As Covid case numbers drop and mask mandates lift in cities like New York, higher-ups seem eager to dust off the communal tables and cubicles. New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently told business leaders to “give [employees] a bonus to burn the Zoom app and come on back to work.”

And yet: Many remote workers say they are working more than they used to, in fact, and may be less eager to “burn Zoom” than politicians or executives. “I don‘t think there‘s ‘going back‘ to anything,” Robert Lambrechts, chief creative officer at ad agency Pereira O’Dell, told us. “That world, whatever we did in January 2020, doesn‘t exist anymore.”

That leaves agencies holding the real-estate bag. In a fully hybrid or remote world, what will agencies do with all that office space?

Cricket sounds: Rather than forcing a return for the sake of aesthetics, Pereira O’Dell has opened its New York and San Francisco offices for employees to use whenever they please. While Lambrechts commutes to the office almost every day, he said he‘s in the minority.

“Four days a week, pretty much no one is here. It‘s me and one other person, and we sit on opposite sides of the office. And I can have literally any call out in the open. It doesn‘t matter,” he told us.

So why all the tumbleweeds? A recent Pew Research study shows that a majority of the teleworkers surveyed are staying home by choice—only 38% are WFH because their office is closed or unavailable to them.

• Barry Lowenthal, who ran Media Kitchen prior to its merger with MMI, said that in his experience, it‘s not just about employees reclaiming their commute time, but also avoiding things like bosses watching over their shoulders.
• Lambrechts said one point of frustration he’s seen is commuting to sit on Zoom all day. Since Pereira O’Dell has hired remote workers around the world over the last two years, with roughly 35%–40% of employees now located outside of commuting distance from their offices in New York and San Francisco, it can be hard to avoid.

Even when teams are in the same city, Lambrechts doesn’t think things will go back to how they were: “​​I do genuinely think that the idea of what an office is is going to change from somewhere where you’re forced to go and sit from eight to five, or eight to six, or whatever, to somewhere where you go and meet with a group of people for a few hours and then do what you want to do.”

Read more about how agencies may need to change their office layouts to accommodate new expectations.—KH

Libby Leist has her hands full steering the long-running morning show Today. Luckily, she’s got a leg up: She’s part of the brand’s key demographic.

“I’m a 43-year-old woman,” Leist told Marketing Brew. “I’m sort of that Today audience.”

That perspective has helped guide Leist, a former news producer, as she shepherds one of NBCUniversal’s largest and most enduring brands forward in an era where audiences increasingly favor digital and on-demand viewing. As SVP, a role Leist assumed in January 2021, she is tasked with balancing the desires of traditional audiences and reaching out to new ones, especially outside the usual morning time slot.

“It’s our job to just continue to push that message that we’re a leader in lifestyle,” Leist said. “I’m really proud of the fact that we already reach 70 million people [per month] as a whole in our audience, and we’re only going to push more to get that younger demographic to follow us.”

All-day viewers: Despite the fact that the show continues to outperform rivals like Good Morning America on ABC and CBS Mornings on CBS in the key 25–54 age demographic, linear viewership continues to decline. At the turn of the 21st century, the morning show was able to attract as many as 7.2 million viewers a day; as of last month, it averaged just over 3 million viewers. That’s why Leist is keen to reach viewers who don’t necessarily tune in during the morning.

One way to do that is to build Today’s presence on streaming. Today All Day is a streaming channel of 24/7 Today programming on NBCUniversal’s streaming service, Peacock. The network produces 20 hours of additional original programming each week, with three hours of original content airing every day on Peacock.

“In any given [commercial] break, Hoda [Kotb] and Jenna [Bush Hager] will be doing a TikTok for social media or recording some lines for Today All Day; we’re getting the most out of their time,” Leist said. “They definitely are feeling those demands, just because we have so many different content streams now.”

Here’s how Leist is focusing on streaming and digital platforms to evolve the Today brand.—KS

As American businesses run from Russia, Google, the world’s largest digital advertiser, is still funding publishers of Russian disinformation, according to a report last week from NewsGuard, a company that, among other things, ranks and reviews the credibility of publishers for advertisers.

• Of 116 websites publishing what NewsGuard described as “publishing disinformation about the war in Ukraine” and receiving programmatic advertising $$, 64% were monetized by Google.

Zoom out: The invasion of Ukraine has caused some advertisers to reassess how they view brand safety, raising questions about what content to fund, where to place it, and even when is best to run it—terrified of becoming the next Applebee’s. That often results in advertisers pulling or pausing their budgets from the news altogether.

Meanwhile, programmatic advertising allows for all sorts of weird stuff to make money—including disinformation and propaganda.

• According to data shared with Marketing Brew, NewsGuard found that Google was monetizing publishers like Pravda.ru, Veterans Today, and ZeroHedge.
• Unlike other brand safety vendors that rely on contextual tools, NewsGuard uses analysts (uh, real people) to rate and review publishers, scoring them on a scale of 0 to 100.

Learn how NewsGuard determines the difference between disinfo and the real stuff.—RB

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

We’re live: A guide to Instagram Live for business, with tips for newbies and pros alike.

Rumor has it: URLs with keywords are often said to improve a website’s Google search ranking, but their importance could be exaggerated.

Collab: TikTok breaks down the potential benefits for brands that partner directly with creators on the platform.

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Marketers should plan for their brands to weigh in on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but should be purposeful in their communications. That’s according to a survey from Gartner, published last week and conducted February 25–March 1.

Gartner found that 60% of US consumers surveyed think that brands should reconsider conducting business in Russia or partnering with Russian companies as a result of the invasion.

“This is a signal that CMOs who focus on the US market must consider consumer expectations for corporate response,” Kate Muhl, vice president analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice, said in a statement.

Caveat: Muhl added that the Gartner survey indicates that consumers are not overly eager to hear the details of those corporate responses just yet.

In the meantime, marketers should take time to build stories about how their companies are responding to the war, and be ready to share those stories “when consumers do become more open to hearing from brands about actions they’ve taken,” Muhl said.

+1: A survey conducted by Morning Consult on February 26–27 also found that most Americans want brands to take action as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Correction: Last week, we said Pinterest’s Predictions report for 2022 came out in conjunction with the company’s annual advertiser summit last week. It was actually released in December 2021.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

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• Twitter reverses decision to make ‘Home’ feed its default on app
• Mood Board: How Old Navy turned TikTok comments into a commercial
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