, and there was a great deal of confusion about how Google’s cookie-replacing targeting methods would work in conjunction with their ad businesses. 

Now, though publishers said advertisers remain interested in the contextual and first-party products they’ve built — and they themselves are committed to staying the course in offering them — some worry advertisers could shy away from plans to spend on cookieless advertising. “There is a question as to whether or not advertisers are going to pull back,” said Rebeca Solórzano, svp of programmatic operations and strategy at Forbes, regarding the general conversation among publishers.

“You might see agencies and brands kicking the can [because] it’s going to affect your cost [key performance indicators] like cost per acquisition,” said Snowman, whose agency works with midmarket clients who are always concerned with quarterly business results.

Testing will wane ’till they’re backed into a corner again’

With the pressure off, publishers said advertisers have been less aggressive in terms of testing ad tech that doesn’t use third-party cookies. “It’s been more test-and-learn whereas it may have all been test,” said Tapper. 

According to one large publisher who asked not to be named, before the Google extension, marketers were spending to test cookieless ad targeting, but since then, “They’ve let loose on the throttle,” and there’s been little movement beyond the “pretty low test-and-learn budgets” that advertisers had already been planning. “We continue to see widespread interest in our cookieless solutions from marketers and agencies along with requests for test and learn frameworks,” said the exec. “However, actual spend coordinated with us directly has been minimal. It remains an information-gathering process.” The exec did not provide details on actual spending amounts.

Snowman said she’s seeing low test budgets from her advertiser clients, too, despite having expected that spending to have picked up to 30% to 50% when the original cookie deadline of early 2022 had neared. “We still aren’t anywhere close to 50% cookieless testing, in general,” Snowman said.

“We’re probably only at 10% and, really, the analysis is only interesting to the trading team and account manager,” she added, noting her clients “right now seem more concerned with general business results.”

The testing pullback doesn’t necessarily result in an overall ad budget pullback, though, said Tapper. She said the majority of spending by advertisers on The Independent U.S. has remained constant, although some advertisers have asked to adjust the amount of money allocated to testing cookieless audience targeting, so it is “a line item as part of a bigger solution.”

Scott Messer, svp media at Leaf Group, which owns publications including Livestrong and eHow, agreed that marketers who had already planned to test new targeting methods won’t shut it down. “If they had a test and it was ready, they’re doing it,” he said. “The difference is that people might actually finish their test.”

While her clients have not reduced test budgets, Snowman said many have delayed tests until next year. She said cookieless approaches involving techniques — such as targeting people in a specific geography who over-index in relation to a particular brand’s product, in contrast with targeting a third-party cookie-based audience segment — will take longer to deliver return-on-investment. “It’s going to take a longer time to see the results against that cohort audience,” she said. “It won’t be till they’re backed into a corner again that they’re willing to accept the cost inefficiencies of testing.”

Shoring up data and measurement

Testing goes hand-in-hand with reliable measurement, of course. And now that publishers are not forced to transition away from third-party cookies immediately, some, such as the large publishing exec interviewed for this story, are making sure measurement capabilities associated with new ad products are dialed in.

While standard metrics like clicks might suffice, said the exec, the added time will help the publisher develop internal metrics or work with third-party measurement vendors to gauge things like brand lift and sales. Those metrics can “show that your ROI is still going to be solid in order to demonstrate the efficacy of the data,” said the exec.

Tapper and other publishers said the cookie extension has given them more time to improve the products they had in development and add enhancements that could help convince advertisers to spend on them in the future. For instance, The Independent is “working more closely” with Integral Ad Science, in the hopes of satisfying U.S. advertiser demand for ad fraud protection and brand safety features, she said. “It’s given us more flexibility in terms of our priorities,” said Tapper, who added, “We’re able to allocate more resources to other elements.”

At Forbes, the extension gives more time to strengthen audience segments the business publisher has been constructing from its first-party data, said Solórzano. “We can build more robust look-alike models and say, ‘This is what a c-level audience reads,” she said. “That’s a great thing that comes out of this extension,” Solórzano concluded: “being able not just to collect the data but to interpret the data and make it meaningful.”

Factors ranging from the end of tax holidays to child tax credits to reciprocity rules between jurisdictions threaten to create mass confusion when it comes to employees’ personal income taxes and employers’ payroll taxes alike, as states get more aggressive about clawing back revenue they lost due to the pandemic.

While much has been written about COVID’s impact on tax obligations, experts acknowledge that confusion reigns. We had some tax specialists break down the most important questions that face employees and employers.

Here’s what you need to know. 

Employee vs. independent contractor 
Increasingly, the lines between employees and independent contractors, or freelancers, are becoming blurred, according to Kelly Erb, a tax lawyer and journalist who writes for Bloomberg and the blog TaxGirl.com. But there are ironclad differences between the two for tax purposes. “You are not self-employed just because you are working from home,” Erb said. 

Other than receiving a W-2 instead of a 1099 form at the end of the tax year, why does the distinction matter? Because the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (aka, the Trump tax cuts) means that you cannot deduct home office expenses if you are an employee, Erb noted, adding, “There is no hardship exemption or coronavirus waiver.”

Not only can employees not write off their office space — they cannot claim work-related expenses like that new laptop, smartphone or their utility bills on their tax returns. That said, many employers have allowed this through the pandemic at their own discretion.

Level with the boss
If you decided to up and move to the beach for the duration of the pandemic, it is up to you to inform your employer. Employees need to provide their bosses with any documentation or information related to the dates of travel or a move out of state, according to Thomson Reuters content editor and tax expert Carlton Huntley.

A recent survey by the San Francisco-based talent mobility platform Topia, revealed that while 28% of employees have worked outside their home state or country during the pandemic, just one-third reported all those days to HR. “As a result, both parties are at risk of hefty penalties in the event of an audit,” said Nishant Mittal, svp and general manager of business travel at Topia.

Ernie Villany, founder and president of accounting firm Boulder Valley CPA in Colorado, added: “Under COVID, people are living in Airbnb’s, they’re living in campgrounds, living in Airstreams. They have to be measuring the days they spend in those communities and in those states because they could be creating a filing obligation that they are completely unaware of in more than one state.”

In 24 states, working for even one day in a state technically obligates a taxpayer to file a return in that state, said Jared Walczak, vp of state projects at the Tax Foundation, a tax policy nonprofit. “More importantly, as people have moved around, even temporarily, during the pandemic, they may have worked enough in multiple states to have tax obligations in multiple states,” he said. 

Know the law
Thomson Reuters’ Huntley advises employees to check the tax policies of the states where they deliver their work — and those they reside in — to see whether they have any specific provisions enacted around those working remotely due to COVID-19 protocols.

As Nicole DeRosa, senior tax manager at the New Jersey-based accounting firm Wiss, notes, many states, due to the significant rise in remote work, have issued temporary guidance with respect to employer withholding (tax deduction) requirements. However, many are ending their temporary guidance and reverting back to pre-pandemic rules, which could impact an individual’s tax situation. 

For example, New York imposes a “convenience of employer” rule, which subjects employees to income taxes in the employer’s state, even if the employee is working out of state. “In an effort to recoup lost revenue, New York is specifically targeting individuals who are claiming less income allocated to New York compared to prior years,” said DeRosa. 

Again, the burden of responsibility falls squarely on the employee.

Lynn Gandhi, partner in the Milwaukee law firm Foley and Lardner said that remote workers need to be aware of each state’s requirements and whether they’re considered a non-resident deemed to be earning income in that state. “[A remote worker] cannot rely on their employer to have properly withheld all required taxes — it’s the individual, the remote worker themselves, who will be liable for any taxes due,” she added.

3 Questions with Bjorn Reynolds, founder and CEO, SafeGuard Global

Remote working is here to stay, but businesses have taken different views on whether to reduce salaries based on location. What’s your view?
We [as a company] want to have the best talent anywhere in the world, period. So when you find the best talent, to then say because you’ve moved I’m going to take your salary down, isn’t the right way to think about. Of course, a lot of people [employers] may have stopped employing in the U.S., and moved their operations to another country, because they can lower their salary bills. But it’s gone too far now, especially with remote access. We believe in trying to normalize salaries — it doesn’t matter to me which country you’re from, it matters to me what you can do. And it matters to me that you’re able to be here for a long time happy, content, excited.

How should individuals who want to work remotely negotiate on salaries?
If you’re really good at what you do, I’d look at where these companies come from, where they’re hiring from and tell them what your expectations are right now. Be clear — it’s a very pro-worker market right now. So ask what’s the best environment and package that I can get as a remote employee? What benefits can you give me? What vacation days, what sort of supplemental benefits do they provide and then of course the salary. But it’s important to focus on that whole package. And the second big thing to look at will be what the culture is of the company: How do they do manage remote employees? Because I don’t want to become someone forgotten —left out, here and there, as a remote employee.

What advice would you give people who want to work remotely for a company that’s overseas, for the first time?
Often when businesses want to employ people abroad, they don’t have an entity [in that country]. So they ask you to be an independent contractor, and they will pay you as a contractor. So they’re almost trying to force your employment categorization. That’s a big no and something I would question, because say if you’re in the U.K. and your’e caught doing something wrong [by HM Revenue and Customs] you’re who gets punished. They [the company] has never been in the U.K. So a big watch out sign is on that — don’t be fooled by that. We see a lot of companies trying to circumvent government rules. There’s been a huge paradigm shift that the employee is now the one in charge.

By the numbers

• 40% of 4,924 employees polled globally, said they plan to leave their job in the next three to six months and 64% of those considering leaving said they would do so without another job in hand.
  [Source of data: McKinsey ‘Great Attrition or Great Attraction’ report.]
• 75% of professionals say it’s important their employer requires all employees to be vaccinated before returning to the workplace, with 27% saying they will not return to the workplace without this requirement.
  [Source of data: LinkedIn.]
• While working from home, 50% of 1,002 U.S. adults talked themselves out of using a sick day and 33% because they believed their supervisor would be suspicious of their reasons for doing do.
  [Source of data: Skynova survey.]

What else we’ve covered

• While some employers may regard employees having a side hustle as an unwelcome distraction, others are actively encouraging their staff to pursue them. 

• Bosses everywhere are anxious to dial up the fun by booking in company retreats, so that colleagues can reconnect in person after so long apart. And some have extra dollars to burn.
• “I’m not comfortable”: The uncertainty around delated office reopenings has left at least one tech startup marketing strategist feeling anxious after finding remote work to be more productive and, as a woman of color, less daunting than in-office work. 

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

Blue Ant Media is confronting the challenge of standing out amid all the other 24/7 streaming channels by steering toward specialization. Its first FAST channel in the U.S., Love Nature, is oriented around nature and wildlife fare. Its second — HauntTV, which soft-launched on Roku’s The Roku Channel in mid-August after debuting on Roku’s and Samsung’s FAST services in Canada in the past year — focuses on paranormal-related programming. 

That niche strategy seems to be working. Since HauntTV’s mid-August soft launch on The Roku Channel in the U.S., it has attracted roughly 600,000 unique viewers who have spent, in aggregate, 11.2 million minutes watching the channel, Schoela said.

“Niche has always been in our DNA, speaking to specific audiences. This, for us, is the evolution of that,” said Schouela.

That niche strategy is also indicative of the FAST market’s evolution. As companies ranging from TV networks to digital video publishers to the FAST services themselves roll out 24/7 streaming channels, the FAST services’ programming guides have become so packed that “it’s easy for stuff to get lost,” said Alan Wolk, co-founder and lead analyst at consulting firm TVRev. 

By contrast, it can make it so that channels are that very clear in their content categories become more easily discovered by way of being immediately identifiable, especially if their names are as clear-cut as HauntTV. “That’s a smart thing because, for so long, so many cable channels had these random names and no one ever knew what they were about, or they were abbreviations,” said Wolk.

Of course, helpful as names can be for attracting audiences, the programming is what will keep them hanging around. To that end, Blue Ant Media is packing HauntTV with a mix of acquired and existing original shows that are mostly only available on the FAST channel. The company’s goal is for the 75% of the channel’s programming to be exclusive to FAST services, and the channel is nearly at that threshold with “hundreds of hours” already exclusive, Schouela said.

Eventually Blue Ant Media plans to invest in producing original shows specifically for the FAST channel, Schouela said, but that’s contingent on the channel generating enough revenue and viewership to merit the money. He declined to say how much revenue Blue Ant Media’s portfolio of FAST channels generate.

Relatedly, the company also has an eye toward selling its U.S. FAST channels’ ad inventory, as it does for the Canadian versions, but for now, Blue Ant Media allows the FAST service owners to sell the ads and receives a share of the resulting revenue.

“That’s something that I think is evolving,” said Schouela, who could have been referring to the FAST market overall.