Tag Archives: branded content

Morgan Stanley

7 Trends That Will Reshape Work — And Life — In 2021 | Morgan Stanley

As businesses plan for the post-pandemic future, we’re finding that many changes born during this period have created lasting shifts in how companies support their employees in both the best of times and the worst. From improving work-from- home practices to enhancing how businesses attract and nurture more diverse workforces, here are seven key trends that show how 2020 has redefined our relationship with our jobs and our employers.

1. Rethinking Productivity and Remote Work

Post COVID-19, the white-collar workforce is poised to change fundamentally. McKinsey & Company estimates the remote workforce could quadruple in size.1 By many measures, productivity rose during the lockdown, yet many employees found that isolation sapped motivation and family demands interrupted work. In light of this, executives are setting a new tone by rethinking how best to capture the gains of remote work while reducing its downsides. Leaders are focusing on productivity by sharing best practices for meetings, surveying their employees, having more candid conversations with them, and exploring how to restore in-person gatherings when the time is right.

2. Hiring and Keeping Top Talent

To survive the economic downturn in 2020, layoffs were a wrenching necessity for 59% of chief executives.2 Heading into 2021, a growing share of business leaders are looking to refill those spots.3 And the wave of workers cut loose during the lockdown offers a rare opportunity to remake and upgrade roles with an infusion of new talent and unique perspectives from other industries. Leaders are diversifying by hiring people with disabilities, as well as those from military backgrounds or untapped geographies.

3. Boosting Workers’ Mental and Physical Wellness

Facing rising anxiety, many Americans devoted extra time to their mental and physical wellness during the pandemic. Sales of both meditation apps and home fitness gear surged.4 At this moment, companies are broadening the definition of wellness and extending more support at home and at work to help employees de-stress. For instance, they’re providing services like personalized coaching to address financial stressors. For mental health, some firms are offering virtual therapy and meditation benefits that can help repair the performance-robbing harms of stress and depression.

4. Updating Workplace Benefits for Millennials

Even as the U.S. workforce grows increasingly multigenerational, millennials are emerging as its biggest cohort and its most potent source of change, particularly around job flexibility. And while millennials have in the past been notoriously quick to switch firms, that’s changing as they become more committed to bigger roles and their responsibilities grow. Research from PwC suggests that companies can further boost retention with millennial-friendly policies, such as expanded equity ownership, more accommodating work-from-home rules and flexible vacation terms. What’s more, firms are pleased to find that non-millennials like these policies too.

5. Addressing Diversity to Improve Hiring and Retention

Even before the convergence of 2020’s crises, employees — particularly women, people of color and LGBTQ communities — faced tougher financial challenges, such as higher student debt levels and retirement shortfalls, compared to other groups. While these issues can be highly stressful and distracting for employees, companies can now address the unique financial realities of specific segments and help these employees be more productive and confident. For instance, leaders are advancing benefits that pay down student debt and customizing financial wellness plans that serve the specific needs of many historically marginalized groups.

6. Reframing Open Enrollment to Deepen Engagement

As remote workers encounter new challenges and needs, companies are rethinking how and when they communicate about benefits and open enrollment. After all, it is the most important opportunity they have to improve the financial and overall well-being of their workforce and their families. To do so, HR decision-makers are engaging employees early and often, and introducing new benefits and financial wellness programs. More companies are widening the availability of equity compensation and retirement planning; some are strengthening mental and health coverage; and many are adding benefits that enhance care for children and adult dependents.

7. Deepening Trust With Extra Financial Support

Now more than ever, people trust their employers as a vital part of their financial safety net. During the pandemic, 46% of companies reported an increase in requests for 401(k) loans and hardship withdrawals; 27% said they fielded increased calls for pay advances.15 Against this backdrop, it’s increasingly important for companies to stay abreast of their employees’ financial health; to target communications to those at risk; and to open up financial wellness programs to staff and their families. Companies are also examining the potential benefits of extending health coverage to gig workers and evaluating the impact of high-deductible health plans on the financial wellness of specific employee segments.

The Bottom Line

The past year has stressed workers and their families like few before. And while the challenges of adapting have come at a cost, encouraging, long-term solutions are emerging. While companies continue to reckon with the pandemic and its effects, they’re taking the opportunity to address the evolving needs of employees and build a deeper relationship with them.

As your company navigates this new landscape, Morgan Stanley at Work is here to help guide you and your employees toward financial confidence and improved well-being, at work and at home.

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Check out the original here, with animated data graphics and full footnotes: https://www.morganstanley.com/atwork/articles/seven-trends-work-life-2021

T Brand Studio

How T Brand Studio Created a Culture of Content Innovation | IBM Industries Blog

When The New York Times first debuted T Brand Studio, its branded content unit, in 2014, branded content didn’t exactly have the best reputation in the industry. Other publishers generating branded content at the time had a tendency to confuse readers by failing to clearly differentiate between content from the newsroom and content from advertisers. Some would further muddy the waters by using newsroom editors and writers to create that content.

Newsroom leadership was initially “very anxious” about the new unit, said T Brand Vice President and Executive Editorial Director Adam Aston. But the need to create a new revenue stream in the organization was clear. The Times had to move from a print sales-based ad model to a digital-first model, and they had to get it right.

“We were watching our print advertising on a linear straight path down, which is where most publishers up to that point were getting most of their revenue and profit. That undermined the economics of subsidizing a news operation. And if you’re cutting back on getting news it’s a vicious cycle. For many of our peers it was a death cycle,” Aston said.

The studio started small, with just a handful of employees producing content hosted on the New York Times website. But it soon proved its mettle with the release of “Women Inmates: Why The Male Model Doesn’t Work,” a beautiful interactive piece for Netflix to promote the second season of “Orange Is the New Black.” This, clearly, was not branded content as usual.Women in Prison, Part 1 | Presented by Netflix

Four years later, T Brand Studio has grown 25-fold, employing more than 100 people across offices in New York, London, Paris and Hong Kong. In 2016, it acquired HelloSociety, an influencer marketing agency, and FakeLove, a Brooklyn-based experiential agency. (IBM’s “Outthink Hidden” campaign was T Brand’s first project with the agency.)

And it has expanded beyond producing native branded content to providing a whole suite of creative services for companies on their own platforms. T Brand Studio is not simply an in-house creative unit, it’s an agency—and it’s successful, growing both production and media revenue by double digits every year.

If you’re looking for a study in how to disrupt your own organization, look no further than T Brand Studio.

“Even when sitting on an incredible foundation of writing, reputation, and loyal customers, change isn’t easy,” Aston said. “The Studio’s success is part of a much larger digital transformation across the Times’ newsroom and business operations that’s accelerated in the past five years.”

A crucial ingredient in T Brand’s success has been its mix of personnel. While similar content organizations essentially hired the usual cast of characters one might find at a creative agency, Aston said, T Brand looked for content makers who were “a little bit different than your standard marketing copywriter creative type.” In hiring, he said, the intent was to “borrow the best of the Times journalism and fuse it with the kind of goals brands would be pursuing.”

“That’s a rule of thumb for all business—you’ve got to master the best of disciplines and bring them together in ways that haven’t been done before. Getting the chemistry right can be hard and getting the casting right can take time,” Aston said.

Another crucial differentiator for T Brand has been its use of new technology, including VR, AR and 360 video. But while the studio has been an early adopter—and in some cases, a first adopter—of those technologies at the Times, Aston said it’s just as important to know when not to use a new technology as it is to know when to use it. VR, AR, and 360 video are incredible storytelling tools, he said, but they’re not right for every project.

“You don’t want to add gratuitous technology to something just because it’s neat,” Aston said.

Once a source of anxiety within its organization, T Brand is now a source of inspiration as it drives innovation within the Times while contributing to a viable new business model. As T Brand gears up to launch its 400th paid post this quarter, it’s intent on carrying that spirit of innovation into the future.

“The more we experiment and the more it’s successful, the more comfortable the Times has gotten at experimenting,” Aston said. “The organization is more confident knowing, ‘Hey you can try this. It may be complicated, it may be hard, it might not always be a home run, but you have to experiment,’” Aston said.

See the original post here: https://www.ibm.com/blogs/industries/t-brand-studio-created-culture-reinvention/

T Brand Studio

The 60-Second Interview: Adam Aston for The New York Times’s T Brand Studio | Politico

By CAPITAL STAFF — 06/27/2014

CAPITAL: Can you walk us through the process of how a paid post gets made? Do you generally approach companies with post ideas, or is it the other way around?

ASTON: It’s a collaborative, iterative process. After clients come to us with an opportunity and specific goals, the team brainstorms and returns with concepts, which we then evolve further along with the client. For a successful execution like Netflix’s Paid Post for “Orange is the New Black,” trust and cooperation are key catalysts.

CAPITAL: The “Orange is the New Black” ad made waves in media circles. Digiday called it “The Snowfall of Native Ads.” Were you surprised by the reaction? Has that success opened up new business opportunities?

ASTON: We’re a young studio, with a lot of energy, talent and ambition. “Orange is the New Black” was the first project on which we were able to fire-up all of our talents in parallel — journalism, video, design and storytelling. We were hoping it would raise the bar, and it did so. Nothing illustrates the potential of a Paid Post like a real-world example like this, so we’ve seen some increased interest from new potential projects.

CAPITAL: Referring to the Netflix ad, Times media columnist David Carr wrote, “All brand-sponsored journalism does not suck.” Do you find yourself trying to challenge that perception on a regular basis? Why do you think people seem to have lower expectations for brand-sponsored content?

ASTON: Like David, we recognize that this kind of content faces real headwinds. Media watchers are rightly concerned that this content could potentially confuse readers. That’s why The New York Times has labored to demark T Brand Studio’s work from newsroom content. That said, marketer content can be just as valuable as content coming from a newsroom. All content — whether news or advertising — works best when it’s of a high quality.

CAPITAL: A lot of your editors and contributors seem to have journalism backgrounds. Is that something you look for? Is there a big difference between writing a news story and writing a paid post?

ASTON: Journalistic sensibilities and experience are vital to execute high quality content, so when were were staffing up we were definitely looking for experienced journalists to join our team. Writing a news story and writing a piece of sponsored content both require solid reporting and writing skills, as well as a focus on facts.

CAPITAL: There’s obviously been a lot of discussion about how to integrate native advertising; specifically, about how it should be differentiated from news content. Do you think it’s important for paid content to be clearly labeled as such? And do you think there’s a reader appetite for well-written paid posts?

ASTON: Sponsored content is not about tricking your readers, it’s about adding value to the conversation. As I mentioned, we want to avoid confusing readers at all costs. In turn, we want to provide them with thought-provoking, engaging content in the form of infographics, video, images and of course, written narrative. Examples like the success of Netflix’s Paid Post show that readers do welcome well-written sponsored content that offer a fresh perspective on interesting topics. Readers respond enthusiastically when compelling, clearly-labeled content enriches their interest in a topic related to the brand.

View the original here: https://www.politico.com/media/story/2014/06/the-60-second-interview-adam-aston-editorial-director-for-the-new-york-times-t-brand-studio-002456