Month: April 2022

“Post-merger integrated companies have a hard time holding onto the employees that they really want to keep for so many reasons,” said Ava Seave, principal at consulting firm Quantum Media. She cited challenges such as combining different company cultures and changes in reporting structure. “In my experience, people in this situation are unsettled and distracted for months and months. Coming back to the office after the pandemic is also a gigantic change that people may not like,” she added.

With all the changes impacting employees after a merger and while implementing a return to office, “executives should put all of the unpleasantness into one package,” Seave said.

In other words — rip off the band-aid.

BuzzFeed/Complex

BuzzFeed Inc. — which now includes BuzzFeed, Complex Networks and HuffPost — has adopted a voluntary hybrid model. Some teams decide to come in on specific days of the week to see each other in person and have group meetings, but attendance in person is not required, a spokesperson said. Since Feb. 28, anyone who is in a role that does not require them to be in the office can continue to work remotely, according to a Feb. 17 email that chief people officer Katie Sitter sent to BuzzFeed employees and that was shared with Digiday.

The central teams at Complex serving the company as a whole — including sales, tech, PR, legal and HR — now come into the BuzzFeed office at 111 E. 18th St. in New York City. Other employees have continued to work at the Complex office at 229 West 43rd St. The latter group includes those Complex employees working on individual brand verticals and shows, which have their own production spaces, such as “First We Feast” and “Sneaker Shopping,” the spokesperson said. Employees at HuffPost have moved into BuzzFeed’s office.

BuzzFeed does not expect to reverse any of these plans this year, Sitter said in the email.

Employees who work in facilities, office services, security, IT, studio operations, culinary and certain production staff at BuzzFeed Inc. now come into the office regularly, according to the email. 

A $125 per month stipend introduced in Sept. 2020 to help employees upgrade their home offices was adjusted to $75 per month. New employees hired after March 1, 2022 receive a one-time $300 bonus to help them set up their home office. 

Dotdash Meredith

Dotdash Meredith’s return to the office began last week, with a hybrid schedule requiring employees to come into the office three times a week. 

In New York, Dotdash’s office at 28 Liberty St. and Meredith’s office at 225 Liberty St are less than a 15-minute walk from each other. Team members have the choice to work from either office, a spokesperson said. 

A Dotdash Meredith video editor who asked to remain anonymous said they remember management announcing in December 2021 that, following the merger of Dotdash and Meredith, the combined company would adopt Meredith’s return to office plan requiring employees to come into the office a set number of days a week. 

However, the Dotdash Meredith employee said they haven’t adhered to the requirements and have only gone into the office twice. Their boss has been lenient with allowing employees to work from home, the employee said.

“I’m in a privileged position where the guidance is vague enough that at least my understanding is I can get away with not being there three days a week,” the employee said. However, “a lot of people are going into the office, because they rightfully fear the consequences of what might happen if they decide not to do that,” they added.

When the Dotdash Meredith employee went into the office for the first time, there was a large poster board on an easel with color-coded sections designating where different teams should be seated. However, the employee said desks were not assigned and workers were able to choose where they wanted to sit. They said it’s “taking some time getting used to” coordinating with teams to work from the office on the same days and in the same areas of the office. “We’re kind of figuring it out,” they said.

The Dotdash Meredith employee noted it was “dead quiet” last Thursday when they went into the Meredith office, but was “a little bit busier” when they went in this week. Not many people were wearing masks (though the employee did) and proof of vaccinations was required to go into the office, they said.

Group Nine/Vox Media 

Vox Media’s offices (including Group Nine offices) are open at 50% capacity for use on a voluntary basis, with the exception of a small number of roles that are required to be in the office, a spokesperson said. Employees have the choice to work from any Vox Media (or Group Nine Media) office. There have been no major changes to offices since Vox Media acquired Group Nine in Feb. 2022.

Hoteling software to allocate desk space is being used by employees at BuzzFeed Inc., but not at Dotdash Meredith or Vox Media. 

The following interview has been edited for space and clarity.

How do you distinguish Jellyfish from other holding companies?

When it comes to the network agencies, as much as they’re trying to reverse engineer it, they’re still thinking in terms of performance media versus brand. They’re still thinking media versus creative. They’re still thinking ad tech and mar tech. They’ve got very traditional views and narrative and language. And I think that’s going to require some reverse engineering. 

I use the analogy that when it comes to size and revenue, we may look like we’re behind in the race, but I believe we’ve done the pitstop. We integrated all of our companies, we are one P&L, we operate under one brand, we’ve got a portfolio of products and services that cater for the world we live in today. 

It’s not digital marketing — it’s marketing in a digital world. And I think the difference being we’ve said goodbye to performance marketing and hello to marketing performance. We’re going to reclaim the word performance in the context of marketing, because who doesn’t want their marketing to perform? Why can’t they symbiotically provide both the performance that you’re looking for, but also the awareness and the brand building?

Who’s your competition?

Nowadays, it is the consultancies, the networks, the S4’s — even some of the performance agencies that are up and coming. I think that we’re all heading to the same place: we want global, we want the full complement of capabilities, we want to be able to create the assets in all the formats that are required.

Advertising is the monetization of attention. And once upon a time, you could get people’s attention with far less work across far less platforms for a far longer period of time. Now, it’s just such a challenge, because it’s so fragmented and so quick. It’s short form, it’s different formats, different platforms, different devices. It’s just exponentially more difficult to get a message in front of the right eyeballs for the right period of time at the right time. So whoever is trying to produce either a platform, methodology or support services to allow brands to eliminate some of that complexity and concentrate on the message they want to get in front of the people, I would consider them our competitors.

What are your geographic designs?

That’s always a very difficult question for me to answer. We don’t really have regional P&Ls. Every single client of Jellyfish is perceived as a global client. The reason why is that, the opportunity may have originated in one region, but often, because of the profile of clients we’re going for, they are marketing globally. So they’re in all markets. But also we can facilitate their activity from any market. For example, if we happen to have bought or organically grown an incredible team who can support advertising in the metaverse, and they’re in Japan, because we’ve won a U.S. client, it doesn’t mean we wouldn’t leverage that team to facilitate whatever we need within that U.S. client. And it takes an organization without regional P&L or separate entities, with none of those silos, to do that.

How do you approach winning clients?

We’ve got very unique relationships with the Amazons and the Metas and the Googles of the world. I’m not professing to be in the lead. But how we’re set up for success to go after the lead again, I feel like we are in a unique situation.

The big pivotal moment for us is when we realized that we need to treat the big platforms like our best clients. We were facilitating, mediating and supporting the advertiser but ultimately, the platform knew who was spending the dollars — they knew it was the advertiser that they needed. And they couldn’t swap out the advertiser, but they could definitely swap out the partner helping. And so when we realized that we thought … we should treat them in exactly the same way. And so we made sure that we understood all the stakeholders, that we understood strategically what they’re trying to achieve, [and] which markets are important to them. We became certified experts on all of the products that they offer. 

What ended up happening is like a siphon. By proxy, we leveraged their brand, their reputation, and their recommendations, and started picking up the bigger clients. Because we were walking hand in hand with the platforms, it’s become popular to recommend Jellyfish, because we were completely aligned with them. Now that you’ve got some of the biggest global brands saying that 90% of activity and budget is going to be spent on digital channels and platforms, we’re getting into those RFPs.