The past few weeks haven’t been great for the digital advertising industry, with many companies enacting layoffs, furloughs and salary cuts.
So how do you, as either an individual or as a company, recover after a tough slog?
This week on The Big Story, the AdExchanger team welcomes special guest Martin Kihn, SVP of marketing strategy at Salesforce Marketing Cloud and former Gartner research VP, who expands on his Monday column Bouncing Back In Tough Times: Lessons From The Past.
The gang chats with Kihn about how to free yourself from pessimism and short-term thinking, as well as why layoffs can undermine a company’s recovery after the bad times pass. He shares real examples of how companies who lacked the resiliency to deal with a crisis ended up damaging relationships with suppliers, customers and potential employees. Just look at what happened with the airlines, which laid off employees in droves post-9/11.
“They’d created a bad precedent and it was much harder for them to capture growth on the upside,” Kihn says. “The downside of layoffs is not only that you hurt morale in the company, but when the recession is over, there’s a period of acceleration – and you can’t hire fast enough to take advantage of that growth when you already have a reduced workforce.”
Also in this episode, Alison Weissbrot looks at how the agency holding companies are holding up through all of this, and how the adjustments they’re making due to the pandemic (yes, that does include layoffs and furloughs) are accelerating a trend that started well before the world ground to a halt.
And we’ll also look at mobile advertising platform InMobi, which – for now – has avoided layoffs with a stock compensation plan.
