Data-Labor-Technology

In a Digiday survey of media companies, BuzzFeed and Reuters had the earliest return estimates of October 2020 for when they will start bringing nonessential workers back into its global offices, if legal and safe to do so. Meanwhile, many other companies said they would not require employees to be back in office until at least January 2021, or they said they didn’t have a solid timeline at all.

Regardless of when companies are able to reopen their offices, the way shared workspaces will look and operate is likely going to be very different.

According to Natalie De Paz, manager of culture and engagement at agency Landor & Fitch, the expectations that employees have for their workplaces has changed.

“It’s not as simple as working X more days at home, but being more intentional in the office space,” said De Paz. “It’s not just for the sake of coming in, but being intentional with how you’re coming in.” 

Therefore, companies need to “define the activities that would make the most sense in a workspace,” meaning the office spaces should be seen as collaboration environment versus a place where individual workers filter in and out on a daily basis to sit at a desk.

However, De Paz notes that some employees will still require that option if their home set up is not conducive to productivity and interacting with external clients or sources. 

“There’s a lot of positives that have come out of working from home and hopefully they can be retained,” said De Paz, pointing to productivity and technology advancements.

There was an initial dip in productivity, De Paz said, that came from employees learning how to use technology that they were initially reluctant to learn. “A lot of people didn’t see the need to adopt new tech,” she said but not having access to whiteboards or manual materials forced them to learn.

Tech will also be playing a large role in the transition period where some staffers remain at home while others are back in the office, De Paz said. Conference rooms, for example, will need to be equipped with cameras and microphones that cover the entire room to keep people who remain remote connected to the in-person staffers.

Publishers have a lot to consider as they move staffers back into the office and it’s going to take time to make the proper adjustments from a safety capacity and a productivity capacity.

Here are the tentative timelines for some of the major media companies. This list will be updated and expanded periodically.

Bonnier Corp. (U.S.)

• The earliest the company would return to its office in New York City is early 2021, according to a company spokesperson. Offices outside of New York are open for employees to access on an as-needed basis, but staffers are not required to be there and can continue working from home for the foreseeable future.

BuzzFeed

• The slow reopening of its offices will begin October 1 at the earliest where legally possible and safe to do so, according to a company spokesperson.
• Currently, “position 1 employees” are allowed in its offices. This includes office services, facilities, security, IT and studio operations, as well as specific production team members, the spokesperson said.

CNN

• The majority of CNN’s staff will not be back in its offices until 2021. Has of June, approximately 15% of the staff was working in an office, according to an internal memo from CNN president Jeff Zucker at the end of May.

Fox News

• Fox News has had essential staffers in their offices since March, but the plan to move the rest of its staff back into its offices is still fluid, according to a company spokesperson and there is not an exact date for that return.

Group Nine

• Group Nine extended its work from home status for the majority of employees through early 2021, according to a company spokesperson.
• Essential news staffers and business-critical production employees should be available to return to the company’s office or remote field assignment with seven days notice, if they have not already returned to work. Employees who are considered to be a part of “essential revenue support” might be asked to return to work sooner than early 2021, but will be given 30 days notice, the spokesperson said.

Meredith Corp.

• Nineteen of Meredith’s 20 U.S.-based offices — 16 of which are television stations — are currently open to certain degree. The other three offices are its headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa and its offices in Shelburne, Vermont and Stamford, Connecticut. The open offices are operating at a 10-20% capacity, according to a company spokesperson.
• The majority of Meredith’s workforce continues to work from home and there are no immediate plans to open any additional offices at this time.

Reuters

• Globally, nonessential employees are still work from home until October, though that date is still under review, according to a company spokesperson. The reopening process will take place on a local business rather than a global basis, however. 
• Certain global offices, like Hong Kong and the Philippines, have reopened their offices only to have to close them again according to government mandates on coronavirus. 

The Guardian

• The Guardian does not have a definitive timeline for returning to its U.S. offices, but according to a company spokesperson, staffers will be working remotely until at least the end of this year or the beginning of next year.

The New York Times

• Staffers will not be asked to return to the office before January 2021, according to a company spokesperson.

Time

• Time’s offices will remain closed and staff members will continue to work from home for the rest of 2020, according to a company spokesperson.

“We actually launched this practice in the middle of Covid-19 [because] all of our clients [have been] nervous about their ability to support their customers needs,” said Vikalp Tandon, global president of Dentsu Commerce. “The only way we could help them is to figure out how they could reach all of their customers digitally, engage all of them digitally and how they could be serviced digitally.” 

With the new commerce practice, the holding company is working to beef up the capabilities of brands like Shiseido, Adidas and Procter & Gamble, among others. While the commerce practice was already in the works, the pandemic and changing consumer behavior it caused made it more important for the new group to go to market now. 

The growth of Amazon and online retail in general has made commerce a more important discipline at agencies in recent years. Brands that had traditionally focused shopper marketing efforts on end-caps or shelves in stores have been looking for more holistic approaches to commerce planning to capture someone’s attention wherever they shop. To help those brands, other holding companies have built out new commerce practices; for example, WPP created Wunderman Thompson Commerce last March. 

“The consumer adoption of e-commerce has exceeded our marketers’ readiness in most cases and Covid-19 has certainly accelerated that,” said Jacki Kelley, CEO, Dentsu Aegis Network Americas. “It’s heightened the importance of strong online transactions and proven brands with the strongest relationship with their customers are in a far better position to manage going forward.”

Tandon will lead the practice and work with Dentsu’s 3500 commerce experts who are employees of agencies across the holding company. Agency execs from Dentsu shops like Isobar, 360i and Merkle will also contribute to the practice.  

Dentsu Commerce has already worked with Shiseido to retool the company’s approach to its website design making it more about the consumer experience rather than specific technical specs, according to Thomas Wasser, global director of omni-channel marketing at Shiseido. 

The holding company is also working with a snack brand to build out a direct-to-consumer venture as well as with a household CPG brand on “commerce-led” planning. 

With this practice, Dentsu will work with CPG brands to create new brands to build relationships directly with consumers and “own the purchase journey from start to finish,” said Kelley, adding that doing so will help legacy CPG brands compete with startups.

Overall, Dentsu is looking to add a “commerce lens into the strategy planning efforts” of its agencies, added Kelley.

“We saw some of the best rates we’d seen since the beginning of March in the last two weeks of June,” Wohl added.

Salon’s second quarter revenues are still projected to be down, year over year, because of the industry-wide plunge in ad spending this past spring. But its results the past seven weeks have Wohl feeling cautiously optimistic about the second half of the year, and they are far from atypical.

Thanks to a surge of spending by advertisers that had to cut back or pause their spending in the second quarter, demand in the open exchanges has leapt, according to sources at two different advertising agencies focused on programmatic advertising.

Ben Hovaness, the managing director of marketplace innovation at Omnicom Media Group, said that ad spending volumes were mostly back to where they had been in the first quarter of 2020, and that on some days in June, the volume actually exceeded Q1 peaks. July, while slightly lower, was “a lot stronger than when things were in the doldrums,” Hovaness added.

Still, there are signs that the recent good times may not last forever: some of the spending is coming in from sources such as NBC Universal, which is pouring money into promoting Peacock, and many buy- and sell-side sources worry that lawmakers’ failure to approve a new economic relief package to replace the one that expired this week could undo a lot of the progress the economy has made.

But for now, publishers and agencies have both benefitted from ad buyers acting according to an old adage.

“I joke around about it internally, but the thing that’s hurt marketing in the past is that old saying: ‘If you don’t use it, you lose it,’” said Tyler Bishop, the CMO of ad optimization platform Ezoic.

Publishers took a beating in the programmatic markets in March and April as traffic surged and advertisers paused their spending while they figured out how to respond to a looming pandemic. The result was traffic spiking to 30% while CPMs dropped by as much as 20%.

But after hitting the bottom of the trough at the end of March, programmatic spending has begun to creep back up. The Ezoic Ad Revenue Index, which tracks the value of online ad inventory relative to a historic high across thousands of websites, showed that the value of inventory has been trending back upward since, with values in June and July largely beating their 2019 counterparts.

Some of that spending has come from advertisers adjusting their media mix, siphoning money away from areas like out of home, which continues to struggle as consumers continue to work remotely and travel less.

“You have to look at where the eyeballs are,” said Ray Jenkin, the North American CEO of programmatic agency Hybrid Theory, who noted that some of his agency’s clients have been putting more of their budgets into programmatic advertising in the past several weeks.

Jenkin cautioned that the good times are unlikely to last. “I don’t think we can look at June and July and say it’s a forward-looking trend,” Jenkin said, noting that the expiration of the unemployment benefits paid by the federal government could cause a drop.  “I don’t think we’re going to see a return to full-blown pause, but we will see some cautiousness,” Jenkin said.

Clark Benson, the CEO of Ranker, said CPMs for his site’s inventory on open exchanges are still down “about 10%,” year over year in July. But a flush of site visitors — Ranker’s traffic has risen every month since March, according to SimilarWeb data — as well as some cautious projections Benson and his team made earlier in the year, have left him feeling good about those results.

“I feel like that’s a godsend compared to what I was expecting,” Benson said. “We’re feeling relief that the sky hasn’t fallen.”