WAX LYRICAL, MAY 2020: How is lockdown impacting brands, agencies and consumers?

As the UK entered its second month of lockdown, we continued our Business As Unusual series of podcasts by chatting to three very different business leaders about how they, and their businesses, are adapting to the new way of life

A few days before rumours of a Virgin Media and O2 merger surfaced, Mark Runacus spoke to Virgin Media COO Jeff Dodds.

As a nation of children adapted to home-schooling and more adult company than they may wish for, we caught up with Emma Scott, CEO of Beano Studios.

And as our industry continued to get used to meetings - and pitches - conducted through a computer screen, Victoria Fox, CEO the AAR shared her take on how she hoped COVID will change the advertising ecosystem for the better.

You can listen to all those conversations by finding us on iTunes, Spotify, Deezer and the Marketing Society’s Soundcloud account and playing our May podcasts but, in the meantime, here are our top takeaways from three fascinating conversations.

The behaviour of brands and marketers has got to change
Jeff Dodds shed light on where he thinks brands priorities should lie at the moment, and how he believes this period will impact the industry going forward.

“No one wants to be sold to at the moment,” he said. “It feels unimportant to be focusing on attracting new customers. If companies are making decisions between laying off staff and spending, I’d rather they were putting the interests of their people first.”

And he believes the industry will be changed, at least in the short-term, by this experience:

“The nature of marketing post-Covid will be different for a while”, he said. “In order to puncture the consciousness of people over the coming months and perhaps years it’s going to require a different approach. [It needs to be] quieter, less shouty, [have] more humility, [be] more value-centric and more respectful.”

Don’t confuse marketing and advertising

Both Jeff and Victoria spoke about how important it is, in their view, to not confuse marketing and advertising but to remember that all great advertising, and all great marketing, starts from the same point: the customer.

Jeff believes that unless people have spent the majority of their career in the industry, when you talk about marketing, they hear advertising. He said: “When you say you want to invest in marketing they hear ‘you want to do some more posters’. I grew up in a generation when marketing was much broader than that, and what I consider to be a marketing function does encompass pricing and proposition development and customer experience and advertising and marketing in that sense.

“Whether you want to attract new customers or work with the ones you have, by talking about customers not advertising it forces people to think about the start point of those journeys.”

Victoria echoes the sentiment and stressed the importance of remembering the current context. She said: “There is a need more than ever to keep talking to your customers and connecting with your customers and driving advocacy through this period, but it feels a very sensitive time to be selling and to be pushing your agenda above the societal agenda.”

Leadership qualities are under the spotlight

Jeff identified what he sees as the three most important traits of strong leadership.

1. Decisiveness - nobody would be interested in working for somebody who’s procrastinating during the current climate. You’ve got to make a strong decision and make it quickly.

2. Reassurance - No one wants to hear anything other than ‘we're going to get through this, this is why we’re going to get through it, and when we get through it these are some of the things we’ll have learnt as an organisation’.

3. Communication - I’m noticing with my team that we’re spending more time together talking as a team than we did before the crisis - about what we’re working on, whether it’s the right stuff, what we could do differently, performance of the business, the impact on our customers.”

Agencies are adapting too….

Victoria Fox is seeing a surge in collectivism and coming together as a community through the COVID crisis. Through the AAR’s twice-weekly town halls she is seeing agencies open up about the challenges they are facing, with creative talent coming together for the greater good.

She said: “Pre-COVID everyone was very boxed into their swim lanes, their disciplines, their remit, their procurement boxes [but] what we're hearing now is people are just coming together collaboratively to answer clients business challenges - genuinely big business challenges that have been thrown up.”

…and hopefully for the long term

We have been forced to change our attitudes to everything from our work to our processes and everyone we interviewed for our May podcasts was optimistic that some of the lockdown-enforced changes will stick around long after some semblance of normality has resumed.

Victoria said: “We’re hearing that agencies are putting their best foot forward to just answer [client] questions, regardless of their background. I think that's immense and should be something that continues. We're seeing a stripping away of layers in decision making, which allows things to accelerate and move, both on the agency side and from brand owners.

Meanwhile Jeff is simply looking forward to embracing the video meeting more. “Pre-lockdown I thought it was odd to do a video call,” he said. “Most of my calls were done via the phone and if someone dialled into a face to face meeting it jarred. Post lockdown I think it'll be unusual not to do a video call - it’ll feel completely natural.”

And it’s not just us adults who are having to get used to a new way of doing things. We have a generation of children who are being home-schooled, away from their friends, with little or no company their own age. Parents are not the only ones struggling to adjust to kitchen-based education, and at Beano Studios the focus is very much on how the kids themselves are feeling.

Our conversation with Emma Scott, CEO of Beano Studios, shined a light on the fascinating work they are doing to record how young people are feeling about the lockdown, about missing school and about being kept apart from everyone their own age.

Kids understand more than we give them credit for

Emma talked to us about Generation Alpha, the children born since 2010, who are already proving an incredibly savvy generation. She told us they are confident and knowledgeable and smart about their tech, having been well taught by schools to control what information they give away.

She said: “Children are very confident about using the internet on their own - 73% question the things they see and read on the internet compared to 52% of their parents. They know what clickbait is and clearly understand the role of advertising.”

Lockdown is not making children miserable, just rather bored

Inequalities among children are extreme, with one million UK and eight million US children denied access to outside space during lockdown. In a bid to understand how young people are feeling, Beano has been running a live mood barometer on its site which has been garnering more than 200,000 responses a day, providing a valuable insight into the feelings of children in different countries.

“Because children today are digital masters we’ve found they’ve adapted very well,” Emma told us. “At the start, levels of worry and sadness were high but as soon as schools shut down, the happiness and boredom factors started rising rapidly. We have happy but very bored children at the moment.”

The Beano is no longer simply a comic

Emma has been the driver behind the incredible pivoting of an 80-year-old comic into a multi-platform content studio and global kids’ insight database. She talked to us about Beano Brain Omnibus, the latest in Beano Studios’ insight consultancy that uses games, quizzes, and bespoke questions to garner opinions and attitudes from the hundreds of thousands of children and teenagers that use the site every month.

These are just some of the topics covered in our two May podcasts. Please do stream or download any of our past pods to listen to in-depth interviews with Jeff Dodd, Emma Scott and Victoria Fox, or any number of our previous high-profile guests.