BrandKnew May 2020

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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05.20#91

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Dear friends: As I pen this, in the midst of a pulverized clustering that humankind has ever witnessed caused by the Covid19, my heart and mind hopes and trusts that you and yours are safe and well. We have taken the road well travelled this issue and keeping things in context brought to the fore some content that is relevant in the current times. For eg how brands have re imagined their logos for the pandemic.

Or the call out to brands to lead with higher values. And four steps that marketers can take to navigate the pandemic.

We also reflect on the post Covid 19 situation and hedge on what the next six months could bring. Inspite of all the controversy surrounding privacy concerns, Zoom, the video conferencing platform has millions of subscribers added to it’s roster as a new WFH revolution hits the world. We also pick up a conversation on how and why digital has an increasingly significant role to play now and most definitely in the future. Necessity is the mother of invention and noting gets better exemplified than the feature on how advertising agencies are taking their pitches virtual. Taking a departure from the predominant trend we have taken in this edition, we draw upon lessons from the world’s most awarded brands.

As the mindspace gets more cluttered and uncertainty looms large, we thought the article on how to overcome creative obstacles would be of help. We also take a dive into why branding is rooted in evolution and why we brand to survive.

There is plenty more to chew on and I leave you to soak all in the way you deem best fit.

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Till the next, my very best. Stay safe. Stay well.

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Suresh Dinakaran

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Country Head India: Rohit Unni Research & Analysis: Meeta Pendse Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Ryan Govindan Video Content Specialist: Mikhaela Cena Content Development Specialist: Abijith Pradeep Trend & Market Intelligence: Simran Thanwani Revenue Generation Specialist: Nitin Kumar

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CONTENTS See Famous Logos Get Reimagined For The Coronavirus Age Four Steps Marketers Can Take To Navigate The Pandemic Nine Lessons From The World’s Most Awarded Brands The Time Is Now For Brands To Lead With Higher Values Top Tips On Growing Brands Now And Into The Future {Grow}: Why Branding Is Rooted In Evolution. We Brand To Survive 10 Sentiment Analysis Tools To Measure Brand Health How To Overcome Creative Obstacles Your Golden Ticket Of Marketing (Hint: It’s Not Your Website) How Agencies Are Taking Client Pitches Virtual All Eyes On Zoom: How The At-Home Era’s Breakout Tool Is Coping With Surgin...

Helping Brands Bridge The Gender Gap When Building Your Brand, First Find Your Purpose Being A Digital Leader Has Never Been More Urgent Havas Cco Harry Bee On How He’s Helping Clients Deliver ‘In-Home’ Creative An Advertising Agency Survival Guide Covid-19 Pandemic: What Will The Next Six Months Bring?

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SEE FAMOUS LOGOS GET REIMAGINED FOR THE CORONAVIRUS AGE

BY LILLY SMITH

Logos look a little different when they practice social distancing.

Efforts to curb the spread of coronavirus have shuttered doors, emptied stadiums, and changed lives around the world. The economic impact will be severe, although it’s too early to tell how the crisis will change global brands.

In the meantime, Slovenia-based creative director Jure Tovrljan reimagined some of the world’s most iconic logos for the new age of social distancing. Tovrljan had the idea about a week ago, he says over email, when he saw Starbucks’s mermaid logo and wondered how it would look with a mask.

At that same time, coronavirus infection rates were rapidly climbing, and his social media feeds “were flooded with cheap memes about the topic,” he says. So after tweaking the Starbucks logo, he decided to make a substantive series.

Tovrljan redesigned 12 logos from brands like Mastercard, the NBA, Nike, and the Olympics. Some updates use a simple play on words: United Airlines becomes “divided,” Nike’s eponymous “Just do it” becomes “Just don’t do it”; the U.S. Open becomes “U.S. closed”; LinkedIn becomes “LockedIn.” “I tried to find something in every brand that communicates perfectly in normal circumstances, but is wrong in these difficult times—mermaid without a mask, Nike telling us to simply do it, Mastercard circles overlapping,” Tovrljan explains over email. “If you turn it completely around, it becomes even more powerful.”

In some redesigned logos, Tovrljan used visual sleight of hand rather than changes to the tagline to communicate our new normal. Tovrljan increased the negative space between the rings in the Olympics logo to completely separate them.

He pulled apart the overlapping red and yellow circles of the

original Mastercard logo, which was designed to emphasize “connectivity.” The NBA logo, which features the silhouette of a basketball player in motion, has been rotated 90 degrees for the age of social distancing: The silhouette still has one leg extended, but he’s now lying down. And the basketball is now a laptop. While Tovrljan’s logos are just thought experiments, some brands have made actual changes to their logos to better express this current moment of social distancing. McDonald’s Brazil has separated the Golden Arches that make up its iconic “M.” In one animated GIF version, the logo is placed above a new tagline that reads (as translated by Google Translate): “Separated for a moment so that we are always together.” Coca-Cola, meanwhile, widened the space between the letters in its iconic script. The logo is featured in a new Times Square ad, which reads, “Staying apart is the best way to stay united.” (Times Square, for its part, remains eerily empty after New York issued a stay-at-home order.) And while it hasn’t touched its famous “Just Do It” tagline, Nike reframed the public obligation to stay at home as a personal challenge in a new ad campaign

by Wieden+Kennedy.

Tovrljan didn’t expect his series to go viral, describing the redesigns as “just an idea of how logos should look like in these difficult times,” in his original Behance post last week.

But Tovrljan told me that since then, “huge brands”—even some from the original collection—have contacted him to make similar adjustments to their logos. He might have stumbled upon the sweet spot that brands are still trying to figure out: how to implement subtle design changes that acknowledge our new reality, while still maintaining the sense of familiarity we all crave.

FOUR STEPS MARKETERS CAN TAKE TO NAVIGATE THE PANDEMIC

By Timothy Calkins

It’s hard to imagine a more challenging environment for marketers than the current moment. With a global pandemic affecting the way nearly everyone in the world works and lives, nothing feels certain anymore. And even the uncertainties are shifting rapidly.

“It’s a really complicated time for brands right now, because the world is changing so quickly,” says Tim Calkins, a clinical professor of marketing at Kellogg. “It’s really rare in life that you see things change so fundamentally and profoundly as they’ve changed in the past few weeks.”

So how should brands think about marketing, as markets are upended around them?

Calkins offers four steps companies can take to find a way forward, whether that means delivering the right message at the right time or deciding to say nothing at all.

Step 1: Press Pause “A lot of people are complaining that they are seeing things from companies that don’t fit the moment: coupons in the Sunday paper that don’t make any sense anymore,” says Calkins.

This is likely a result of marketing efforts getting planned and locked in weeks, even months, in advance.

“The awkward thing is that it’s going to take a while for all that activity to work through,” he says. “And if you’re a marketing leader, one of the first things you want to do is pause everything that you can.”

This is easier said than done, however. These days many campaigns are automated, run by algorithms without a lot of human direction. This can make it challenging to even know which campaigns are even running. So before you can press pause, Calkins advises, you need to figure out everything you’re doing across every channel.

Step 2: Rethink Your Plan for Spending and Investment This is the big one.

While some companies are dealing with an unexpected wave of demand, most are crippled with the opposite problem: business has dried up, and it’s dried up quickly.

These brands have a critical decision to make: Do they want to invest in their business and marketing efforts in order to stimulate demand? Or do they want to conserve their resources until the environment is more favorable? While some restaurants are going all-in on increasing their takeout capabilities, for instance, many are opting to save their money in the hopes of reopening later.

“Even if you had a lot of money to spend on advertising, people are not feeling inspired to go spend a lot of money.”

- Tim Calkins But even businesses outside of the hospitality industry are deciding that additional marketing efforts might be misplaced.

“I think there’s no question we’re going to see cuts in advertising, because right now there’s not a lot of money to spend on marketing efforts,” says Calkins. “But the bigger problem is, even if you had a lot of money to spend on

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A brand can launch the most fabulous social-media campaign in the world. But if its customers are anxious about paying the rent, it’s not going to matter. “Likewise, if they can’t even leave the house, they’re not going to take advantage of that wonderful sale going on. You’ll say, ‘I don’t need a winter coat right now—I’ll get by,’” says Calkins.

Marketers should now be thinking instead about what their market will look like when the public-health emergency begins to subside.

“It’s not that you get through the pandemic and then everybody goes right back to doing what they were doing,” says Calkins. “People are still going to be staying home.

They’ll be very cautious in their spending. As a brand leader, you’ve got to think about how—even after we get through this and things begin to ease up—we are going to begin restarting our business.”

He believes that for many brands, the best decision might be to cut back on current spending and investment altogether, so that money will be available later.

Step 3: Check Your Messaging For brands that do want to move forward with a campaign in the current environment, they need to ask whether their current message is still relevant and appropriate.

“This challenge is almost a harder one than shutting down your campaigns,” says Calkins. “How do you get the message right, and how do you hit the right tone?”

Campaigns that brands put together just a few weeks ago may no longer be effective, or worse, may register as tonedeaf or insensitive to the difficulties many people are now experiencing.

Some ads are clearly a bad idea. “It’s not a time to be too flippant. It’s not a time to make health jokes. It’s not a time to run ads featuring people hugging each other or ads with big group gatherings,” says Calkins. “Those are pretty easy.”

Determining which ads might work is far harder. “Clearly you need a more serious tone—that’s a given. But at the same time, you don’t want to be too down in the dumps,” he says.

“People are looking for a boost. They’re looking for ways to feel okay as we navigate through all of this.”

Some brands have been able to navigate this new environment successfully. Calkins points to Sam’s Club, which recently launched a new ad on primetime television, a rarity for them.

“It was really a thank you to all of their employees who are working so hard to try to keep the shelves stocked at this time. And they went through and they named employees all around the country who are working hard,” he says.

This ad works on at least three levels: It gives a nod to Sam’s Club’s employees—“an important group to think about,” Calkins says. It also helps to build the brand, making people feel positively about the organization. And finally, it communicates a business message. “It says: ‘We’re open.

We’re ready for business. We’re here to help. We’re a place you can turn to,’” says Calkins.

Calkins points to other brands that have gotten their tone right. A new spot by Jack Daniels taps into how people are trying to connect with each other virtually. Nike launched a campaign about playing in your own home. And a new ad from Budweiser salutes the doctors, nurses, Red Cross workers, and scientists on the front lines fighting the coronavirus.

“You’re seeing the brands that can move quickly to adjust their messages,” says Calkins.

But the key is to move quickly.

“I think these messages will start to seem very predictable and lose their impact if you wait. A month in, people are going to be sick of staying inside. The easy jokes won’t be easy anymore. And we’re going to have a lot more people dying, and more economic hardships, and the uncertainty of when we come out the other side,” he says.

“This is going to get darker before it gets lighter. That’s why the easiest thing to do right now is to pull back on all marketing. And it’s not necessarily a bad idea: better to do nothing than to come across as insensitive or inappropriate.”

Step 4: Look to the Future Ultimately, brands need to make sure that whatever messaging they engage in, it is consistent with who they are and what their brand stands for.

“Brand purpose has become a big deal,” says Calkins.

“Brands say, ‘We care so much about this cause or this particular belief.’ This is a time where you want to be very careful that you live up to that.” If, for example, your brand is built around its low environmental footprint, this is not the time to be sending vast quantities of excess inventory to the landfill or to be swapping in less expensive—but more environmentally damaging—materials.

“You want to make sure those values come across as you make decisions. It’s easy to live up to your values when times are good; it’s a lot harder when times are tough. And now times are tough,” he says.

Companies also need to make sure that whatever message they communicate they can actually deliver on in the future.

With so much changing so quickly, and economic predictions looking more and more dire, this becomes incredibly challenging to do.

For instance, while companies might wish to broadcast to the world that they care about their employees, that messaging has to be consistent with how they are acting. “It’s very hard to go out with a message saying, ‘We really care so much about our employees’ at the same time that you’re letting them all go,” says Calkins.

Which brings up another thorny challenge for brands as they look into the future: making sure that their messaging remains sensitive, so that even if they do have to lose some employees, they will be ready to recruit these individuals back to the team. “That’s going to be tough,” he says.

“A lot of a marketer’s job right now is internal messaging.

What works in your favor right now is recognizing that we’re all going through this. People understand that times have changed.”

Nine lessons from the world’s most awarded brands

By Warc Staff

An analysis of the recently released three WARC Rankings – Creative 100, Media 100 and Effective 100 – has identified nine common marketing themes used by highly successful brands.

“Becoming a successful brand is not as easy as having great products and services,” says Joe Stubbs, Vice President of Global Brand, Interbrand, who provides expert commentary in the new report, Lessons from the World’s Most Awarded Brands.

“Becoming a successful brand is about having the courage to continuously make bold and iconic moves that will drive exceptional results.”

Lessons from the World’s Most Awarded Brands includes insights and behind-the-scenes stories of the top-ranked campaigns and brands across fast food, retail, tech & electronics, FMCG, automotive as well as the new contenders transforming strategies. There are also best regional performances and expert commentary by global CMOs and industry leaders.

Here’s what the most successful brands are doing.

1. They are marketers, not just communicators While a lot of the work featured in the rankings is communications, the stories behind that work reveal marketers working across the classic 4Ps spectrum – product,

price, place, and promotion.

IKEA, for example, identified a product opportunity to appeal to a new audience and ensured distribution through 3D printing. There is also a growing interest in the breadth of the customer experience, and how to align all interactions with a brand – McDonald’s talks about “feel-good moments” that span ads to packaging to design.

2. They know how they’re contributing A consistent theme through the interviews in the report is that marketers know how their work contributes at a business level: brand metrics are joined up to commercial objectives.

For retailers that link might be very direct – as Colin Mitchell, SVP/Global Marketing at McDonald’s points out, they receive sales data very quickly and can see what is working. For others it requires more work. Samsung and its agency Starcom use search data as a leading indicator of business impact.

3. They have one eye on the long term Long-term marketing investment versus short-term is a very live debate at present. This might involve splitting budgets between distinct ‘brand’ and ‘activation’ work. It also involves the nurturing of ‘distinctive brand assets’ over time, which demands consistency as well as creativity.

Volkswagen balances brand investment like the Road Tales project with very sales-focused work. Meanwhile, Fernando

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Machado, CMO of Burger King is criticised by some for a ‘stunt’ approach. But as he points out in the report, that is only one element of his marketing plan as he balances highimpact brand activity with everyday executions designed to drive footfall.

4. They know creativity is key – but only when applied in a business context Creativity is a key element as brands seek distinctive and innovative products and communications. Whilst creativity drives distinctiveness, and in some cases delivers a cultural impact, it means nothing if it isn’t achieving broader commercial objectives.

An example is Burger King’s Whopper Detour: fantastically creative, but with a real business purpose underlying it – to drive downloads and orders through an app.

5. They tolerate risk The decision to do something different – for example, to run a campaign that does not play by category rules, or to divert budget into an untested proposition – can seem risky. But the rewards are potentially much higher. The marketers in this report understand that trade-off. Indeed, some of the brands in the report – even big ones like Samsung and Burger King – take a ‘challenger’ approach. They deliberately flout category rules and use attention grabbing tactics that court controversy to position themselves against a bigger competitor.

7. Their purpose is focused on their customers Purpose has become synonymous with ‘save the world’ communications that have little alignment with a brand’s actual objectives or its impact in the world. In this report, a lot of the marketers use the word ‘purpose’ – but that purpose is usually focused on their customers and their pain points.

In other words, they know why their brand exists and how it ought to behave.

IKEA’s approach to developing add-ons for the disabled community is a textbook example of spotting a new way to serve a specific group, and Volkswagen’s Road Tales was built on the simple need to entertain children during a car journey.

8. They look for the human stories in data While a lot of modern marketing revolves around datadriven ideas and tech innovation, successful brands have the ability to spot human stories or ‘small data’ and turn that information into a source of creativity and competitive advantage.

Much of the success of KFC’s work in China, for example, is built around Chinese gaming and e-sports. This in turn was built on the observation that KFC’s meals can be eaten with one hand, leaving the other hand free to hold a controller.

Volvo’s E.V.A. Initiative was all about data; but what made it powerful was the message that crash test data had become a gender issue.

6. They execute flawlessly – even if it takes time

9. They build an ecosystem of trusted partners

The scale of some of the work in the WARC Rankings is breathtaking. Whopper Detour took a year to come to market due to the technical and legal complexities. Carrefour’s Black Supermarket also took a year as the marketing team convinced colleagues, lawyers and lobbyists it should deliberately flout the law to gain an advantage. IKEA’s ThisAbles project took even longer. A genuinely great idea is worth the wait if that’s what it takes to land it seamlessly.

Most marketers work with external partners, but much of the work in this report springs from relationships that go beyond supplier and contractor. Some projects involve broader ecosystems, as clients and agencies bring in specialist support. A common thread: it’s not just about hiring the right people – it’s about sharing data, giving them access across the organisation, and setting them briefs that will bring out the best from them.

The Time Is Now for Brands to Lead with Higher Values

By MIKE HOWER

It’s during moments of great difficulty that our authentic selves shine through — and the same is true for companies. Long after the COVID-19 crisis passes, the world won’t forget the values-driven companies that led with a conscience. The time is now to decide: How will your brand be remembered?

COVID-19 has smashed any lingering doubts about the dual necessity and expectation for companies to align their actions with higher values. The world-altering events of the past few months have revealed that companies can and must exist beyond servicing the bottom line. This virus threatens without discrimination every human on our planet, and nearly everyone will experience loss — whether it’s a loved one, a job or simply faith in the future.

medical masks and face mask covers for healthcare workers

Yet it’s during these moments of great difficulty that our authentic selves shine through — and the same is true for companies. Long after the COVID-19 crisis passes, the world won’t forget the values-driven companies that led with a conscience. The time is now to decide: How will your brand be remembered?

treat patients afflicted with COVID-19. Ford’s actions fall well

Pivoting with purpose

in the United States and Europe.

Because COVID-19 attacks the lungs, there has been a high need for respirators, which have been in short supply across the country. In response, Ford recently announced it will produce 50,000 ventilators over the next 100 days at a plant in Michigan, in cooperation with General Electric’s healthcare unit; and can then build 30,000 per month as needed to in line with its value of “Enhancing people’s lives“; and GE’s with its commitment “EHS excellence to protect our people, our communities and GE.” And with hand sanitizer supplies dwindling, companies are repurposing production. Pernod Ricard, the French spirits company that owns Absolut vodka and Jameson Irish

During World War II, many companies retooled their manufacturing facilities to produce things supportive to the collective war effort. With many likening the COVID-19 crisis to a world war, companies are stepping up to retool and produce necessities such as personal protective equipment (PPE), hand sanitizer and life-saving ventilators.

whiskey, has repurposed its distilleries to produce it here in

In hospitals and clinics across the country, our frontline healthcare workers are exposing themselves to the disease as they treat the sick without adequate protection. Fashion brands such as Christian Siriano, H&M and Zara have pledged to adapt production lines to making millions of

Repurposing production to support the common good also

the US; while luxury goods conglomerate LVMH — parent company of luxury fashion brands Christian Dior, Guerlain and Givenchy — is using its perfume-making operations to pump out hand sanitizer, and providing it to the French government free of charge.

makes business sense — with the global economy on the verge of collapse, providing high-demand items can help keep companies busy during a downturn. Sustainable Brands recently published a long list of other companies pitching in

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for the common good.

Leveraging your core offering for collective impact Companies don’t always have to retool to be helpful in addressing COVID-19. Many are leveraging their existing products and services for the collective good.

Allbirds and Crocs both are donating their footwear products directly to healthcare workers who request them. In only five days, Allbirds donated the $500,000 worth of sneakers it had allocated for the effort; then switched to a model which allows customers to “buy-one-give-one” or donate a pair to a healthcare worker. This small act can create a big difference in improving morale for healthcare workers.

3M, one of the chief makers of N95 respirator masks, is stepping up production to meet rising demand. For frontline healthcare workers, wearing these masks can mean the difference between getting sick or staying healthy as they come into close contact with infected patients.

LinkedIn is offering to support the recruiting needs of organizations that are filling volunteer or full-time positions specifically for coronavirus response. Likewise, companies such as International Paper are donating boxes to food banks facing shortages as they struggle to meet rising demand for their services. And the Visa Foundation today launched two programs totaling $210 million to support small and micro businesses — aligning with its long-term focus on women’s economic advancement and inclusive economic development, and to address an urgent need from local communities during the COVID-19 crisis.

Every company has a core competency — and the wide implications of COVID-19 means most can find a way to direct this toward positive impact. At thinkPARALLAX, we’re also taking this to heart — that’s why we’re offering some of our services through a complimentary webinar on Tuesday, April 14 at 11 am PDT, which focuses on how companies can engage employees with purpose-driven communication on COVID-19.

Putting employees first Much ink has been spilled around the need to engage employees to drive recruitment and retention. However, COVID-19 is testing corporate commitments to employee well-being.

Last month, millions lost their jobs after much of the US shut down to respect social distancing guidelines. No sector was hit harder than food service, where once-bustling restaurants found themselves empty and restricted to pickup and delivery only. Many restaurant workers have lost their jobs, and those who remain employed face reduced hours.

To help make sure his employees stay on payroll, Texas Roadhouse CEO Kent Taylor recently announced that

he would forgo the rest of his 2020 salary and bonus — amounting to over $1 million. Taylor also has donated $5 million of his personal funds to Andy’s Outreach, a nonprofit run by Texas Roadhouse to help employees in times of need, demonstrating his commitment to the people that make his business possible. In addition to being the right thing to do, this also generated enormous brand equity in positive public perception.

Conversely, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey drew public ire after he sent out an email last month to grocery store employees suggesting that they “donate” their paid time off to coworkers facing medical emergencies. The billion-dollar company also said it would offer unlimited unpaid time off during the month of March. Many employees reported feeling shortchanged by this policy.

Whole Foods ultimately joined its parent company, Amazon — as well as Walmart, Darden Restaurants, McDonald’s, Apple, Instacart, Uber, Lyft and other major brands — to offer two weeks paid time off for employees who contract COVID-19. While these companies could be doing more, it’s a start.

Prioritizing employee well-being also means displaying a sensible sense of humanity for them during these tough times. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has urged his team them not to stress about work, and to focus on their loved ones and taking care of themselves. Likewise, San Franciscobased IoT solutions provider Samsara — after instituting a hiring freeze due to COVID-19 — managed to reassign all 75 members of its recruiting team across three geographies to other departments, rather than lay them off.

Companies beware: How you treat your employees during this crisis will reflect on your brand for years to come.

Looking toward a better future It’s too early to tell what the long-term impacts of COVID-19 will be on our world, and the worst may yet lie ahead. But every business has a responsibility to do its part in helping us all push through. Your employees, customers and even investors are watching.

Companies can retool their services and products to support the collective effort to deal with COVID-19. This doesn’t always have to be things that directly impact healthcare workers — there is a long list of stakeholders being negatively impacted by the crisis that businesses can find ways to benefit.

Businesses ought to take a deep look within to determine how they can best leverage their existing skills and experience to help. If anything, companies should remember the people who make everything possible — their employees — and do whatever they can to help them through this difficult time.

We’re going to get through this together — that’s the only way — and our collective actions today will determine the stories told tomorrow.

Top tips on growing brands now and into the future

By Kim Portrate, CEO ThinkTV

Did anybody else think that was a weird Easter? We live in such strange times, it makes me long for normal things.

Normal holidays, normal business days, just normal days when it’s business as usual but right now, it’s anything but BAU. This all new sort of BAU changes the way we market and ThinkTV has noticed a change in the advice marketers are getting from experts to navigate the new normal.

Here are the top tips from three experts we think have a good handle on how to grow brands now and into whatever the next new normal might be: 1. DON’T GO DARK Speaking to Marketing Week in the UK, Peter Field, aka the Godfather of Effectiveness, noted: “The only sensible course for any advertiser who wants to maintain a presence through this recession… is to be putting money into long-term brand building.”

Drawing from analysis of the IPA databank, Field said brands in “panic mode” during previous recessions cut all ad spend and saw their market share, and profitability, drop over the long term. Even where budgets were cut by just 20%, profits took a hit.

2. TRUST IS EVERYTHING Research from Kantar finds national media channels are the most trusted information source right now, outranking government agencies and doctors. That means your customers are visiting these channels. Avoid putting your brand next to blatant, incorrect information about CV-19 and invest your advertising dollars in the safe environments your customers are choosing.

3. PLAY THE LONG GAME Mark Ritson, always good for straight-talking advice, in his article in The Australian said the “really good” marketers are increasing spend during this crisis. History provides numerous examples of companies that, “discovered the inherent opportunity of recessions and acted accordingly”, among them, Procter & Gamble, which increased its ad spend by 7% post-GFC. Week 15 shows continued increased consumption of BVOD with viewing up 36% since pre-lock-down.

We know you’re being asked to change your plans, everyone is, but as you navigate this evolving situation, consider carefully what to reallocate and which media spend to hold to connect with your customers.

If you’re not maintaining share of voice but competitors are, they’ll come out on top when all this blows over. How long that market share will last and what it will cost to claw back should be top of mind for marketers now.

We reckon your brands are always best served by media that has the power to reach and engage audiences while amplifying other channels. It sets you up for the recovery to come and helps you ride the storm until it arrives.

{grow}: Why branding is rooted in evolution. We brand to survive.

By Evelyn Starr, {grow} Community Member

In Mark Schaefer’s book Marketing Rebellion, he states that consumers are now in control of brands and that this is the new order of marketing.

We don’t have time to consider each message anew.

From an industry standpoint, this is certainly an unsettling new order!

Instead, we do what we have always done – we accumulate experiences with an entity to formulate an image that helps us decide quickly whether we want to give our attention to that entity or not.

But from consumers’ point of view, nothing has changed.

We brand to survive.

The disparity between the industry’s “a-brand-is-what-wesay-it-is” perspective and consumers’ true perception of a brand comes from the industry’s misunderstanding of how brands form in the minds of consumers.

A sum of experiences

Let’s explore that today.

The changing idea of “brand” Marketers have long thought of “brand” in the cattle-marking sense. We are marking this entity in the manner we want you to see it.

This is how brands form in consumers’ minds. They are the sum of all the experiences the consumer has had with the brand.

Some of those experiences are marketing messages from the company. But many experiences occur without the company’s knowledge.

Marketers rationalized that consistent marking and repeated impressions over time would make their conception of the brand actually become the brand in consumers’ minds.

Product usage experiences at home, out-of-stock situations in store, tales of good or bad experiences with the brand from friends, experiences working for the company…these and more get stored in the folder marked for that brand in that consumer’s mind.

The problem is that companies were only factoring their oneway communication into consumers’ image of a brand.

Coca Cola’s Brand Image in Advertising and in Reality

How brands form today

In Mark’s recent post about the idea of brand, he featured an 1890 Coca Cola ad where the company portrayed the brand as sophisticated, youthful and vigorous.

Consumers – humans – are wired for survival.

From our earliest days we’ve had to make decisions to keep ourselves alive.

Our early decisions included whether an encountered animal was a predator or prey. We used our past experiences and those we gleaned from others to categorize animals in our minds so we knew quickly whether to flee to safety or to pursue dinner.

Today’s challenges are less about bodily threats, and more focused on managing the thousands of messages that come our way each day.

By the 1950s, Coca Cola was still promoting those attributes in campaigns with the taglines “Almost everyone appreciates the best” and “Sign of good taste”.

My father worked for Coca Cola in New York City for two short stints in the late 1950s.

In June 1958 he was one of many college students Coca Cola hired for long shifts stacking bottles as they came off the line. The company paid overtime, welcome extra funds to college students.

groupisd.com

21 The second stint was after he got out of the army in December 1959. The company paid overtime then too, and honored his union card meaning he got paid for the December holidays though he only worked a few days.

My father felt grateful to Coca Cola for the opportunity to earn much needed money. The jobs proved to be fun because the young people working there enjoyed being together.

My father’s brand image of Coca Cola is generous, fun and youthful from his experience working for the company. Not sophisticated though as the ads were saying.

When I was a child, Coca Cola was saying it wanted to teach the world to sing. Still a youthful and vigorous portrayal of the brand, though perhaps less sophisticated.

My parents did not keep Coca Cola in the house, however.

My mother was health conscious before it was fashionable and did not want us to have the sugary drink.

My brand image of Coca Cola was that despite catchy TV commercials the product was not good for you.

As you can see, Coca Cola’s image in my mind and in my father’s mind came more from our experiences than from messages the company conveyed. We made choices about the brand and talked about it from our own perspective.

We controlled the Coca Cola brand in our lives.

Consumers Brand to Survive Every Day According to Beverage Industry magazine, in 2018 the top 100 beverage companies accounted for 221 products in 15 different categories.

No matter which beverage category we want, we are still deciding among several brands.

And this is just a beverage choice.

We make hundreds of product and brand choices daily.

That is why we brand to survive.

We use our past experiences to shortcut the consideration process and decide quickly so we can move on with our lives.

Social media wake up call Before the internet, we mostly kept our brand experiences to ourselves. Maybe we told a few people in our innermost circles.

Only a few souls were motivated to complain or compliment the brand wrote or called the company. Once the internet arrived, a few more emailed companies their thoughts.

Then came social media.

In the mid-2000s as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube launched, marketers discovered that not only could they advertise there, but consumers could express their feelings and share their experiences with brands there.

Suddenly consumers had the same kind of broad media

platform that brands had enjoyed for years.

Social media reversed the communication flow of brand messages and turbocharged it.

Marketers felt like consumers had wrested control of their brands from them as thousands of consumer brand messages flew at them on social media, dominating conversation about their brand.

But what really happened is that they were finally privy to consumer conversations that happened in private before but now happened in public with a megaphone.

What does brand to survive mean for marketers?

Marketing isn’t going to override thousands of years of human evolution. Consumers’ branding-to-survive modus operandi is the reality that companies must face.

With social media, companies can’t feign ignorance and risk flak for disingenuous, inauthentic or inappropriate messaging, as Peloton learned recently.

The way to cope is to switch marketing’s focus from messaging to experience.

Every brand experience matters. Brands are constantly evolving in consumers’ minds. Recent experiences can loom large.

Marketers should be listening to customers via all channels available to them – social media, customer service lines, instore, website help chats, market research – to understand their brand’s current image from the customer’s point of view.

With a benchmarked starting point, marketers need to articulate what they want the brand experience and image to be and then map a course to get there.

The course reaches beyond the marketing department into all areas of the business. Employees’ experience with the brand and how they talk about it is a significant contributor to brand image. Same for partners, vendors, anyone who comes in contact with the brand.

Even with perfect execution, you can’t control your brand.

With careful execution you can influence it though and also build much goodwill that can buffer some less-than-ideal experiences.

If this effort seems daunting, remember that the humanity that causes consumers to brand also promotes understanding, forgiveness and enthusiasm.

Working toward exceptional brand experiences can be rewarding and give your brand a true competitive advantage.

Maybe it can even teach the world to sing!

Evelyn Starr is a brand strategist, writer and Founder & CEO of E. Starr Associates which specializes in marketing help for brands in adolescence, brands that have stalled after their initial success.

10 Sentiment Analysis Tools to Measure Brand Health

By Aleh Barysevich

Are you monitoring your businesses ‘brand health’, and actively working to improve this key metric, and maximize performance?

Brand health, which started as a quirky definition, has become an important indicator of success for most companies, yet, the definition might still sound pretty confusing to some marketers out there So to begin, let’s break it down.

What is brand health?

Brand health is a collection of metrics which represent brand awareness, brand reputation, and brand’s share of voice.

It includes customer satisfaction and the opinions potential customers have on the company. How is brand health measured?

The easiest way to measure brand health is by using focus groups, questionnaires, and social media. The latter provides the most insight, however it won’t suit every company out there. If your target audience doesn’t use social media, there’s no point in turning to social networks, blogs, and forums to assess your brand awareness and reputation. That said, such a scenario is fairly unlikely these days.

Given that brand health is a collection of metrics, it’s safe to assume that you need more than one tool to get a clear understanding of how well your brand is doing. In this post, we’ll focus on tools that measure sentiment - sentiment analysis tools that show your brand’s reputation on social media and beyond.

What are sentiment analysis tools for?

Sentiment analysis tools interpret a text (e.g. a social media post) in a way that aims to reveal the intent and tone behind

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it. Then, the tools compound the data and display cumulative brand sentiment across a range of inputs in charts and graphs, so that the businesses can monitor relevant trends without having to go through each post.

Big data enables businesses to keep tabs on positive or negative opinions, and respond to any spikes as they occur, which thereby enables them to maintain brand health.

Limitations of sentiment analysis tools Even though machine learning is an increasingly powerful mechanism, the assessment of tone in written language is not yet 100% accurate.

People write sarcastically, they use slang, they make spelling mistakes and use ambiguous wording. All of these factors make it impossible for tools to always get it right, but the advantage of larger data sets is that even though some of the samples will be wrongly assessed, the overall results - the graphs and charts the company gets - will likely be indicative.

Now that you know the basics of sentiment analysis, let’s take look at some of the best tools available today to help you monitor your brand sentiment.

1. Awario Awario is a social media monitoring and analysis tool.

It covers all major social media networks, news, blogs, forums, and the web. The in-built sentiment analysis feature - available in all plans - sorts brand mentions into positive, negative, and neutral. You get a graph that shows you how your mentions have grown over time and how their overall sentiment has changed. In addition to the brand’s sentiment, you can see the topics that get mentioned most often when people speak about your company.

2. Brandwatch Brandwatch is one of the go-to social media monitoring and analytics tools when it comes to sentiment analysis.

It analyzes brand sentiment shows trends, and has a cool feature called “image insights”. The feature identifies images associated with your brand’s logo in the same way that topics can be associated with your brand’s name. This means that when you upload your brand’s logo, the tool finds images on the web that include that logo.

3. Talkwalker Talkwalker is another great tool for sentiment analysis. The tool claims to have the best available sentiment analysis technology, which enables it to detect sarcasm and other unobvious forms of negative mentions. It also monitors industry and customer satisfaction trends, the latter enabling you to more easily discover which features of your products are liked (and which are not).

4. Hootsuite Insights Hootsuite is a social media management platform that focuses on scheduling and team management. However, Hootsuite Insights has some relevant features: it analyzes social media platforms to reveal your brand’s sentiment and the trends around your brand. You can later filter this information by location, language, and gender.

5. NCSU Tweet Sentiment Visualization App NCSU Tweet Sentiment Visualization App is a sentiment analysis tool for Twitter. Twitter data can be highly indicative of broader brand reputation on social media, given that most Twitter users follow brands on Twitter, and there are tons of mentions of brands in tweets. The app is an online solution that helps businesses capture and analyze this data, showing the results of both sentiment and topic analysis.

6. Mention Mention is a tried and tested social media monitoring app.

Mention monitors brand mentions on major social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, and the web. Mention’s sentiment analysis is available in all plans - the tool sorts mentions into positive, negative, and neutral, making it easy for you to measure your brand’s reputation, see how it changes over time and what influences such shifts.

7. Social Searcher Social Searcher monitors social mentions and the web - and it’s free for up to 100 keyword searches per day. The app also performs sentiment analysis for the mentions that it finds, while you can also upgrade to Premium Monitoring, which will increase the amount of keyword searches you can conduct. The tool monitors not only top social networks, but also more local and niche ones, such as Flickr, Dailymotion, Vimeo, and VK. 8. RapidMiner RapidMiner is a cloud-based data mining tool. Similar to the other tools on this list, RapidMiner uses machine learning to perform analysis and reveal trending topics. But it can also be used for a lot more than that. The platform claims to be sophisticated enough for data scientists and simplified enough for the rest.

9. Lexalytics Lexalytics is a business intelligence solution which analyzes different kinds of text. Lexalytics works with social comments, surveys, reviews, and any other text documents. In addition to sentiment analysis, the tool performs categorization, theme extraction, and intention detection, which can make it easier for users to see expanded context, and understand the relative advantages and disadvantages for their business.

10. Clarabridge Clarabridge is a multi-faceted platform which includes customer experience management. Part of this solution is sentiment analysis. The tool’s sentiment analysis is very complex and takes into account grammar, context, industry, and source.

Wrap-up Brand health calculation calls for a broad range of metrics, but measuring brand sentiment might be the most important one. What people say to their friends and family, what they share on social media, and what they post on personal blogs is what, eventually, leads to consumer action, and as such, it’s important to understand your brand reputation, what influences it, and how you can manage such to improve.

How to Overcome Creative Obstacles

By Mia Pinjuh

We all have that one idea we keep circling, but that always seems just a little too much to take on for whatever reason–you may be lacking the time, money, or focus to make it come together. We rounded up advice from a handful of determined creatives who have wisdom to share on how to get things in motion when things have been a bit stuck.

Time-poor?

Many of us are busy, overextended, and doing our best to cram as much as we can in a day. No wonder many of us struggle to find time to properly ruminate on a big idea that’s been lingering. It might flourish into something significant, but only if you give it the space and attention it needs. You might think that multitasking is the answer, and fruitlessly keep adding it to the bottom of your to-do list.

But as Dr. Sahar Yousef explains, this is a myth that might be holding you back, as well as adding to your guilt. Our ability to focus for long stretches has been compromised by

distractions and a constant stream of demands on our time.

We need uninterrupted time to get into the flow, fully focus, and sincerely engage.

“One of my mottos is that there’s no ‘on’ without ‘off’.”

The self-explanatory first step is to rethink your blurry relationship boundaries with your inbox by setting aside specific blocks of time for checking and answering emails.

This frees up significant brainpower for other things–like

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turning your attention to a long-standing project. As Dr. Yousef points out, “The more focus training (i.e. meditation) you do, it’s like hitting the gym. That ‘muscle’ gets stronger, and then it becomes easier to then in turn focus.”

And while it could be tempting to sacrifice your sleep in service of your creative momentum, the trick is to work smarter.

Resting is a crucial reset for your mind and body. “One of my mottos is that there’s no ‘on’ without ‘off.’ It comes back to intentionality for me,” says Yousef. “Have intentional off periods where you’re relaxing, you’re not processing information, and you’re truly resting and rejuvenating.”

Short on resources?

Can you visualize all elements of your project but draw a complete blank when it comes to the logistics? Maybe you need a working knowledge of Photoshop but don’t know who to ask for a rundown on the basics. Or perhaps you want to stage an event but don’t have the first clue about what permits are required in your city.

Mitch Goldstein is an enthusiastic advocate of libraries as the best (and most overlooked) resource available, be it your local public library or your alma mater’s facilities. The staff are likely able to send you in the right direction if it is beyond their scope, because librarians are trained in deep research, both digitally and via books.

Goldstein is also quick to point out something that many people may not be aware of, “Many libraries also offer a bonus hidden perk: a free membership to Lynda.com’s (now LinkedIn Learning) video tutorials on software, which is an excellent resource to keep up on new tools. Of course, the Internet has a ton of stuff for free (YouTube), but I really love Lynda’s well-organized and structured lessons, which include downloadable exercise files.”

Lacking inspiration?

Being stuck in the quicksand of a creative rut sometimes seems insurmountable. The more you think about it, the more daunting it seems to take that first step. Take heart in knowing that everyone battles this particular obstacle, and lives to tell the tale. One way to jolt yourself out of a state of monotony is to experiment. Don’t think too much about the details, and go with your gut. Do something out of your comfort zone and shock your creative system with an unexpected excursion.

“It’s important to allow yourself some freedom, flexibility and time to begin noticing things.”

“What helps me get out of a creative rut is to stop trying to replicate previous success and instead try new things and experiment,” says designer and illustrator Marina Martian.

Don’t feel tied to any particular path and see where expanding your thinking takes you.

Artist, author and podcast host Tai Snaith agrees, saying “If I’m feeling creatively flat, I will go to a thrift store and it helps to activate the part of the brain that looks for opportunities.

It’s important to allow yourself some freedom, flexibility and time to begin noticing things.”

Feeling overwhelmed by the world?

You’re forgiven for feeling defeated, especially in today’s overwhelming news cycle. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking your voice can do little to change things that seem so much more pressing. But what if you reframed your creative pursuit as a necessary outlet for yourself, that will make you much more available to your community and the world at large? A creative outlet does wonders to shift your perspective, and can serve as a vital driver in other areas of your life. Monica Khemsurov of Sight Unseen touched on this when reflecting on the year ahead, “Since people are so anxious right now, they need the comfort of beauty and creativity more than ever. But at the same time I feel like we need to be actively involved in enabling change. I’m not sure yet what that means in practical terms.”

Take care to not overlook the importance of creativity, and the comfort it can bring. Your project might well serve as someone’s inspiration (or distraction!). And Khemsurov is buoyed by hop of a positive shift in the design industry, “What if people start spending less on fleeting fashion items and more on sustainably-produced objects and furniture they can live with until 2030 and beyond?”

Take a moment to think of the greater purpose of your work and how it can be a driver for change.

Need some direction?

Mentorship is an undervalued resource that can shift your perspective, be a powerful motivator, and change your approach to work. So when feeling apprehensive about diving into a daunting project, look to someone who has been through it already.

“If someone shares their work and it’s important to you, reach out to them.”

For Alexis Lloyd, VP of Product Design at Medium and former head of Design Innovation at Automattic, seeing how John Maeda worked up close shed light on what makes a good mentor and leader. The key is to “give people space to surprise you.” Use your network to find someone who would be a good fit as a mentor for you. As photographer Aundre Larrow points out, “If someone shares their work and it’s important to you, reach out to them. The internet gives exciting opportunities to meet people you can learn from.”

Commitment issues?

Have you heard the expression “throw your hat over the fence?” You’re not going to take on a daunting climb until there’s something to hold you accountable, and when you toss your metaphorical hat over the line, it puts a tangible placeholder out in the world. When artist and author Emily Spivack decided to write a book, she knew how tough the road ahead would be. So she created a website announcing her plans and made her ambitions public. “That was me putting a stake in the ground,” Spivack says. The public accountability she set up for herself was the push she needed to commit to a big project without external deadlines.

Your Golden Ticket of Marketing (Hint: It’s Not Your Website)

By Karen Hayward

Too often, companies dive into creating a brand-new website—or other major marketing initiative—without having any kind of strategy, plan, or goal in place to help guide them. As a result, the messaging, targeting, and brand voice are all over the place.

Ultimately, the website or major marketing effort doesn’t do

With the right messaging, you can create effective, targeted

what the business hoped: It’s not a golden ticket... It’s not a

communication that helps build lasting relationships with

direct path to strategic results.

current customers and allows you to reach ideal customers

But there is a true golden ticket of marketing: the right messaging.

in larger numbers.

This article will guide you through the basics of messaging,

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Technologies, Dell, EMC, Dell EMC and other are trademarks of Dellor Inc. learn or its subsidiaries.

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including how to create key messages and a value proposition, build a messaging framework, and choose between horizontal and vertical messaging.

• Key messages: the main information you want customers to remember

With that strategic foundation, you will be able to improve the effectiveness of not only your website but also your marketing as a whole.

• Proof points (one for each key message): facts that give credibility and believability to your key messages, like testimonials, proven results for previous customers, and industry awards

(Editor’s note: This article is adapted from the book Stop Random Acts of Marketing.)

• Value proposition: a general statement about what your business offers

Key Messages and Value Proposition

• Copy blocks: 25-, 50-, and 100-word descriptions of your organization and services

The right messaging starts by identifying your key messages and creating a value proposition. Key messages are the core pieces of information you want your customers to remember, and a value proposition is a statement unique to your company that tells customers what your business offers.

The most important thing to remember when working on key messages and a value proposition is to focus on the information that your customers are going to care about. It doesn’t matter what you think is important; all that matters is what your customers think is important.

While I was working at CenterBeam, an IT managed service provider, we thought answering the help-desk phones in less than 60 seconds was critical, and we used that as one of our key messaging points. But we discovered, through research, that our customers didn’t care about that. They wanted us to be able to resolve their problem when we did answer the phone, even if it took a little longer to make contact. So we changed our messaging to include what our customers wanted—level-two engineers who could solve problems. And that was what set us apart from our competitors.

To find out what customers really wanted, we hired an outside company to survey customers. Another option is to interview customers on your own to find out what really matters to them. Start with just 10 or so customers, and then expand if you need additional information.

Next, look at your sales history to identify your strengths and your main opportunities for growth. Also look at your competitors, and establish how you can position yourself against them. Which strengths make you different?

Use all of that information to construct a clear, concise statement of the things that matter to your target market.

That’s is your value proposition. Then choose your key messages, which should support your value proposition and convey the most important information you want your customers to know. I recommend having three key messages.

Once you have your value proposition and key messages, you should work on completing a messaging framework.

Messaging Framework A messaging framework is a guide for all your messaging.

A Google search of “messaging templates” will bring up several options and examples that you can use. I recommend using a framework that includes the following elements: • Target segment: who your target audience is, including the job titles of your primary target and subtargets • Positioning statement: a statement that clearly defines the position you want to take in the marketplace (similar to a value proposition, but more specific and targeted, with an emphasis on competitive differentiation)

With those elements well defined, you will have a strong foundation for your messaging framework.

Horizontal or Vertical Messaging After creating a messaging framework, it’s time to discuss whom to share that messaging with: Specifically, are you going for horizontal or vertical messaging, or both?

You need to consider how specific you want to get. Do you speak globally to the industry? This is known as horizontal messaging. Or do you target certain demographics or industries? This is segment, or vertical, messaging.

If there’s not much variation in your target audience, then horizontal messaging can work well. If your target customers have different needs or desires, though, vertical messaging will likely be more effective.

For instance, at CenterBeam we sold outsourced IT services to many different kinds of companies. Although we were selling the same service, we emphasized different features according to the industry of the prospect we were targeting.

When we were selling to healthcare companies, we’d explain our security features and how we could help with HIPAA compliance. When we talked to nonprofits, we’d express that we understood the importance of their mission and that we were keen to support their sector, even offering their 12th month free as a way of giving back.

It will take some experimentation to learn what messaging works and what messaging doesn’t. For example, one of our initial messages at CenterBeam was that our service worked remotely. We supported people all over the world, so a prospect didn’t need to worry about our ability to support their clients in five separate locations. This was a great horizontal message about our ability to support remote users, but it didn’t resonate with our target audiences because they weren’t necessarily all over the world. The message positioned us as a global provider, and the prospects perceived we were too big for them. We were able to easily adjust the messaging for our audience.

Implement Your Messaging With the right messaging in place, you can begin implementing it across the channels that are most relevant to your audience. That includes your website as well as email marketing campaigns, social media posts, and elsewhere.

With clear, consistent messaging across all channels of communication, your marketing will be more effective.

Whether your company is one or twenty years old, it’s time to take a look at your messaging to ensure it’s conveying the right information.

HOW AGENCIES ARE TAKING CLIENT PITCHES VIRTUAL

By Philip Kotler

Across the industry, as everyone scrambles to figure out new ways of working, one more quintessential part of agency life that’s gone virtual is the pitch. Without the ability to meet in person, agencies are cooking up ways to bring “pitch theater” — i.e. the physical presentation of an agency’s brand of creativity — to life online.

“An office environment enables us to create endless opportunities for pitch theater so we asked ourselves, ‘What would the Black Sheep do to take the same level of magic to people’s living rooms?’,” said Tim Harvey, chief growth officer, BBH Group, adding that the shop created an augmented reality experience for a pitch last week to do just that. “It was a comms solution born out of a world that recognized the production realities of [coronavirus].”

Due to the new work from home reality across the globe, agencies, brands and consultants are all adapting to pitching over Zoom and WebEx, among others. Instead of shaking hands or sussing out someone’s personality in office conference rooms or over drinks, agencies and brand marketers are hopping on video chats, seeing each others’ home offices and learning how to continue the norms of the business together, albeit digitally.

Whether agencies are pitching new creative concepts or new business, doing so has never been about simply shaking hands and showing a PowerPoint presentation. Agencies have spent decades perfecting how to immerse clients into a story and make them feel connected to an idea so that they

buy it. Transforming how that’s done digitally doesn’t happen instantly and can be awkward, agency execs and consultants say as it can be difficult to get a sense of how a pitch is being received without seeing body language.

“Pitching by Zoom is tricky since we all know so much is based on team chemistry,” said Lisa Clunie, co-founder and CEO of Joan Creative. “I can’t say we’ve perfected the tool yet, but we’re working hard to keep our fun culture at the forefront of our client meetings.”

The lack of proper in-person pitch theater likely makes the work more important than the chemistry. “The work now truly has to speak for itself,” said Alison Moser, head of business development and PR, Forsman & Bodenfors NY. “It’s forced us to be more direct in our presentations and disciplined about their delivery. But this all comes with a much more transparent and honest communication line between agency and client. At the end of the day, it feels like we’re all rewriting the rules of pitching, and I hope they continue to evolve to an even more human place once we get through this.”

The types of pitches happening virtually vary. Some agencies are simply figuring out new ways to pitch current clients on new creative or media placements. Others are vying for new business via pitches, many of which are still ongoing according to consultants who say that while some clients, particularly those in healthcare, have paused agency searches that the majority of their pitches are still running.

According to a new report by IDComms, more than half of

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agency CEOs are confident their shop can respond to a new business brief with roughly 8% saying they have asked for new business activities to be put on hold.

“When it comes to reviews, it’s now about how urgent it is to do,” said Lisa Colantuono, president of the search firm AAR Partners, adding that all of her current pitches are still ongoing save for one client that has paused. “The priority is to pay attention to day-to-day business and keep it afloat. It’s time-consuming to do a review so people may have to put them on hold a bit, it depends on the category.”

Whatever the pitch may be, everyone is making do simply because they must.

“You have to do your pitch theater in different ways,” said TBWA/Chiat/Day New York CEO Rob Schwartz. “Part of what clients are buying is the energy and enthusiasm of an agency.

It takes a different kind of stagecraft to do it virtually.”

Typically, when pitching a client in a room an agency can showcase their work throughout the space and on the walls of a conference room, almost like a mural, explained Schwartz.

Without being able to do that, agencies have to “make the storytelling more like chapters,” said Schwartz. “You have to really practice how you will do the hand off.”

Of course, beyond the potential awkwardness of the hand off or speaking over each other, adapting to doing everything virtually can be a pain. “One of the very first virtual meetings

was a mess,” said a consultant who asked for anonymity.

“The connection wasn’t strong on the marketer side. The voiceover was garbled. We couldn’t really hear the briefing too well from different team members. We must’ve stopped it three times to figure out what’s going on.”

Some agencies believe that incumbents will be more likely to hang onto a piece of business now as agencies are less likely to want to uproot their business but consultants say that if a marketer is looking to move now that it’s likely they will continue with the pitch anyway.

Aside from the brands that have pressed pause, there are business dynamics that are changing for the on-going pitches. Some that are still running pitches have reduced their estimated media spend and adjusted the scope of the pitches they are running, according to consultants. Those brands haven’t yet looked at changing the payment terms for the agencies that may win the business of those pitches yet but consultants expect that to be a possibility in the coming weeks as marketers look to retain as much cash as possible amid the uncertainty of the months ahead.

Consultants also worry that marketers might be more likely to run pitches without them, switching to doing so internally as a way to cut costs in the current uncertain market. “The business dynamics are changing and we all have to see how we manage,” said another consultant who asked for anonymity. “Right now we’re busy but we anticipate not being busy. It all depends.”

All Eyes On Zoom: How The At-Home Era’s Breakout Tool Is Coping With Surging Demand And Scrutiny

By Alex Konrad

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan’s kids finally care about what he does for a living. Sure, they were there that morning in April 2019 when Yuan, the founder of the world’s most popular videoconferencing company, rang the opening bell at Nasdaq, with Zoom’s stock-market debut making him a billionaire. But it wasn’t until a Monday in mid-March that Yuan’s eighth-grade daughter, forced by the coronavirus to go to school remotely, finally had a question about her father’s work. “My daughter had never asked what I’m doing,” Yuan says, beaming. “For the first time, she stopped by to say, ‘Dad, how do you raise your hand in Zoom?’”

On the last Saturday of March, nearly 3 million people globally downloaded the Zoom app on their mobile devices for the first time—a record for the company, bringing the number of downloads since its April 2019 IPO to more than 59 million, according to mobile intelligence firm App­topia.

Zoom recently ranked No. 1 among all free apps on Apple’s App Store, ahead of Google, WhatsApp and even Gen Z favorite TikTok. None of that accounts for the millions who tune in via laptop or desktop computer. On April 1, Zoom said it had reached 200 million daily users in March, up 20x from its 2019-best of 10 million at year’s end.

Yuan’s son, a college freshman, has become an emergency Zoom user, too. “I told my son, ‘I finally realized why I was working so hard,’ ” Yuan says. “I realized, ‘Maybe I built these tools just for you to use in your online class now.’ ” This newfound respect still wasn’t enough to stop either kid from battling for the family’s WiFi with Dad, jokes Yuan, 50.

All of this pushed Zoom, based in San Jose, California, into a new financial stratosphere. As recently as Monday, its shares were up 143% since the IPO and 44% in the last month—a time when the S&P 500 fell 11%—giving the company a market cap of $42 billion and Yuan a net worth of $5.5 billion, making him one of the richest self-made newcomers on this year’s Forbes Billionaires list, being released next week. Even before the spread of COVID-19, Zoom was on a tear, with at least 81,000 paying customers, including Samsung and Walmart. It posted revenues of $623 million and net profits of $25 million through its fiscal year ending January 2020, up 88% and 234%, respectively.

Welcome to the new work-from-home family life: conducted, increasingly, over Zoom. As the coronavirus ravages the planet, leading to quarantined cities, states sheltering in place and schools and universities closing down worldwide, Zoom has emerged as one of the leading tools to keep businesses up and running, students learning and people connected through virtual birthday parties, happy hours and yoga classes. It’s also one, that, as security and privacy concerns about Zoom have mounted, is under more scrutiny than ever before.

Eric Yuan On Zoom’s Record Traffic And Growing Privacy Concerns.

Zoom also became a social-media phenomenon almost overnight. On Twitter, TikTok and elsewhere, Zoom went viral—quite a feat for a piece of business software. “Just got an email from a prof: ‘As a reminder, you are required to wear clothes during Zoom meetings.’ Rules are made when they become necessary, not before,” one Twitter user

quipped, getting more than 85,000 likes. Joked another, to 21,000 likes: “Lol you thought you were better than me cause you went to Harvard??? We’re all attending Zoom University now.” (The real Harvard is conducting all of its remaining classes on, what else, Zoom.)

Inside the company, Yuan and his employees had two concerns: keep Zoom running, and make sure it was in the hands of those who needed it most. When parts of China went into lockdown, Yuan opened up Zoom’s base-level free accounts, usually capped at 40 minutes per meeting, to run for 24 hours. In mid-March he expanded the offer to all K-12 schools shut down, first in the United States, Italy and Japan, and later to 19 more. By early April, more than 90,000 schools were using Zoom. Add them to the millions more taking advantage of Zoom’s “freemium” model to use it for work or personal reasons.

Just a week ago, it appeared Zoom’s biggest challenge was ensuring that its systems didn’t crash under the weight of millions of new users, with the brand well on its way to becoming the generic term for videoconferencing of the stayhome era, much like Xerox, Kleenex and Google are for their categories.

What Yuan didn’t account for: with new heights of popularity, Zoom has experienced a wave of growing pains and concerns that have shifted the conversation around its video tools drastically in just a few days. Some schools were already hesitant to offer Zoom to their students. But instances like “Zoombombing,” in which hackers and online trolls crash other users’ Zoom meetings, grew so prevalent that the FBI had to release guidelines on Thursday on preventing them. The New York Attorney General’s office sent a letter asking Zoom to respond to security concerns. And Zoom has been rocked by other reports of sending data to Facebook, sharing LinkedIn information even for users appearing under pseudonyms, and other vulnerabilities. It was enough to make SpaceX join NASA in shunning internal use of Zoom.

On Wednesday night, Yuan and Zoom apologized in a blog post, vowing to freeze development of new meeting features, set up weekly public security-focused town halls, and devote its engineers’ focus to privacy and security for the next three months, among other steps. “I am committed to being open and honest with you,” Yuan wrote. It did little to quell fears as investors continued to sell, pushing its stock down 20% in three days.

In an exclusive new interview on Thursday night, Yuan says that he’s proud of the numbers of people that Zoom has recently helped. He takes personal responsibility for what’s gone wrong and says he won’t stop until he’s regained users’ trust. “We take it very seriously,” Yuan says. “I really want to build something to make the world a better place.”

The son of mining engineers in China’s eastern Shandong Province, Yuan grew up fascinated by entrepreneurs like Bill Gates. After graduating from Shandong University Science & Technology with a degree in applied mathematics in 1991, he decided to head to America. Before his departure, U.S. Customs asked for an English-language version of his business card. It listed Yuan as a consultant, and he was misunderstood to be a part-time contractor. His visa was denied. For the next year and a half, the now-skeptical immigration services would deny him seven more times.

Yuan refused to give up. He eventually made it to California and got a job at Web­ex, an early player in web-conferencing and videoconferencing applications. It was acquired by Cisco in 2007, and Yuan left four years and four months later, disillusioned by the quality of the service. He started to build Zoom and began offering to hook up some in-need organizations and institutions, such as the University of San Francisco, for free. Offering Zoom for free was key to Yuan’s business, too: the year before Zoom’s 2019 IPO, the majority of its largest customers started out as unpaid users, the company reported in its S-1 filing.

Now that altruistic impulse is taking on global importance as Zoom has become vital for the work-from-home economy.

But it’s far from the only company stepping up to meet this trend—and standing to profit later. Google and Microsoft also announced they were opening up more free features for their own classroom and videoconferencing tools. RingCentral, a Belmont, California–based cloud communications company, and Newsela, a New York City–based ed-tech firm, are two of a host of lesser-known players doing the same.

But likely no other company has signed up so many new users, so fast. How can Zoom possibly keep up? “Is your platform prepared for practically every college class in America to be using it? Simultaneously? Asking for a whole lot of friends,” said Adrienne Keene, an assistant professor of American studies at Brown University, via Twitter. “It’s unrealistic to expect we can just transfer class to a Zoom call and things will be fine,” she later emails Forbes, noting that some students live internationally, have spotty Wi-Fi or have no quiet space at home. “However, I am looking forward to seeing their faces and hearing their voices.”

Yuan may not have predicted all the ways Zoom would facilitate a social-distancing lifestyle. But the company started to brace itself for huge changes when COVID-19 first disrupted business in China beginning in January. At that time, customers such as Walmart and Dell reached out with concerns, Yuan says, wondering if their local employees would be able to move full-time to communications through Zoom.

In the run-up to going public, Zoom had trained its staff on responses to natural disasters, though the company didn’t anticipate that the disaster en route would be a pandemic.

Zoom’s 17 data centers were designed to handle traffic surges of up to 100x, Yuan says. “The beautiful part of the cloud is, you know, it’s unlimited capacity, in theory,” he says.

And with engineering teams across the globe, including in China and Malaysia, Zoom has the technical chops to be able to remotely monitor its systems around the clock.

Still, some Zoom users noticed dips in video quality, or had difficulty connecting in the first place. Zoom’s online help center is experiencing the dreaded “longer wait times than normal.” On March 23, Zoom’s service page acknowledged that some users of its free service were reporting problems with starting and joining meetings. That’s not surprising, given that daily active mobile users jumped 610% in the last two months, per Apptopia. It’s not just Zoom’s challenge. The internet as a whole is straining from so many people now living entirely online, says Morgan Kurk, CTO of communications technology firm CommScope. His recommendation: Schedule your Zoom—or any virtual meeting—roughly 15 minutes past the hour to avoid the virtual rush.

Then for Zoom’s more recent, and more pressing, concern: security and privacy issues. In late March, Vice Media’s technews site, Motherboard, revealed that Zoom was sending data to Facebook, even if users didn’t have a Facebook account. Zoom said the outflow was limited to metadata— what type of device you were using, the size of your screen, what language and time zone you were in. One day after the

to hackers. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, we are working around the clock to ensure that hospitals, universities, schools and other businesses across the world can stay connected and operational,” Zoom said in a statement sent to Forbes. “We appreciate the New York attorney general’s engagement on these issues and are happy to provide her with the requested information.”

news broke, Yuan wrote an apologetic blog post explaining that the program had allowed users to log in via Facebook, and that code was removed.

Apology and clarification blog posts have become too common at Zoom in recent days. Yuan admits that “Zoombombing” and other hacks or pranks of Zoom meetings are something he never anticipated. “I really didn’t understand why hackers would want to hack into a classroom,” he says. “Are they going to learn algebra? Maybe calculus?”

What about protecting users from hackers? On March 30, the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter to Zoom outlining several privacy concerns, including whether the surge in users made the platform more vulnerable

Much of the problem, Yuan insists, stems from Zoom’s

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historical primary usage: for work. Employees who shared explicit images or otherwise pranked Zoom meetings with colleagues wouldn’t last long in the job. It’s different with public meetings, and in classrooms turned virtual. Yuan says that when schools started closing, his instincts were to help.

But in hindsight, Zoom moved too fast. It would’ve been better served hosting a day or two of training sessions for teachers before opening up shop. Some security best practices like passwords and locking participants’ screens were already available, he says; Zoom’s mistake was not to make them the default. “I think this is my fault. We should’ve done more to train them,” Yuan says. “We did not do a good job, because we wanted to give them free access and we assumed they had good IT resources to configure security settings.”

Other much-maligned practices or vulnerabilities in Zoom’s software also stemmed from its naïveté about how it would work outside the enterprise. A now-removed attention tracker was meant for corporate training, according to Yuan; a tie-in with a LinkedIn product that shows a user’s job information wouldn’t seem sinister on a corporate call. Some mistakes were fully avoidable, like marketing Zoom’s tools as end-toend encrypted when the reality was they weren’t that. (On Thursday, digital rights group Fight For the Future launched a campaign calling for Zoom to go further, and make its tools truly encrypted end-to-end.)

Zoom insists it only collects user data only to the extent it’s absolutely necessary to provide “technical and operational support”—in other words, to ensure your meeting’s audio and video are working smoothly. One school in Colorado says it won’t use Zoom, citing concerns about how its data would be used and who controls it long-term. Zoom does not have the ability to monitor anyone’s conversations or meetings in real time, says global risk and compliance officer Lynn Haaland, who recently joined the company from PepsiCo. On Thursday morning, Yuan held an all-hands meeting for Zoom from his temporary headquarters, his home office in the San Jose, California-area, running on two hours of sleep.

The past few days have been tough, he says, representing the worst crisis he’s faced in his career. Usage, now in the hundreds of millions, keeps going up. “I want to raise the bar,” he says. “I told the team, let’s double-check, triplecheck the privacy and security, to not let any of our users down.”

Just a week before, Yuan appeared different when reached over Zoom — not just because he was using another virtual background. Then, he’d attended his first virtual happy hour with other CEOs; he talked about new features in the works, from Snapchat-like features for users to “embrace the fun side of Zoom” to settings for college-sized lecturers. Some were half-built, some essentially finished when Yuan froze all new feature development on April 1.

Yuan says Zoom will likely take other decisive measures, too, besides what it shared in its blog post. Yuan says he will “probably” strip all tracking and cookies from Zoom’s website.

A bigger deal: Zoom’s CEO says that “down the road, very soon you’ll see” all meetings conducted over Zoom require password protection. The company will double-down on its bug bounty program, he says, and welcomes all criticism and feedback. And if Yuan can’t turn Zoom into the “most secure platform in the world,” in the next several years, he says he’ll even consider open-sourcing Zoom’s code for others to try.

“I feel like Zoom is not a part of Zoom anymore. Zoom belongs to the world now,” Yuan says. “So I need all others to help us. Together, let’s build a much better, most-secure platform in the world, that the whole world can benefit from.

“I think we made a mistake, but the intentions were good. If I have a choice, for sure I will go back to the B2B business. For now it’s a totally different game.” - Eric Yuan ” What happens to Zoom after the pandemic passes?

Analysts who saw the virus as a “wakeup call” for businesses that will save on rent and commuting time by shifting more permanently to work-from-home still see Zoom’s influx of users converting to more paid subscribers over time, even after “the first concentrated set of news that has not been overwhelmingly positive,” says JP Morgan Research’s Sterling Auty, who remains bullish on the stock. “Zoom has a culture of wanting to make things better and the actions they are taking demonstrates it,” he adds.

And the recent doubts about Zoom aren’t shared by its paying customer base, says RBC analyst Alex Zukin. Even before Zoom went public, CIOs and customers knew about Zoom’s security set-up and limitations, says Zukin, and had studied its architecture before. They were fine with it. “I think that Eric is in an impossible situation. I don’t think they built this product with this ever in mind,” says Zukin, who believes that Zoom fell victim, temporarily, to its own popularity and hype. “There’s a lot of rabbit holes you can go down that are not monetizable, that are distraction prone. When you do Zoom for birthday parties instead of Zoom for enterprises.”

Yuan acknowledges that much of these problems are of his own making. “I think we made a mistake, but the intentions were good,” he says. Chastened by the boom and bust of life atop the App Store ratings, Yuan is looking forward to a day when Zoom can get back to its bread-and-butter, business customers. “If I have a choice, for sure I will go back to the b2b business,” he admits, “For now, it’s a totally different game.” For Zoom’s many millions of recent new users, however, Yuan vows: “We need to work 10 times harder than before to win trust back.”

These are intense times, made more so by the fact that they are unfolding in his home, under the gaze of his family. A week ago, Yuan said his mother, who lives in the house, asked him why he was always late to eat lunch. Now she wonders why Yuan stays holed up in his home office, barely pausing to sleep. The days of Yuan’s kids asking for customer support using Zoom, meanwhile, may be over for now. Yuan says he hopes he’s setting a good example for his kids on perseverance in adversity. “I told my kids, ‘we are going through this very, very tough time. I’m not going to talk to you a lot, and I’m so sorry. But one day in the future, you will understand why I was so crazy busy for now.’” Until then, Yuan will do all he can to keep the world’s physically isolated people connected.

HELPING BRANDS BRIDGE THE GENDER GAP

By R Restaino

As global expectations around gender equality shift, brands need to act fast to remain relevant. Rocio Restaino, Head of Brand Strategy at Interbrand Buenos Aires, looks at what it takes to become a stereotype-free brand The world is changing. Demonstrations in favor of gender equality are on the rise in every country, while women’s movements voice their demand for equal rights and opportunities. Economists and human rights organizations globally have produced many reports on inequality, and they all agree – the world is not an equal place. Today, half of the world’s population does not have access to the same opportunities as men in finance, health, legal protection and much more.

As the UN reports, in a vast number of countries men are still allowed by law to prohibit their wives from working outside the home; over 10 million girls under 15 years old are forced to marry; women are greatly underrepresented in parliaments to the tune of 2 women for every 10 men; and only 63 countries comply with the International Labor Organization’s rules on maternity leave.

As the World Economic Forum said in its 2019 report, the global gender pay gap is currently in the region of 30 per cent. In other words, a woman earns 70 cents for each dollar earned by a man. It’s improving, but incredibly slowly. At the current pace it would take 202 years to close the gender pay gap. The WEF also says that if we actively seek to achieve gender equality by closing all existing gaps (financial, legal, health, etc) we would still need to wait 108 years. Interestingly, in the WEF’s 2018 report, they estimated 100 years for the gap to close. In the 2017 report, it was 86 years…

Even though we feel the world is changing rapidly, the truth is that we are ever further from equality.

What does this have to do with branding?

Everything.

First and foremost comes a responsibility. Brands can be a crucial part of the inequality problem; in the worst-case

scenario they can reproduce gender stereotypes. They may not have created them, but if they reproduce them they legitimize and normalize them. Brands are one lens through which we view ourselves and our society and, as such, have a profound influence.

Second is the commercial argument. People are more informed, connected and demanding than ever before. They question traditional marketing and have a proliferation of choice at their fingertips. Brands need to pay attention to changing customer expectations around gender and diversity but many are lagging behind in understanding this, which brings serious commercial risks.

A recent example is Victoria’s Secret, which was forced to close several stores, and even cancel its famous fashion show, because it was at a disadvantage against competing brands which better represent diversity. We are talking about a historically successful brand which has failed to rethink its way of representing women and ignored new, fast-growth entrants, such as Savage x Fenty, which celebrates women through a lens of inclusivity, not misogyny.

Data suggests that two out of three individuals make spending decisions on the basis of their beliefs and values.

It is no longer possible to argue that ethics and brands are disconnected, or assert that what happens in culture does not have an impact on them.

This is even stronger among young people; consumers belonging to Generation Z stated that they had stopped, or considered stopping, buying from a company which had spoken out or behaved against their beliefs. If brands want to remain relevant, they cannot keep doing what they have always done in an attempt to stay in a “safe harbor”. That place no longer exists.

So, those of us who are in the business of brands have a huge responsibility and a huge opportunity to get this right.

What can brand-builders do?

We conceived Brandaid to speed up the adoption of a more progressive gender perspective among brands. It’s not always easy or quick to create change; some major brands have started to adapt their strategies to redefine targets and look for more inclusive insights, but the pace is still slow.

Gillette, Axe, Essity, Dove, Nike and others are breaking ground – exploring potential paths, making mistakes, failing, succeeding and trying again.

Today, under the Brandaid umbrella we have research, but we also have a proprietary methodology made up of two tools: A communication tool which helps us measure how far brands are from a gender balanced perspective, based on their communications, and a mindset tool, which allows us to understand what the collective mindset of a work team is, which capabilities that team has to address gender issues, and what type of training they will need to get there.

We also have several products and services we offer to our customers to support them on their way to transformation, such as curatorship for pieces of communication, and training addressed to creative teams.

And in November 2019 we launched The Brandaid Awards, to identify brands who are doing a good job. Inspired by our Best Global Brands awards, we defined a set of parameters and those brands that surpass them go through our communication analysis methodology. Movistar Argentina was the winner this year – they have made great progress in building a gender stereotype-free brand.

How can brands address gender equality issues and avoid gender stereotyping?

There are four key points: 1: Conduct a retrospective analysis – looking at the brand’s history, because the status quo can be reinforced by its historical brand-building. Finding innovative new ways to represent genders, which do not strengthen traits culturally associated with each gender, is a powerful weapon in the hands of those of us behind brands.

2: Understand the true meaning of gender perspective.

Avoiding stereotyping does not mean a brand has to stop communicating its key messages and start talking only about the gender pay gap, glass ceilings, or gender violence. The challenge is to make sure we avoid gender stereotypes, while still being able to go ahead with our communication plan. All brands, regardless of their category, product or service, face the same challenge of conveying stereotype-free messages.

3: Look at the brand holistically and trying to avoid stereotypes in all aspects of the development of an idea. The same level of attention should be paid to all visual and verbal aspects; language, symbols, objects, sounds, song lyrics, costumes, characters and, of course, the underlying message.

4: Transversality in gender perspective – one of the most innovative points of the Brandaid project. In other words, having a single gender stereotype-free piece or campaign is not enough – the lack of stereotypes must be embodied in the whole brand. Many brands take advantage of specific opportunities or dates of the year to “talk about diversity”,

then return to their usual stereotype-laden communication.

So when we analyze gender stereotypes in brands’ communications, we make sure it is a sustained change, reflecting a willingness to rethink the brand over time as gender stereotype-free.

What are good examples of brands spearheading change in gender equality?

Many brands are doing good things.

Essity, through its Blood Normal campaign, has started to break down a damaging taboo that holds women back, in a way that intelligently connects to the product.

Dove is also very interesting. While not perfect, it was a pioneer brand and its last campaign – the “show us” project, which saw them develop an image bank to showcase true depictions of diverse and genuine women – is outstanding in creative and strategic terms, but also extremely useful in practical terms.

Changing categories, Microsoft is another brand I really like.

They ran an advertising campaign to bring to light that when thinking of “inventors”, we always think of men, despite the fact there are great women who invented things we use every day, but do not know about. The brand built a strategy around this idea, which not only seeks to facilitate women’s access to the STEAM world, but also generates visibility for women who made history by great scientific and technological work.

What we still do not see often enough are brands that embed gender perspective and diversity, without pointing it out and saying “I’m doing diverse communication.” The next level could be normalizing diversity.

Gender is an effective tool to create a clear brand personality – so how can brands approach a gender-neutral future?

Gender currently represents a primary identity for people.

Even before being born, we are already socialized in a certain way –­pink or blue, dolls or soccer balls – which will influence us for the rest of our lives. This is what we need to rethink. We need to let each individual decide what he or she really wants in life, and stop thinking that if a person looks like a boy they will want certain things and if a person looks like a girl they will have different desires and abilities. Not all men are strong; not all women wish to be moms.

When it comes to defining brand personality, a brand’s gender should also become less fixed. If we keep thinking that if a brand is for women it should be soft, loving, caring and sympathetic, or if the brand is for men, it should be strong, robust and high-achieving, we are just reproducing the old stereotypes we want to leave behind. Gender does not match people’s personalities in real life and should not do so with brands either.

This is a crucial point. Separating gender from standard personality traits is one of the challenges we have as brand creators, for this is where biases usually appear – behaviors which may, even inadvertently, keep reproducing a status quo which reinforces structural inequalities.

We have a great opportunity to make brands that enhance people’s rights and freedom of choice, show new paradigms and ways of being – and ultimately we can help to make the world a better place.`

CL E RMONT K . Y.

U. S .

MAY YOUR YEAR-END BONUS BE WORTHY OF YOUR EFFORT.

EVERY BIT EARNED

KNOB CREEK® KENTUCKY STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY AND STRAIGHT RYE WHISKEY 50% ALC./VOL. ©2019 KNOB CREEK DISTILLING COMPANY, CLERMONT, KY.

When Building Your Brand, First Find Your Purpose

By Eric Leininger, Andrea Brimmer

It’s rare for an established business to rebuild its brand from scratch. But sometimes opportunity presents itself in unusual ways. For Ally, rebooting after being spun off from its parent company gave it the chance to delve into what customers didn’t like about banks and use that as the foundation for a new brand and a new sense of purpose.

Eric Leininger: Why was Ally founded? Did you have a purpose at the beginning or did your purpose emerge as time went on?

Andrea Brimmer: The company was born out of consumer need.

It was a really small group—about 10 of us around the table.

We approached our business proposition not as business people and not as marketers, but as consumers, and we asked: What is every single thing that we hate about banking?

We looked at 24-7 service, which didn’t really exist prior to Ally. We made hard and fast rules around transparency and disclaimers and speaking to people in plain language, because a big part of the way that banks make money is through customers who are uneducated about finance. We changed our entire model of how we compensated people in the call centers based on their ability to resolve a customer’s problem in the first touch. Our purpose became being a relentless ally for our customer.

The interesting part is how entrepreneurial in spirit it was. We were almost a hundred-year-old company that was largely behaving as a startup.

The iPhone was literally just being launched: smartphone penetration at the time was only 20 percent. So this idea that

people were going to bank in the palm of their hand was pretty radical at the time. There was quite a bit of convincing we needed to do because people weren’t comfortable sending their money to this amorphous place on the Internet. So we purposefully crafted our brand to make people comfortable with this new way of thinking about banking.

It was a big step. But I think the beauty of it was, it was the only way forward for us because we didn’t have the time or liquidity to buy or build branches. So we went all in on this idea of the digital orientation of financial services. And it’s obviously a bet that’s paid off.

Leininger: From those 10 people around a table to 8,500 employees now, how have you sustained this purpose as the organization has scaled? Typically, companies become more bureaucratic as they expand to this size. The front-line employees who deal with customers and the most senior managers lose touch with one another, and everyone loses touch with the clarity and simplicity of the original purpose.

So different companies have different ways of developing and maintaining this sense of purpose. The tech company SAP, for instance, chose to align its purpose around its employees’ stories.

Brimmer: While we’re a decent-size company, we aren’t so

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big that you can’t be highly connected, particularly as a leadership group, to the mission and the day-to-day decisions we make as a corporation.

And that brand belief system—that we are an ally for our customers—has really permeated throughout the entire organization. And a lot of it is because we’ve never lost that scrappy underdog mentality. The customer sits in the room with us in every meeting that we have. We start every meeting by reading a customer letter and reminding ourselves why we do what we do. Our CEO, Jeff Brown, often reminds us that this money is exceptionally personal to them and they’re entrusting us with their most important asset and we have a responsibility to take good care of that.

As a result, our purpose factors into all of the decisions that we make, particularly as we’re growing and adding new products. For instance, since we’ve launched, we’ve added a mortgage capability.

Leininger: Your brand purpose grew out of one financial crisis and is now functioning in the midst of another. How is your purpose manifesting itself in the current situation with coronavirus and the financial markets? What specific actions have you taken on behalf of customers?

Brimmer: This has been an opportunity to put Ally’s mission to be a true ally to its customers, employees, and communities into practice. We recognize there has never been a more critical time to deliver on our promise to “do it right,” and we are committed to supporting the people we serve through this crisis.

We’ve taken a number of steps to support our customers, communities, and all stakeholders to bolster peace of mind and help safeguard their long-term financial well-being. This includes deferring payments for our auto- and home-loan customers as well as waiving fees at Ally Bank and Ally Invest.

“We recognize there has never been a more critical time to deliver on our promise to ’do it right,’ and we are committed to supporting the people we serve through this crisis.”

— Andrea Brimmer We’ve pledged $3 million to help address the emergency needs of our communities with emphasis on our main business centers, Detroit and Charlotte. I’m also incredibly proud of the way we’ve really gone above and beyond to show support to our 8,500 employees and their families during this stressful, scary, and uncertain time.

You can’t call yourself an ally and not be ready to step up when crisis hits. I think we’ll emerge stronger from this crisis just as we did from the last one.

Leininger: If a leader was struggling to create a purpose statement to galvanize their organization, what advice would you give them?

Brimmer: The purpose has to be authentic and it has to be rooted in what your company does. For example, we’re a bank. Our purpose has to be rooted in finance—it can’t be that we’re the company that saves the whales. While that’s an admirable pursuit, it has nothing to do with why people want to do business with us.

And your purpose has to remain consistent. It can evolve, you can add aspects to it, but holistically changing your purpose is very confusing both to the enterprise that needs to bring it to life, to your associate base, and to consumers.

Leininger: That’s a great answer. We see many companies struggle with this by making their purpose too complex.

Or, they make it so elevated that it could apply to many businesses. Our former dean, Sally Blount, writes in Harvard Business Review that companies seeking to articulate their purpose should place their emphasis on clarity, relevance to customers, and the ability to differentiate from competitors.

Ally’s purpose really seems to be aligned with that guidance.

Can you talk about the distinction between purpose and corporate social responsibility? How does Ally view CSR? Brimmer: CSR should be related to purpose. Our strategy around CSR is that as a bank, we have a responsibility to help change the trajectory of people’s lives with regard to their financial abilities and stability. By that we mean helping make people financially literate, but also taking it one step further.

For example, we partner with the historically black colleges and universities through the Thurgood Marshall College Fund on what we call a “weekend of learning.” We brought 50 students to Detroit and gave them the challenge to use technology to solve an issue that the city is facing.

A number of Ally employees spent the weekend mentoring these students, honing their projects, which the students then presented Shark Tank–style. We selected three teams as winners. Our CEO was so impressed that he ended up offering internships at Ally for all 50 students. Fast forward to today, and five of the 15 who joined Ally as interns have accepted full-time positions and we’ve got some returning as interns again this summer.

So what started as a marketing and CSR program opened up this huge pipeline of diverse talent. I think that a lot of companies would have ended up just writing a check and walking away. But our purpose and our CSR strategy are so tightly aligned that it was a great brand moment for us to be able to rally around the ethos of what we are all about.

Leininger: At McDonald’s we used to say, “you can’t distract people with shiny objects—and you shouldn’t try to” in CSR. For example, there was a time when Walmart decided their CSR was going to be about sustainability when their corporate CSR issues were not about sustainability. Critics

of the company wanted them to focus on wages, working conditions, and how women employees were treated. Until Walmart pivoted onto actions that were at the core of their business, they were getting viewed cynically in CSR circles.

Interestingly, public opinion eventually caught up with Walmart’s original focus on sustainability. And Walmart’s Environmental, Social, and Governance Report demonstrates real progress on these matters. Yet, they do not seem to receive credit in the general-business-press rankings of most sustainable companies.

So purpose and CSR can go wrong, or the timing can be off.

How do you manage these potential concerns?

Brimmer: A challenge that many CMOs have is that they are held to stringent KPIs. But the marketing of your purpose and your CSR strategy will never have a straight line to a distinct ROI. What you have to do as a CMO is align your business partners—as well as your CFO and your CEO—on the importance of talking about purpose and CSR. I’m fortunate because our CEO believes that it is part of our responsibility as citizens of the world to do the right thing. This manifests in how we give employees what we call “volunteer time off.” The company also does pretty healthy matches on any charitable giving.

Leininger: At a time when there’s so much discussion about how the role of the CMO is changing at such a fast pace, it would be interesting to hear how you are working to grow marketing capabilities and marketing talent within the organization. What are you looking for as you expand?

Brimmer: I hire for cultural fit first and credentials second.

That’s not to say that we hire people who aren’t highly capable and intelligent, but we have such a special and important culture that if you don’t align with that culture, you just won’t be successful at Ally.

Probably the three most important things in your life are your health, your family, and your money: not just in terms of what it allows you to buy, but what it empowers you to do. We don’t take for granted the trust that the customer has placed in us for the money part. So we have to have people who both live that culture and understand how to talk about it.

BEING A DIGITAL LEADER HAS NEVER BEEN MORE URGENT

By Wharton Team

While the COVID-19 pandemic may be a health crisis and shock to the system, it is driving the rapid adoption of digital technologies and ways of working needed for companies to stay relevant, according to Scott A. Snyder and Yulia Barnakova, co-authors of this opinion piece. Snyder is a senior fellow at Wharton and partner, digital and innovation, at Heidrick & Struggles. Barnakova is a principal, digital and innovation, at Heidrick & Struggles.

When the Mosaic browser, with its consumer-friendly interface, was released to the world in 1993, most had no idea how radically this first foray into the internet era would transform our lives – both personally and professionally. As humans, we are generally poor at detecting and acting on early signals of change. And as business leaders, we do not fare much better. Most companies were late to the party on PCs, eCommerce, Smartphones, digital payments, the sharing economy, Gig work, AI, and now virtual ways of working.

And it’s not for lack of trying. Last year, companies spent nearly $1.2 trillion on digital transformation, according to research by International Data Corporation. Yet only 13% of leaders believe their organizations are truly ready to compete in the digital age.

Enter the COVID-19 crisis. While it may not be a welcomed shock to the system, it is driving the rapid adoption of digital technologies and ways of working needed for companies just to stay relevant and continue to operate. Not only has the stock market experienced a historic drop in value, but companies have had to dramatically change the way they operate amidst a social lock-down.

This also includes servicing customers in new ways. If you are a bank, you now have a surge in digital banking users. If you are a healthcare provider, telehealth visits are way up. If you are a retailer or restaurant, online ordering and delivery are keeping your business afloat. Companies are also having employees work remotely wherever possible.

For some segments of the workforce, especially tech and sales, this is natural and a relatively easy transition. For others, this is a painful leap from a traditional physical work environment, with regular face-to-face contact, into a new digital domain, requiring consistent, proactive efforts to

maintain connection. This also puts enormous pressure on internal organizations like IT and HR to ensure the technology capabilities, workplace policies, and organizational processes are adapted to this new environment. As companies scramble to provide training on digital tools to their workforce to make this shift, all leaders are being put under the spotlight in terms of their own digital readiness.

Fortunately, the groundwork for virtual collaboration has been laid by our use as consumers of apps like Facetime, Google Hangouts and Skype. The path for workplace messaging solutions like Slack, Teams, and Jabber were already cleared by our voracious appetite for texting, as well as platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat. And now social virtual reality platforms like Mozilla Hubs, AltspaceVR, and Rec Room – historically used by the gaming and entertainment community – are quickly moving from the living room to the virtual conference room, enabling highly immersive professional interactions for those willing to plunge in.

Yet, even with our head start with virtual interactions as consumers, many leaders are still finding wide gaps in their own capabilities, realizing they must rapidly raise their digital skills to be effective in this fast-changing environment. So how can leaders shift behaviors, mindsets, and ways of working in such a short period of time – both for themselves and their teams?

The Headwinds to Rapid Transformation To understand the pathways to rapid transformation, we first need to know what stands in the way.

1. Thinking “digital” is someone else’s job. The first barrier is thinking anything “digital” is owned by others – like IT, those with “digital” in the title, or even a new executive formally tasked with “digital transformation.” The reality is that every part of an enterprise is impacted, and every leader can be an amplifier or blocker of digital adoption.

If leaders do not see how digital technology and ways of working translate to their role, there is little hope for sustained impact from transformation efforts – and for their ability to drive success in the future. The table below

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shows how every functional leader has a role to play in shaping digital adoption for their organization.

The Role of Different Leaders in Digital Acceleration

to generate novel thinking and opportunities that could deliver advantages for your company as the market rebounds.

Critical Skills of Digital Leaders To overcome these headwinds and thrive in today’s extremely dynamic, uncertain environment, leaders must turbocharge their skills for the future. They must become what we call digital “triathletes,” playing a unique three-part role of digital strategist, innovator, and driver – to be able to navigate and thrive in fast changing digital world. While all triathletes are better at some events than others, they must train and develop proficiency in all three to stay in the race. Similarly, digital triathletes will naturally have unique capability spikes, but a solid level in all three elements as described below.

• Digital Strategist: Stays ahead of emerging trends and technologies, experiments with them personally where possible, and finds ways to apply them to drive transformative change for customers and/or business operations. The Strategist role is critical for envisioning the future and developing a path to winning by creatively leveraging technology.

2. Waiting for everything to be perfect to act. If this current health crisis has taught us anything, it is that inaction has a price. The same goes for organizations that fail to move ahead to deploy digital tools and operating models as minimal viable solutions with room for employees to dive in and evolve how they use these solutions over time.

3. Thinking digital is only about efficiency versus enabling innovation. Organizations need to foster the right culture and mindset to encourage experimentation, failure, and learning around new digital operating models and experiences along with the process, tools, and coaching on how to innovate. Otherwise, great ideas from your employees will get crushed under the weight of corporate machinery, especially a company in short-term crisis mode. As a result, you may only focus on using digital to reduce cost during the crisis and miss the opportunity

• Digital Innovator: The Innovator role is central to disrupting the status quo and moving the organization toward the vision for winning in the future. This role helps their teams overcome legacy mindsets and ways of working, as well as finds ways to harness the company’s legacy assets like data to build a long-term digital advantage.

• Digital Driver: Builds trust and collaborates across the organization with diverse stakeholders to enable rapid action. The Driver role ensures that once the vision is set, and the status quo disrupted, that innovation initiatives are executed quickly. This role is also responsible for building talent to enable execution for the future and broadly across the organization.

At the core of the digital triathlete is agility – the ability to rapidly pivot as the market changes, shed old mindsets, and voraciously keep learning about new technology and ways of

working for the future.

The demand for digital triathletes has always significantly outpaced supply. Even before the crisis, only 9% of executives strongly believed their leaders had the right skills to thrive in a digital economy. Now such leaders are even more soughtafter, as companies try to survive these unprecedented times.

Knowing what skills are needed and why it is so critical to rapidly hone them will help leaders set the pace and build a sustainable digital advantage, securing their own – and their company’s – long-term success.

A summary of this future competency model, Digital Dexterity, is shown in the table below:

and machine learning algorithms, it was able to identify the COVID-19 outbreak early, alerting its government, business, and public health clients of danger zones like Wuhan several days before the WHO and CDC. Launch organizational experiments with emerging technology — Capitalizing on the user-friendly Oculus Go virtual reality headset released in 2018, Walmart was one of the first organizations to use VR for large-scale employee training, ordering 17,000 headsets to use across its locations. This investment in trying new technology is now paying extra dividends, as the organization has much more comfort with VR, which is now gaining massive traction as a more immersive virtual collaboration tool.

Raise your own digital game — Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, believes that the knowledge and skills lifespan is very short. “Mine is two years in duration, max. I’m constantly retooling myself,” he says. Now is the time to become well versed with all the advanced features of your current virtual collaboration platforms, for instance, as well as find new virtual tools to try with your teams to stay better engaged and connected.

Get creative with serving your customers virtually — The crisis has spurred incredible innovation with how organizations continue to stay connected to and serve their customers virtually. We have seen Skype-based courses, Zoom art classes, virtual team building workshops, and Periscope jam sessions become increasingly popular. This physical-tovirtual translation often requires teaming those with expertise in digital ways of working with those who have the subject expertise and institutional knowledge. This allows the team to creatively translate traditional solutions into virtual ways to engage with and continue to deliver value to customers.

Becoming a Digital Leader Like typical heart patients who fall back to their old habits after going through by-pass surgery, many leaders will revert to their old ways of working after the COVID-19 crisis subsides and businesses begin to ramp up again. But leaders who see this as an opportunity for lasting change will seize the window to train harder and build their own digital dexterity.

Below are some key strategies to accelerate this set of skills amid today’s period of extreme stress and volatility.

Use scenario planning to anticipate both short and long-term shifts — Amidst the crisis, every business will be presented with unique challenges – but also opportunities – to leverage technology to unlock new opportunities around customer experiences, products, and operations. Using a scenario lens can help companies make more balanced bets vs. overweighting on the near term, as well as embed more optionality into their strategies to pivot quickly with market changes.

Leverage data and predictive analytics to help monitor and see early signals of change — The Canadian health monitoring platform BlueDot scours news reports and airline ticketing data to see early signs of possible outbreaks or unusual events. Through its natural language processing

Empower your employees to innovate and co-create — Companies like Mastercard and Enel view innovation as a competency that all employees can develop and provide the pathways for these employees to quickly move concepts into experiments and learning or impact across the enterprise.

This includes having leaders make innovation a priority and giving employees and teams the time and space to collaborate, experiment and learn with new digital tools like virtual reality, machine learning and automation. It also means allowing them to find creative ways to innovate and provide support amid the crisis, as we have seen with several distilleries and cosmetic companies innovating and pivoting to produce hand sanitizer for their communities.

Focus on shifting the mindset and culture to clear the path — Without changing the hearts and minds of the organization and helping all employees see themselves in the new digital version of the company, it will be hard to drive lasting change, even on the back of such as monumental crisis like COVID-19.

This is an opportunity for leaders to set the example by embracing the current situation as an opportunity to reinvent themselves as digitally aware leaders and help their teams see the opportunity amidst the chaos. This will help every leader, no matter where they sit, realize that being a triathlete and building digital dexterity is more than just physical training.

It’s the mindset to win under any conditions. Even this one.

CAPITALISM IS BROKEN. Green Swans is a manifesto for system change designed to serve people, planet, and prosperity.

GREEN SWANS THE COMING BOOM IN R E G E N E R AT I V E C A P I TA L I S M

BY J O H N ELK IN GTO N

If Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swans are problems that take us exponentially toward breakdown, Green Swans are solutions that take us exponentially toward breakthrough.

Our success—and survival—now depends on how we rein in the Black Swans and accelerate the Green Swans.

J O H N E L K I N G TON.COM

VO L A NS .COM

“J OH N E L K I N G T ON H A S ON CE A G A I N P R O V EN HIS S TA TU S A S ON E OF T H E G RE A T T H I N K E RS OF OU R TIME. ” – PAU L P O LMAN,

Former CEO of Unilever, Co-Founder and Chair of

IMAGINE, Chair of the International Chamber of Commerce, The B Team, and the Saïd Business School

AVA I L A B L E N O W

EVERYWHERE BOOKS ARE SOLD

HAVAS CCO HARRY BEE ON HOW HE’S HELPING CLIENTS DELIVER ‘IN-HOME’ CREATIVE

By Kyle O’Brien

With many feeling claustrophobic and anxious as the coronavirus lockdown continues throughout the globe, Havas New York chief creative officer Harry Bernstein – known as Harry Bee by many – has found reasons to be positive, highlighting how creativity can help lift people up.

“When you’re dealing with a situation that has no map, we need to create the map – and the map is created through creativity,” Bernstein tells The Drum. “I believe in the power of creativity. That’s why I took this career and now…creativity is needed more than ever.”

Creativity comes in many forms for Bernstein, lately. One is staying connected while remaining apart. Havas has created a virtual community with its workers. The team connects on Zoom meetings and virtual fireside chats while setting up production studios at workers’ homes.

“Me and our team at Havas have been really focused on what is happening, and what is happening is working from home,” he says. Havas NY’s chief executive, Laura Maness, recently commented to Bernstein: “Over the past five years all these companies have been in-housing all their creative.

Now, everyone’s in-homing.” That means that every business that brought creative in-house is now wondering how to get work done, while Havas is successfully building in-home studios.

Havas is still cranking away at business, doing post-production work from home on current projects and projecting work on its six-month calendar. But in the short term, it means looking at different ways to produce things without a full crew and supporting creative ideas through consumer insight and social listening, plus being in service of clients’ messaging, especially at a time when the message is most important.

“You want to be service in this time, not prey upon fear or take advantage of someone in this situation,” notes Bernstein. For instance, Havas works with New York power company Con Edison, and beyond the ad work the agency does, the team also helps with messaging, using a mix of strategic, cultural and consumer insight to keep people informed.

The agency is seeing other ways to build campaigns during this time, leaning on its internal creative studio, Annex 88, and continuing to create through existing footage and assets, leveraging influencers and even building things in 3D, since the agency has that capacity.

Bernstein said the agency is ready to expand its influencer reach through TikTok campaigns, which it’s in the process of building.

TikTok’s irreverent place in social “We were starting to embrace the TikTok community (before

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the coronavirus), which is flourishing and growing at home. If everyone’s at home, either dancing or telling stories or doing life hacks, it’ll be easy to incorporate products. And also it helps to show how the products will live when people are under these circumstances. It kind of plays together,” he says.

The main things Bernstein likes about TikTok over other social channels is its sense of fun.

“It’s just irreverent and fun. Twitter is a powerful tool, but sometimes it’s so heavy. (You say) OK, I’m going into Twitter, better be ready for what’s going to come down my pipe… it’s a wild ride. Sometimes, you look at Twitter for a half hour and then you cardboard all your windows and hide in your closet,” he jokes.

He thinks Instagram has a role of being a portfolio of people’s lives and showing where and how they’re working, while LinkedIn’s role is to deliver business information and best practices.

“Then TikTok is this irreverent, lighthearted, fun, musicdriven, culture-driven tool that just is like an anomaly. The birth of it is people dancing at home. The tone right now is refreshing sometimes,” says Bernstein.

He notes the popular meme that quickly grew around the song called Corona Time, which is based on the beer but has taken on a new meaning, especially for younger generations.

“In some other channels it might be seen as crap, but in the irreverent world of TikTok it’s just fun,” he notes, saying that TikTok can help people feel creative, energized and optimistic in the face of all that’s going on.

A creative work-life balance Bernstein says that Havas has always tried to create a solid work-life balance, but now it’s making sure people stay connected to that ethic. The agency is taking its offline programs online, consisting of its wellness programs of yoga and meditation, plus family time art classes and inspirational chats.

Bernstein is hosting one of those chats Thursday (3 April), a creative conversation with Zach Lieberman, an artist and educator based in New York City who creates artwork with code with a focus on building experimental drawing and animation tools, including augmented reality, which will be streamed on Instagram Live on the Havas NY feed for anyone to see.

Its yoga and meditation programs are also available to anyone on Instagram Live as well, and Bernstein says the sessions have grown from 50 employees to getting over 1,000 views.

“We’re not only focused on our own community now, but the world at large, that’s been really well received. People have been texting me and DM-ing me and being like, ‘thank you, we need this’. If someone wants to meditate or do yoga, there’s a million other options. I’m just trying to make it as

easy as possible and also make an excuse for people to put it in their in their day. I just think it’s really important…just making sure you’re giving people breaks,” he says.

Build in creativity and remain positive Bernstein believes it’s important that people build in ways to be creative to these social distancing, stay-at-home days.

Whether that’s building Lego kits with your kids – something Bernstein does with his two children – to taking time to meditate and think, or adding augmented reality to your projects, any time away from usual tasks may help.

“If you’re confined to a space, as much as you love and appreciate your space, that can be redundant, so the ability to augment that reality (is important),” he says, suggesting the augmented Zoom backdrops, Facebook AR and other ways to alter reality.

He states that creatives he knows are working on other ways to engage people during this time, helping spark creativity and positivity in others.

“I think true creativity has an optimism to it. Our job is to solve problems in a creative way. So now we have this huge problem,” but there are creative people working to solve problems in the creative space, whereas people in other industries like finance might see the sky as falling.

“There’s always going to be fears, always going to be concern about the future. But I think the pure creative part has a natural optimism to it,” he adds, saying that the creative marketing industry is used to disruption and that’s sometimes what it needs, especially as it works to help pull people out of their current malaise.

What’s next?

What happens when we’re allowed to return to normal?

When we can come back to the office and don’t need to inhome our work? Aside from missing being with his kids all day, Bernstein thinks we’ll return with a greater connection to our coworkers.

“I really think it will bring a new freedom because we’ve done it at such scale now. It will give the ability to have more (people) work from home and free up some of the office life.

There might be a new kind of attitude towards a work from home kind of scenario that we’ve been dancing with for five years and, and the value of it,” he says.

The ongoing online chats and everyone being in this major challenge together builds new bonds among coworkers, Bernstein believes. “I do feel like I’m feeling a stronger bond with my team, to be honest…a new level. When you’re tackling these real challenges, and you make it through together and you have some successes, there is there is a newfound connection, so I’m hoping for a grander, larger human connection…it just brings you back to basic.”

This article is about: North America, Havas New York, Havas, Creative, Advertising, Creative, Agency

AN ADVERTISING AGENCY SURVIVAL GUIDE

By PETER

Tough question. Will your advertising agency survive? Here is my educated take on which advertising agencies will survive and how they will make it happen. It is my advertising agency survival guide.

Having gone through the 2007 – 2008 recession as an agency owner, I saw approximately one-third of advertising agencies fail or shrivel. My current survival advice is based on watching that storm as well as recent deep conversations with small and medium-sized agencies. I did not choose to rush out my thoughts. I actually thought about my thoughts.

LOL.

here. It will open a new window for this offer.

Two Quick & Very Important Points.

How long will the shit-storm last?

Like you, I have no clue when any semblance of normality will return. I have to assume it will. Plan accordingly.

Chamath Palihapitiya is one of my most respected “advisors”.

He has said that companies should be able to adjust and make new plans to survive 36 months. 36! Yes.

Plus, this is not short and sweet. You will actually have to read all of it. OK, it is sweet.

He says, think like this is another depression. Whoa. Are you ready?

Quickie… I am giving away my 30 years of huge and small agency experience, guidance and coaching for free – for awhile – the right thing to do. If you want smart advice, go

This is what I do know… If you want to be in the top 1/3, you can’t lose all or even some marketing energy or brand awareness. Why make your voyage back too uphill?

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You will get my marketing recommendations below. But first, the big question.

Will Your Advertising Agency Fail?

Here is what an advertising agency principle should be doing right now. I admit that this is generalized given the diversity of the types of advertising agencies. But generalized does not mean its not an effective how-to for virtually any agency.

strategy advisor. Talk to your clients about their issues – and help find market building ideas and opportunities.

Be a compassionate, valuable marketing guide. Be perceived as a friend and not a supplier that is focused on its revenues. A smart, knowledgeable “friend” will get listened to. 1/3 of you can do this.

1. “Advertising Agency”: This is my universal term for most types of communications marketing firms.

3. Do client triage. Create an existing client hierarchy.

Determine what current clients should get the most attention. You do not have the time to uber-manage every client. If it makes sense, fire clients or just let them mosey along. Again this is a time-management and resource issue.

2. “Client”: A client is a company that has consistently used any form of advertising or digital marketing. In your case, it is a client that meets your target criteria (you have that, right) and you think would want to hire you. Sorry, Nike and Adidas do not want to hire you.

4. Who will be the client or client category winners? Slow down and understand what client categories will survive and grow in the short to medium term. For example, when we all go outside again, many will head to Las Vegas or their local casino to party.

OK, Advertising Agency… What Are You Going To Do About it?

5. Think like a CFO. If a beloved client is having cash flow problems, work with them on payment terms. I know, easier said than done and potentially painful for you, but this is one way to maintain the relationship. To balance client needs with yours, consider providing advantages, like a discount for advance payments.

TWO DEFINITIONS

I am going to be tough here. At least 30% of advertising agencies will fail in the next twelve to eighteen months.

This post provides my take on how to survive, my advertising agency survival guide. For the winners, how to set yourself up for growth.

6 ADVERTISING AGENCY PAIN POINTS – I KNOW YOU KNOW THIS. BUT, IT IS WORTH RESTATING. 1. Your current and future clients are freaked out.

2. Some current clients have already reduced or canceled advertising and project spend.

3. Agency profitability sucks.

4. You will be too slow to manage your costs.

5. Agencies, too many, are already poorly positioned, and, worse, are unbelievably ignorable.

6. Prospective clients “probably” do not want to hear from you.

Advertising Agency Survival Strategies I know what I am talking about. I’ve won and lost. My advertising agency survived the 2007-2008 recession.

My $30 million VC funded digital business did not survive the 2001 dot-com bust. Don’t feel bad for me, Microsoft eventually bought our technology.

Current Client Opportunities An always… think like a client. I’d imagine that you get really stupid supplier messages that look like the marketer has no clue about your needs. Don’t do stupid, ignorable marketing yourself.

1. Now is the time to become close friends. Get past just being a project-based “supplier” to become a sensitive business advisor. In many cases, this is the job of an agency principal or CEO. 2. Dial-up your position as a business and marketing

Agency Management Action – Skip This Section If You Want To Get To Marketing.

Be paranoid. Internalize Intel founder Andy Grove’s mantra…

“Only the paranoid survive.”

• Understand your cash runway. We will start to see many well-funded yet low-revenue Silicon Valley startups run out of cash. Your agency is not immune. If you really think you are doomed just close your doors – or merge/ sell. See below.

• Reinvent your business plan (maybe your business)…

Never let a good crisis go to waste. Look at your early 2020 pre coronavirus business plan. Toss it. What plan, and advertising agency, makes sense today and for the future? I know that for most of you the old plan is useless.

Think about what a client would buy from you not what you want to sell. “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” A bit of guidance from General Eric Shinseki.

• Dial-up scenario planning. Think through three or four business scenarios. What would you do if a quarter or one-half of your clients split? What categories should you begin to specialize in? What if this pain lasts for 12 or more months? Get into future-think, offer scenario planning to your clients.

• Now! Reduce the cost of doing business. I always tell agencies that the only thing they truly control are their business costs. Look very hard at your P&L and make adjustments fast. Today.

• Obvious: Management should take a pay cut – well, they might have had to do this already but this is a start. Tell your staff that you did it. Show that you give a shit. Don’t do online meetings from your private home gym.

• Obvious: Fire low utilized employees. Harsh, you bet.

I have unfortunately fired too many employees due to loss of large clients; pain from the aforementioned dot com bust and the advertising world killer 2007-2009 recession. If you know that you have to let staff go, do it quickly and in a group. You want to reduce internal stress if you can. Don’t leave employees guessing.

• Merge or Buy. There is nothing as sweet as buying cheap assets. Consider buying an agency. I bought a design firm just to get Nike as an agency of record client. Or, consider merging with a compatible, additive agency or even tech firm. or see my posts about how to sell an advertising agency.

• It might be time to buy the smart local PPC agency.

Agency Business Development Planning Should I Market the agency? Will anyone listen?

You have a big decision. Go quiet or go smart. Quiet is bad.

Think through how you will market your agency. I mean think really hard with the future client’s ear in mind.

Note: I am putting a list of essential business development blog posts at the bottom of this “essential” bog post.

Scenario planning. Build and review two alternative onepage agency marketing plans. No, you do not have to spend three weeks doing this. But, just start the process. Today.

Tactical ideas follow.

• This is so critical. Be everywhere a client will look for an agency. Some will, sooner or later. Try searching for your agency using the keywords a client would use. Do you know how clients find an advertising agency? Go here to find that out.

• Then go here: Ask if you are your agency is a go-to expert? If not, you better start to figure out what you can really offer clients that will make them want to listen to you.

• Own a client category. Be perceived as a ‘must-read’ expert. Just to get the juices going, here is a growth category – sleep. Do you know the Oura sleep ring? Just saying.

• Really hammer the universe of outbound marketing.

Know what clients you should be targeting. But, don’t be stupid – target the right clients. Own Linkedin agency marketing. Test PPC advertising. Leverage your email list.

Need a smart PPC agency? I have one for you.

• Make short but sweet agency videos. Sweet. Short. Smart.

Compelling. You have the time. if you need it, I have an animation agency for you.

• Become a noted strategic thinker. Be Unignorable. Be top of mind. Deliver smart, valuable insights. Unignorable insights. Think of being perceived as a consultancy vs. agency.

• Do some fast online market research. Think about creating an industry-specific research panel. Impactful, effective research will get attention.

• Show your creativity. Do some crazy stuff like Canada’s John St. (look at their videos).

• Spend, but, spend wisely. You are probably telling your favorite clients that they should not reduce their spending – dramatically. Are you? Spend wisely. Figure out what works. Stop the deer in the headlights action.

• Be efficient! Plan and manage business development programs and costs. Be rational about what clients will need your services. Have a tight process. No plan + poor process = failure.

• Please do not be an idiot. Tough talk? Just imagine the way too many agencies that just went after the Purell account. Y’all think I am kidding? I want to cry about this insanity. If you did that, maybe it is time to shut down.

Once Again – Here Are My Main Points To Help Your Advertising Agency Survive & Prosper.

Your world is now upside down. Many agencies will fail. If you think you will fail, cut bait and split.

Winners will: Love, hug their best clients.

Adjust their business plans. Note: many ad agencies do not even have an old business plan. It is time to get on it. Here is the main question: how do you make money?

Cut costs now.

Practice the art of scenario planning.

Build a business development plan based on how to market into these headwinds. Do you have a compelling expertise?

If not, get it.

Be insight-driven. People will want to hear relevant, sensitive insights. I bet I can have three for your agency in 15 minutes.

Real winners will make being unignorable (and valuable) a primary objective. Especially in these times.

Think about buying or merging. Hmmm, maybe selling.

Go faster than the next-door agency: “If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” A bit of advice from F1 and Indy champion Mario Andretti.

Some, Just Some, Unignorable Links: A Free Growth Offer You Cannot Refuse.

The Big Advertising Agency Resource List.

Business Development Secrets. Actually, this whole 600 post blog is about advertising agency business development.

How Small Advertising Agencies Can Win Big Clients. My bet is that a smart, compelling agency can sneak into a big boy right now. But, it takes unignorable big ideas. Not sell, but insights.

The World’s Largest Advertising Agency Blog List. Everything in one place.

That’s It For Now. Contact me if you want to talk about your growth strategy and the detail in my advertising agency survival guide. I am offering my best of class advice for free. A give back.

YES, FREE.

COVID-19 Pandemic: What Will the Next Six Months Bring?

By Richard Thaler

In his recent article about four different futures for the evolution of the COVID-19 virus, Wharton’s Eric K. Clemons, a professor of operations, information and decisions, noted that the markets have been reacting to uncertainty rather than to expectations. Continuing his analysis in this companion piece, he examines four more potential scenarios examining the very short term social and economic dimensions of the crisis. Clemons’s bottom-line assessment: It is premature to assume that we will manage our way through the next several months successfully. It will be painful, and the key questions involve how we will respond to the pain. Different responses will have different impacts on the levels of pain we must endure. This model allows us to predict the impact of the policy decisions we observe.

It’s customary when doing a scenario analysis to assume a long-time horizon, maybe five, 10, or even 25 years. When I did the first part of my analysis of COVID-19, I assumed that both the lethality of the virus in five to 10 years and its mutation rate over the same period were unknowable today.

That results in four different scenarios, ranging from benign to catastrophic. The most benign scenario, low lethality and low mutation rate, would be a minor inconvenience for which a vaccine would be available. The most catastrophic scenario would be a virus that was highly lethal and that mutated frequently, meaning it would have many fatalities among infected individuals and no vaccine would be available.

Scenario analysis is not a classification system, where you

divide a population into segments — high aptitude and low aptitude and high energy and low energy — to get four groups.

It’s not even a system for dividing the future into high and low probability outcomes. It’s a system that looks at the most critical things we don’t yet know, the key uncertainties that we really need to be able to evaluate. These are the things that if we could know them, we could predict the future. They help us divide the future into sets of alternative outcomes. We then assume that each of these critical things takes on one of its two most extreme values. That gives us four different futures, defined as Low1 & Low2, Low1 & High2, High1 & Low2, and High1 & High2. When we select our two key uncertainties, we get four very different futures. We sequentially assume that each of the combinations is true, and we sequentially analyze each of them.

When we pick our uncertainties correctly each of the futures is possible, they are all different from the others, and they all require different sets of strategic responses.

It is not usually necessary to perform scenario analyses for short-term uncertainties. Usually we understand the world we are in now, and usually we know how to respond to the world we are in now. We know how to predict the responses of others over the short term, and we even know how to predict the effectiveness of their responses.

But our current situation is different. We’ve never faced a threat like the coronavirus pandemic, and governments have never tried to implement the same set of responses before.

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It’s hard to anticipate exactly what the government policies will be, and it’s hard to predict how complex human societies will respond, so it’s hard to predict how effective government actions will be. If citizens believe that their governments’ actions are effective, if they believe their governments’ assessments and reports are honest and accurate, and if they believe that sacrifices are shared equally, communities may respond in support of the common good. But if citizens believe that their governments’ actions are ineffective, if they believe their governments are lying, and if they believe that some groups are receiving preferential treatment, our responses may be totally ineffective.

The virus was no one’s fault. But our responses, and the economic, political, and personal costs are at least partly within our control.

Uncertainties in Our Current Scenario We sort of know where we are now. We are confronting a new virus. It seems to spread faster than the flu, because we have no immunity from previous infections with this virus. Likewise, we have no vaccines to slow the virus’s transmission from person to person. We have no effective anti-viral medications to treat this virus, so it can be extremely lethal, at least in the most vulnerable populations. In the absence of vaccines and medications, the most promising way to limit the damage is to slow the spread of the virus, mostly through voluntary social distancing. This can be combined when necessary with mandatory closings of businesses, bars and restaurants, theaters and sporting events, schools, and indeed almost all places where people congregate and can expose one another to the virus. In the absence of complete testing to identify carriers, and in the absence of complete self-isolation of carriers and suspect carriers, social distancing and shutting down vast segments of the economy may be the only way to slow the spread.

Why is it so important to slow the spread, or flatten the curve of growth in infection? There are two reasons. In the most pessimistic scenario, we are all going to get the virus, but we do not all have to get sick at the same time. If we can spread out the times when people get sick, we will not overload the hospital system, and there will be an adequate supply of hospital beds, intensive care doctors, and ventilators with trained operators. We will get sick, but far fewer of us will die. If we can flatten the curve even further, we may not all have to get sick. We may slow the transmission long enough to have vaccines available before most of the population is exposed.

What will the effects be when we shut down entire segments of the economy? We’ve had recessions that emerged over months or years. We’ve never had a self-imposed, instant and long-lasting recession before.

Here are the two questions that, if we could answer them, they would enable us to predict how deep and how long the recession would be. They also would allow us to predict how catastrophic the impacts of COVID-19 would be on the health of our populations.

Can We Flatten the Curve?

We need to slow the spread of COVID-19. But can we flatten the curve, and slow the spread of the virus? There is so much we cannot predict, because we have not tried this before.

• Slow the Spread and Flatten the Curve: Do young people accept instructions to hunker and shelter in place voluntarily, or do they shelter in place as a result of criminal sanctions for ignoring instructions? Bavaria has recently imposed mandatory lockdown in order to eliminate Corona parties, where young people gathered to celebrate the virus. Indeed, since the risks to young people are relatively low, do they continue to congregate in groups, expose themselves, and endanger others?

Does the closing of restaurants, beaches, bars and theaters adequately slow transmission? Does society provide anonymous testing for everyone, regardless of citizenship or legal resident status? Does society provide medical care for everyone, regardless of citizenship or legal resident status?

OR • Rapidly Spreading: A True Pandemic: Does restriction on who qualifies for treatment result in an untreated and undiagnosed reservoir of disease circulating at all times?

Do individuals who are at low risk continue activities that increase the likelihood that they will serve as transmitters of the virus? Does transmission therefore continue, overwhelming hospital beds, hospital staff and critical resources like ventilators?

Can We Share the Pain?

President Trump tried to rally America behind him in the War Against an Invisible Enemy and he may have succeeded in uniting the country in shared sacrifice. But for how long? And under what circumstances do we remain united? And under what circumstances does social cohesion begin to fall apart?

Again, there is so much we cannot predict because we have not experienced this before.

• Share the Pain: He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother: Do we share the pain? There are several indicators that would allow us to assess if we are successfully sharing the pain of the sudden and severe downturn. We would see enormous income taxes on the truly wealthy, as we have seen in times of national crisis before, though they may never need to approach the 94% top marginal rate of 1944. Revenues are used to support small business owners and their employees, providing basic income and ensuring individual survival. We develop safe door-to-door delivery, which enables small stores and restaurants to keep operating. The bottom does not fall out of the economy, and the middle class does not become alienated, to the extent that they did in Europe in the 1930s, which accelerated the growth of fascism.

The least well-off segments of society do not suffer disproportionately, and they see that they are being supported financially by the truly wealthy.

OR Sauve Qui Peut: We all Protect Ourselves and Our Families:

Do we end up with everyone acting in their own self-interest?

Do we fail to share the pain? Does rural America decide that COVID-19 is a coastal problem, a big city problem, or even a Democratic Party problem, and believe that they are safe? Do big cities understand that elderly residents are often low income, cannot afford to stockpile, and when they do venture out to purchase essentials, they find mostly empty shelves? Do some groups believe that supporting the poor is too expensive, given the current size of the national debt?

Instead of funding the poor and easing the pain of the ill and the unemployed, the government relies on discredited approaches like tax cuts for the wealthy and a decrease in government services and the social safety net, believing that more money in the hands of the wealthy will lead to more investment, more hiring, and more spending. The most heavily armed segments of society rebel, and the truly wealthy accept massive government intervention, like martial law, in order to ensure order and ensure domestic tranquility at any cost.

The Resulting Scenarios As usual, answers to these questions generate four very different scenarios:

general, bear the bulk of the pain. Businesses fail as the recession deepens, and businesses that provide services to the most vulnerable segments of the population fail disproportionately. The poorest regions of large cities truly become banlieues, not in the sense of suburbs, but as no-go zones of suffering and violence. This scenario is shown in cautionary amber.

• One Nation, Indivisible: We can’t flatten the curve, and we can’t end the recession. But we unite as if we were facing a foreign invasion, and we share the pain equally. We endure gasoline rationing, food rationing, and possibly even rotating power blackouts. Working at home is the new normal. Text dating is the new normal.

Community watch organizations emerge, patterned after the civil defense groups in London during the Blitz, to make sure that neighbors do not die at home due to lack of heat, or lack of food, or an accidental fall. The cost of medical care is staggering, especially at a time of reduced economic production, and the national debt explodes. Again, this scenario is shown as cautionary amber.

Still, the cautionary scenarios are often not only dangerous but dangerously unstable. Would we truly share the pain equally? Would we truly remain one nation, indivisible, if the suffering lasted for years? During World War II, U.S. military leaders believed that the population would not have been willing to continue the war against Japan if the Japanese had been able to resist for much longer. We are a more ethnically and economically diverse nation today, and political divisions are worse than they have been at any time since the Civil War. Would rural America, with ample local food supplies, continue to support rationing? Would the urban poor, often well-armed, continue to suffer as their wealthier neighbors appeared to continue to live the lives they had enjoyed before?

I see two halves of an unacceptable alternative shown in dangerous red.

• All Fall Down: Truly the End: Social cohesion ends. Rural populations refuse to share food with the cities. The urban poor erupt in violence, pillaging wealthier communities in their cities.

Or

• Still Normal: Complete Recovery as After 2008: We slow the spread, flatten the curve and share the pain.

We will still face a recession, but we will recover from it. There may be tens of thousands of elderly patients who never fully recover, which will increase the burden of medical costs on our society. Some expenditures are never replaced; we are not all going to go on extended drinking binges, or dining binges, or theater binges, to make up for the meals and entertainment we missed.

But properly managed government aid will keep most businesses from failing. We will muddle through. The scenario is shown as green. It is not good, but it is as good as we can hope for right now.

• And I Guess It’s Gonna Hurt me For a Long, Long Time: We slow the spread of the virus and successfully flatten the curve, but we do not share the pain of the recession. The poor, the elderly, and the vulnerable in

• Martial Law and Fascism: Social cohesion ends but the power structure has not collapsed entirely. Martial law is declared. At best, we have a temporary police state. At worst, we have fascism.

Bottom-Line Assessment In my first piece I sketched out why it was premature to assume that COVID-19 would be a plague of biblical proportions, a biological catastrophe for decades to come.

In this piece, I argue that it is also premature to assume that we are going to manage our way through the next several months successfully. It will be painful, and the key questions involve how we respond to the pain. Observing governments’ policies and societies’ responses will allow us to determine which of these scenarios will emerge. The virus was no one’s fault. But our responses, and the economic, political, and personal costs are at least partly within our control.

Stay safe. Be good to one another. Good luck. And may “God bless us, every one.”

Book,

&

Line

Sinker

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