14 minute read
The importance of the shared experience
Left to right: Jeff Rosica, Jade Kurian, Serge Van Herck and Mark Harrison
Having already released The Marketing Leaders Power Book earlier in 2022, The Circle Society is now turning its attention to the leaders of the media and entertainment industry. The Leaders Power Book, which is expected to be published in time for NAB, aims to acknowledge achievements within the industry
At IBC, The Circle Society brought Jeff Rosica, CEO and president of Avid, Iatakoo co-founder and president Jade Kurian, and EVS chief executive Serge Van Herck together with DPP CEO Mark Harrison to discuss a number of topics, including current industry challenges, and the move to hybrid working and its impact on innovation. Here, we feature a snapshot of that conversation. Mark Harrison (MH): What a really interesting time for the three of you to be leading your businesses, which are all different businesses in different ways. If you look back to 2017/18 there was massive change happening in the industry, as we all know, then we had the impact of Covid, and all the things that happened around that both from a technology point of view but also from the point of view of workforces.
I’m really interested to know, do things feel different now from what they did three years ago in terms of your company and what’s important to making it operate successfully?
Jade Kurian (JK): I’m sort of that person who thinks that as much as things change, they stay the same, and that what we’re seeing now is what we’ve always seen, that we have to listen. If you listen both to your employees and the people that you’re servicing, then you’re going to get that feedback loop and you’re going to create and innovate based on that. Yes, culturally, things have shifted, and I think things are going to shift back and forth. Right now we have work from home, where especially bigger companies are able to give people that luxury of working from home. A lot of times I think smaller teams need that face-to-face, they need that time and that shared experience to succeed. What we’ve been doing is offering a hybrid approach. A lot of times, engineers will ask us, should we go all virtual? And we say, no, go hybrid; have some hardware and have some virtual. I don’t think that you can really succeed together as a team without some of those shared experiences.
Jeff Rosica (JR): I would agree. I think hybrid is the way to go for the future. Fundamentally, things have changed. There has always been remote workers; every company I’ve ever worked for, there’s always been a percentage who work from home. From a cultural standpoint, I worried about the fact everybody was remote all the time, and everybody was at home all the time and not really interfacing even with friends for a long time, and not really interfacing with each other as a company. We didn’t have trade shows going on, we weren’t travelling in large numbers to customer events or having events, there wasn’t any shared experience as an employee.
MH: Were you seeing a measureable impact of that within Avid?
JR: I wouldn’t say that we have the data to say that efficiency is down. In my gut, I know that you won’t innovate as fast. There’s valuable time in people sitting around ideaising and there’s valuable time in how people collaborate together. There’s a real value in people being together and keeping that culture. At Avid we’re lucky because we have a culture where people just love this industry and they love being a part of ‘team Avid’, but also because they built these shared experiences, they built relationships over many, many years. That only lasts for so long; new employees come in, they don’t have that same experience. We have to find a balance and whatever that new normal is going to be; as Jade said, it won’t be fully remote for everybody, it won’t be fully in the office again. I don’t think it should. None of us wants to spend a bunch of money on real estate costs. It’s going to be a different world. But I do worry about innovation, collaboration, these things need some nurturing.
MH: Serge, I have a feeling you might agree with that?
Serge Van Herck (SVH): When Covid started in March 2020, we sat down to discuss our objectives and strategy to make sure that everybody had the same ambition going forward. Covid was an interesting situation for us, because suddenly, we all had to start working from home. EVS has our headquarters in Belgium and 25 offices around the world, and at that moment in time, our link with all our colleagues worldwide improved because now we were all working from home and had that same experience as a home office or remote offices. We learned a lot and we kept that way of working. We feel that we have much more interaction with our colleagues with kept that flexibility. It’s also one of the expectations that new team members have, the flexibility of working from home or the office.
JR: The technology isn’t expensive. We have Zoom rooms at our headquarters, our offices have really cool technology, and we’ve invested a lot more time in that. It’s a fraction of what we spend on real estate. I agree with what Serge said; definitely you’ve got to have more flexibility in this place we’re in and the environment we’re in. I was in the office from the very beginning, I actually only left for about a month and was back in because we had all of our hardware engineers come back because of the labs and test labs, they were all back in right away, and I didn’t want them coming in if I wasn’t willing to come in. What I noticed is that as we started opening back up, it was the young people who came back. The longer-timers were not the ones going back to the office, it actually was the young people because they wanted to share the experience, also they want to learn from each other, they want to learn from other people. We’re hearing from some of the younger people that they’re disappointed more of the long-timers aren’t coming back more days because they want to learn from them. It’s hard to do that on Zoom.
MH: Are you so confident that you will stay in hybrid for a long time that you’re actually going to give up offices?
SVH: It’s not our plan at this moment in time. We built a beautiful new headquarters in 2016. It’s on our balance sheet. We’ve built it, it’s not going to go away. We have offices around the world. We have no massive objective to reduce any spaces. When we acquired Axon in May 2020, we had two offices in the UK and we brought them together, and in a much nicer environment than what they both had before, so there was some rationale behind that. But there’s no structural effort or objective to reduce space.
JR: I think we’re the opposite. We actually remodelled our headquarters this last year, but we are purposely cutting back 25 to 30 per cent of our real estate because people aren’t using every cubicle or every office and a majority of people want to be flexible, they want to be in two or three days a week. But we’re also investing in the spaces. Now it’s really modern and different in the way people can collaborate and work together, there’s a lot of technology in there.
MH: One thing I heard somebody say recently was that companies are going to need to very consciously restate and rebuild culture, that there’ll be an imperative to bring people back into physical space, because of the need to repair some of the things that were lost. So Jade, I’m curious, you obviously don’t have as big a team as these guys have, but are you finding the amount of time you need to physically be together is actually steadily increasing again?
JK: I definitely think so. I think of overhead not just in terms of real estate and technology spend and what you’re spending on Zoom and all of these tools, I also think of it in terms of how long does it take you to innovate. While we haven’t done the research, I can tell, I can feel it. I think in leadership roles when you see that your team is struggling, it’s easier when you’ve got a group of people who are working together all the time and iterating. So I look at it more that way. To what Jeff said, the younger people want to come in because they might create their own culture, their own experiences, and they want to learn, and they’re finding that they can’t learn when they’re sitting at home by themselves.
MH: Let’s take this conversation to what happens when you interact with your customers or your potential customers. Are you finding that there is a real desire to meet in person again? Are they wanting you to come to them, or is there greater flexibility in how you get together? JR: I think it’s going to be a mixture. We’ve probably all changed our marketing mix, we’ve all learned that content marketing is so important going forward. I’m sure we all use digital content a lot more than we probably did before all this because we all probably learned some lessons during this time. But I do think the face-to-face is important. The trade show floor is nice to see people and show them new stuff, but it’s the meetings, it’s the time you get to interact with customers, talk with them and listen to them. To get that kind of volume all in one place at one time is really valuable. You learn a lot from going to spend a few days talking to people. We’re back on the road again, it’s kind of a love/hate relationship I have with travel. We also built a new customer experience centre at our headquarters, because a lot of the bigger customers are saying, ‘hey, why don’t we just come to you?’ I’m a big face-to-face believer. I think that we have to find maybe new ways, new mixes to get there. But we’ve got to do it.
SVH: We found new ways to interact with customers. I remember during Covid, in the morning I’d be talking with customers in Australia and with Germany, in the afternoon I’d be speaking to the US, and that was great. But sometimes you need events like IBC, you need to go and meet with customers. We’re also now thinking of ESG [environmental, social and corporate governance], we’re trying to reduce our CO₂ impact. So that means that we’ll have to be careful in travelling and doing some of those interactions virtually. We’re sending a lot of colleagues out to meet customers, and if I look at our travel budget at the moment that’s just skyrocketing. But we have to get back up to a level with a combination of face-to-face and remote.
MH: When you do get together with your customers, do you feel as if the tone has changed at all? Is there anything different about it compared to two or three years ago?
JK: I would say that all of our customers that we have recently met with in person have just been relieved to see people and they keep saying, ‘it’s so nice to see you in person!’ Building that relationship is so much easier in person than on Zoom or on some virtual method. If you’re trying to sell, you get nearer to the close by being there in person, because they can look you in the eye, they get to see you and they can determine whether or not they trust you.
MH: At the DPP we’ve observed that if you go back to 2017/18, there were quite a lot of end users standing up on stages at various kinds of conferences almost wagging their finger at the vendor community saying, ‘you’ve got to catch up with us’. It feels to me as if that’s changed, partly because of the shared trauma of Covid, where everybody needed each other more, but also because change has been going on for long enough now that actually everyone’s worked out this isn’t necessarily simple. It’s not a matter of some vendor having perfect requirements for you, there’s more to it than that.
JR: I would say that there is more of a shared relationship between broadcasters and vendors with trying to figure out how we’re going to innovate, what we need to do to help this industry move forward and be successful. It’s become even more collaborative, and there’s more empathy and understanding on both sides. One thing I will say is that I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never seen so many changes, technological shifts, business shifts happening, demands changing, business pressures changing. If we went back in time and looked at any time in this industry, there’s never been the pure scale. It feels like it’s five times what it’s ever been that we’re dealing with at one time. That is going to require listening, talking, understanding, prioritising. What this industry is going to have to do is prioritise better. We know there’s lots to do, but we can’t do it all. There’s phenomenal opportunity out there in how we can innovate for people to help their business and help their operations and what they’re trying to do. But I think there is a better collaborative work to that dynamic.
SVH: Thinking back to 2020 and the start of the pandemic, we had broadcast customers who suddenly had to go from everybody in the studio to nearly everybody at home. We had to do a massive amount of work with our customers to do that shift. It really brought us closer to getting to that moment in time to help them migrate to remote production and teach them how to use our tools to do that. At that moment in time, it helped us to even have closer links with those customers, and we have continued to have that.
MH: What is the thing that you feel that as an industry we should most focus on right now if we’re going to keep up with the speed of change, and if we’re going to make these new, better, relationships more fruitful?
SVH: For us, clearly ESG; that’s something that we need to improve. Last year we did our first report on sustainability. That is definitely something that we as a company, we as an industry, have to further work on, and make sure that it’s more than just marketing, that it’s a reality. In terms of the young talent that we attract, they are very, very conscious of that. For us who are a bit older, it’s something we still have to fully embrace. But we’re working on that.
JK: I think for us, it’s the proliferation of credible information. That’s what we’re interested in and it’s what we focus on. We want journalists to do real stories, and put credible information out there. What we have today – disintegration of governments and all kinds of societal wants and needs – a lot of it can be attributed to the lack of credible information. People are listening to their neighbours who are probably not scientists, technologists or engineers. I think what journalists do is go out there every single day, and become an expert in something that they were not yesterday, and they try really hard to tell the whole story. That’s what we want to do. We want to support those people who are doing that, because there’s too much of ‘I’ve heard this from my neighbour on Facebook and so it’s true’. It’s impacting not only our governments but our culture, and it’s impacting business as well because you’ll hear team members talking and they’ll say, ‘I heard on Facebook’, and it’s not true.
JR: What we’ve got to try to figure out as an industry pretty quickly... I used to like the term ‘remote work’, but really it’s ‘distributed teams’. If we look at the amount of content required in these models we’re all moving to as an industry, moving from linear advertising models to streaming, whether it’s a local content provider in any given country or the big, international ones like Netflix, they all need to crank up their content machines. We’re not going to have enough people, we’re not going to have enough resources to do all they want to do. So I think we’re going to have to figure out how to enable people to really work with anybody, anywhere, on anything, and also be able to do that efficiently. We’ve got to figure out how we do that because our industry needs it, or it’s going struggle in a few years. n
