BBDO Love
COVID-19 has been forced all business work-from-home and navigate a new lifestyle. It is important to connect employees and maintain companies’ cultures.
“Around 70 percent of the organisations believe that the single biggest concern for continued remote working is fall in productivity.” — E&Y Surveys
BBDO realized that is important to maintain productivity and provide meaningful work. But more importantly, is to motivate and connect employees when face with uncertainty, the agency achieved that with “BBDO Your Home” — a campaign to rebrand home space to BBDO office which released in March 2020.
“We are all at BBDO, wherever we are. Stay safe.” — BBDO
Team members can generate their home office logo by typing their home address into the BBDOmicrosite.
The story pulled me as a bystander, when it comes to work-from-home, most businesses’ biggest concern is productivity and digitalization. This agency makes remote work more personal, which will have a positive impact on brand reputation and employee connection in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is important that we continue to think of ourselves as one office. But, for right now, we are not just one big office space in Midtown Manhattan — we are made up of many unique people, places and spaces”
— BBDO New York CEO Kirsten Flanik
The campaign is an innovative way to gather employee sentiments by creating their office logos and sharing on LinkedIn. It related to how public capture, measure, and quantify the brand perception.
However, a few days after the campaign released, some criticism voice revealed on Fishbowl from a self-describe BBDO employee that thinks BBDO was not truly embracing employee from working remotely. The self-described employee shared an email from an unspecified BBDO office, the email informing staff that: “We will remain open because it’s the right thing to do for our clients and to keep the business moving.”
Suddenly, more comments followed by that critical voice to question BBDO: “What about your employee and their families?”
For sure, everybody is struggling with the crisis, it is also even harder to keep a positive mind to look at things like we used to. BBDO is trying to deliver a message through something small which is your home office, but the idea is big — There is a huge amount of people losing their job and families, we are lucky to have the ability to work from home during the crisis. Those small peaceful and meaningful things are what accomplish our lives.
A few months later, BBDO Atlanta published another experimental advertising called “BBDO love” in Aug 2020. Expressed the idea about the lack of human contact and showing appreciation to their employees. The senior leadership team drove more than 400 miles around Atlanta to employees’ homes, and deliver a special message “BBDO loves the person live here” to each BBDOer.
“Usually each summer, we have some sort of small get together to say thank you to employees, but this year that wasn’t going to happen. So, instead, we took the party on the road.” — Robin Fitzgerald, chief creative officer, BBDO Atlanta.
The experimental campaign got shared via twitter, LinkedIn, as well as digital press such as Ad Week to write reviews about it.
The world’s leading agency seems didn’t stop their move from criticism voice, instead of posting videos of efforts made for the experimental campaign and sharing real-life camaraderies on social media.
This action not only motivated their employees. As a student studying in the marketing field and want to work in an agency in the future, I realized that to encourage people around you is also a crucial part of the work.
