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After nearly 10 years at Mother New York, Aarti Thiagarajan left the creative agency earlier this year to join Netflix as director of brand partnerships.

Replacing her in the role of managing director and partner is Katie Longmyer, who comes to Mother New York with an eclectic background and an eagerness to shake things up at the independent agency, whose clients include Dave & Buster’s and Tripadvisor.

“I have a little bit of a ‘let’s break the rules’ attitude, which Mother also does, but I think I maybe break them a little bit more and can turbocharge that vibe,” Longmyer said. “That’s the fun part. I don’t want to do what anyone before me did.”

Unlike most executives in the advertising industry, Longmyer hasn’t spent the majority of her career climbing the ranks at various agencies. She started out as a club promoter, something she said was “ongoing” for quite some time, although not so much recently.

“It’s easier when you’re younger; you can go out all night and work all day. It’s not the same anymore,” she said.

Longmyer landed at Warner Records after college, rising from a field marketing representative to brand partnerships manager. “I was in nightclubs every night during that time,” Longmyer said.

She eventually left the music industry and opened up an outdoor venue in Gowanus, Brooklyn that catered to residents of the neighborhood. According to Longmyer, it was a weekends-only, all-ages spot that hosted barbecues, dog parties and other events.

“That was my first foray completely into entrepreneurship, owning my own business and running it,” she said. “I loved it.”

Since then, Longmyer’s career has been a mix of entrepreneurial pursuits and corporate gigs. In 2014, The New York Times profiled Longmyer and her knack for connecting artists with brands in a way that’s beneficial for both parties involved.

“Katie’s like a translator,” Jasmine Solono, a DJ who worked with Longmyer at the time, told the Times. “She can translate artist language into corporate planning. That’s not easy to do.”

Shortly afterwards, Longmyer joined Translation, the agency founded by Steve Stoute. Longmyer built and led the shop’s experiential practice. After leaving Translation, she met Miguel McKelvey, the co-founder of WeWork. She was hired as his chief of staff last year, an opportunity that she said led to the “wildest year” of her life.

“I joke that I probably got three MBAs last year,” she said.

She described her role at the company as McKelvey’s strategic thought partner. “I sat with him in all of his meetings and discussed ideas with him,” Longmyer explained. McKelvey ultimately left WeWork in June after its failed IPO and the resignation of its CEO and co-founder Adam Neumann.

Longmyer recently co-founded 99 Problems, an initiative encouraging young people to vote.

“I have some themes in my career that have stayed consistent, but I think that allowed me to move around through different industries as a result,” Longmyer said. “Celebrating creativity, independence and community are the things you’ll find in every single aspect of my career.”

At Mother New York, Longmyer will report to the agency’s U.S. CEO and partner Peter Ravailhe. She will officially begin the role on Nov. 9. At the agency, she hopes to focus on widening the pipelines of access for job candidates.

“Creativity is endless, and the way people think is so unique,” she said. “When you widen the aperture of what you’re looking at as far as talent, you have more diverse voices at the table. Sometimes the resolution takes a little longer to get to, but it’s usually much more innovative and interesting.”

AI-driven tugboats and tenders are parking cargo ships, ferries that dock by themselves are moving cars and people across waterways, and soon small cargo ships will be hauling fertilizer and groceries around Scandinavian fjords with little or no crew. This maritime transformation is being led by advancements in AI and sensor technologies, as well as a general rethinking of how to move goods across the globe with fewer people to both save money and avoid the pandemic. Some ships are being retrofitted, some are being built from scratch, but it’s likely that smaller ones will be first to sea with AI at the helm.

These new seaborne systems are facing the same hurdles as autonomous vehicles—liability fears, uncertain regulations, and concerns about cybersecurity. At the same time, companies developing AI-based ships and navigation systems are seeing growing demand for their technology. Shippers want to avoid their cargo getting stranded at sea or in port because sailors have contracted the coronavirus. One marine executive said harbor pilots, the locally based navigators who steer big ships the final miles, are reluctant to board because of coronavirus risks. That is slowing down what used to be a routine procedure when massive ships enter crowded ports or treacherous river mouths.

For these commercial shippers, the near future is not a self-driving Uber, but more like a driver-assisted Tesla. They don’t expect AI to replace captains of larger ships, but to augment them.

“In the open sea, there are situations where the person is quite bored,” says Hendrik Busshoff, product manager for autonomy at Wärtsilä Voyage, a Helsinki-based maritime technology firm that is providing high-resolution radar equipment to the Mayflower project as well as several other autonomous ships.

“We may not remove the person from the ship, but we will remove them from the bridge and have them do more high-value work and call the person in when they are needed,” Busshoff says.

That kind of high-level planning by an AI-captain is being deployed today in Norway, where Kongsberg Maritime has built a 260-foot-long autonomous, zero-emissions ship called the Yara Birkeland.

When Kongsberg first began discussions with Norway-based global fertilizer giant Yara back in 2017, the plan was to build a completely unmanned vessel that could load, sail, and unload its cargo in between three Norwegian ports with no human intervention. But that changed after Kongsberg officials realized that they would have to convince Norwegian and international regulators to draft an entirely new set of rules to allow bigger ships like the Yara Birkeland to operate without a human captain on board.

“In 2017, there was no question that [our ships] were going to be unmanned,” says An-Magritt Tinlund Ryste, Kongsberg’s autonomy project manager. “But you also realize there are no rules and regulations, they are all based on having a human on board. You either need permission or you have to change the rule set.”

So Kongsberg shifted gears. After the hull of the Yara Birkeland was built in a Romanian shipyard and launched in February 2020, Kongsberg decided to add several crew members on the fertilizer transport vessel while keeping the autonomous systems. The humans would act as an insurance policy if something went wrong. The Yara Birkeland’s sea route would have replaced the 40,000 trips a year the company’s trucks make hauling fertilizer around the fjords by land, reducing both diesel pollution and making those rural roads safer. But the pandemic has delayed the ambitious project, according to an October 20 earnings call by Yara International CEO Svein Tore Holsether. “Given the complexity of Yara Birkeland and the need to get expertise in to support that, we decided to put that on a slower pace for a while,” Holsether told investors.

LinkedIn senior manager of content marketing Sean Callahan said in a blog post, “Ogilvy is a prime example of an organization that has made efficient and effective use of its LinkedIn page—which is a free way for an organization to share content and build followers on LinkedIn. Any organization can create a LinkedIn page. Content shared on LinkedIn pages appears in the LinkedIn feed of whoever follows the page. When used skillfully, as Ogilvy has done, pages can amass large, relevant followings and become conduits for organizations to share content with their target audience—which can include potential hires, prospects, customers and partners.”

Ogilvy worldwide social media manager and community growth strategist John Vetrano explained in the LinkedIn blog post why his company puts an emphasis on its page on the professional network: “First, by spotlighting the incredible and diverse talent of our employees, we attract future talent and bolster our reputation as an employer of choice for all. Second, LinkedIn is a perfect platform to meet both current and prospective clients where they are. With our LinkedIn page, we’re able to showcase our creativity and strategic expertise to drive increased consideration by key decision makers.”

Ogilvy regularly shares content to its LinkedIn page based on six pillars: creative work, events, news, talent, thought leadership and webinars.

Vetrano wrote, “We’ll look at CTR (click-through rates) and download rates if the content is meant to drive traffic to a recent white paper. On the other hand, when we post a quote from our founder, David Ogilvy, we’ll look at shares and engagement metrics.”

He concluded, “Reaching the 1 million milestone is a validation of all the hard work that our team has put in over the years. It’s a testament to the incredible minds and creative genius of our amazing colleagues, and it’s a tribute to Ogilvy’s rich heritage of excellence dating back to 1948. I think David Ogilvy would have loved LinkedIn. He understood the power of word-of-mouth and personal connections in building brands, including that of his own agency, having once said, ‘If we treat our employees well, they will speak well of Ogilvy & Mather to friends.’ Assuming that each employee has 100 friends, 250,000 people now have friends who work for Ogilvy & Mather. Among them are present and prospective clients.”

In a conference call, CFO Brian Olsavsky said the platform saw a continuation of demand trends from Q2 when online grocery sales tripled, although he did not provide much color other than noting Amazon is “reaching more customers” in grocery and its year-over-year (YoY) sales growth in the category continues to accelerate.

“The strong demand and sales growth across our major product categories globally include hard lines, consumables, soft lines and media,” he said.

Olsavsky pointed to “strong Prime member engagement” during the quarter, but did not provide an updated membership figure.

“Prime members continue to shop with greater frequency and across more categories than before the pandemic began,” he added. “They continue to expand their usage of Prime’s digital benefits, including Prime Video.”

In fact, he noted the number of Prime’s 150 million members worldwide who stream Prime Video grew by more than 80% year over year in Q3.

But the biggest headline from Q3 is arguably logistics.

Olsavsky said the platform added 250,000 employees in Q3 and 100,000 more in October to meet heightened demand. Many of these hires are in its transportation network to handle aforementioned customer demand, as well as the expected onslaught of orders during the holiday season.

Per Olsavsky, Amazon plans to grow the square footage of its fulfillment and logistics network by about 50% in 2020, with about half focused on transportation facilities, including sort centers and delivery stations. He hopes this investment will alleviate some of the pressure on third-party couriers—and said Prime Day was a good stress test, which left the platform “[feeling] good about the performance of the network.”

That’s important as third-party sellers once again embrace the platform’s Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) program, which relies on Amazon itself to ship orders.

“We feel good that we’ve been able to develop that capability a lot this year, because we’ve needed it and we’re going to need it in Q4,” Olsavsky said. “Having said that, it’s going to be tight for everyone. And I think we’ll all be stretched and it’s advantageous … for people to order early this year.”

He also noted there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the holidays—including the election, which yielded some order disruptions in 2016.

A bright spot (again): Amazon Advertising. That’s thanks to “very strong advertising performance in Q3,” which includes monetizing additional traffic as “real estate for our advertisers,” Olsavsky said.

Now, Amazon is focused on making its Advertising tools easier to use, including simplifying registration for agencies and marketers, and developing new products—including opportunities in OTT video.

“We’re also very focused on being smarter about surfacing more relevant ads to customers, making display ads easier and then increasing the usability of the Amazon demand side platform,” he added.

For its part, Dow Jones has built an artificial intelligence tool to sharpen advertisers’ keyword blocklists, making them suitable and relevant for the company’s three titles. In doing so, it’s grown its volume of monetizable inventory threefold and improved the reach and effectiveness of advertiser campaigns.   

In April, Dow Jones began offering the brand safety tool SafeSuite as part of its toolbox of products to encourage advertisers to spend more while marketing budgets were on a coronavirus-induced hold. The tool takes advertisers’ keyword blocklists—used to keep ads away from unsuitable or unsafe content online, but often including general news content—and shrinks them to be more relevant to The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barron’s.  

“There is a spectrum. [Advertisers] avoiding news altogether is like doing surgery with a guillotine,” said Dow Jones chief revenue officer Josh Stinchcomb. “The default is extending the blocklist, which is still overkill, like doing surgery with a hatchet, but there are scalpels.”

In August, Dow Jones had 98.4 million global unique monthly visitors, according to Comscore. The publisher wouldn’t share how much revenue it lost through advertisers’ overzealous keyword blocking, but its focus on business and finance meant that it was more shielded compared with general news publishers.

A $4.1 billion hole in ad revenue

The last six months have been rocky for news publishers’ ad revenues, and at the center is keyword blocking: Each overlapping crisis hitting the news cycle prompts advertisers to add more words to their lists, avoiding their ads appearing next to unsafe or unsuitable content. Publishers including Gannett’s USA Today and Dow Jones expect an increase in companies blocking ads from election-related stories. 

So far in the U.S. this year, extreme keyword blocking has cost U.S. news publishers $4.1 billion, according to estimates from cybersecurity firm Cheq. March was the peak, squeezing publishers’ programmatic ad revenue. But the situation has significantly improved, said Stevan Randjelovic, director of brand safety and digital risk for EMEA at GroupM: In a data sample, “coronavirus” and its derivatives no longer feature in the top 15 words on the agency’s clients’ blocklists. 

Tech company Integral Ad Science saw an 80% drop in coronavirus-related keyword blocking from mid-March to early May, thanks to more sophisticated AI contextual tools that read page sentiments and avoid overblocking news content.   

“Overall total keyword blocking is down 30% versus the same period a year ago,” said Joe Barone, managing partner for brand safety Americas at GroupM, due to “reducing exact match keyword blocking in favor of more sophisticated semantic avoidance.” Barone added that about 5% of GroupM’s U.S. blocking activity is related to President Donald Trump or the election. 

Relevant lists increase yield

Even so, blocklists persist and Dow Jones has seen some grow. The blocklist that a tech client provided consisted of 763 words, which blocked 55% of positive articles and only 81% of negative articles. SafeSuite reduced this list to only 42 words, blocking 90% of negative articles and only 23% of positive articles. For a luxury client, SafeSuite reduced its blocklist by 85%.

But it’s not just reducing the list—understanding the suitability of the article adjacent to the brand message is key. For instance, on MarketWatch, a story could include that a company “IPO killed it” and the tool would recognize the article’s suitability for ad placement. Using the tool increased the campaign clickthrough rate for its luxury client by 10% compared with using a client-provided list, Stinchcomb said.  

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The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

Even the few people who don’t follow Kim Kardashian West’s wildly popular social media accounts often get wrapped up in her life. The lives of her and her ilk have become aspirational as a result of the celebrity culture Kardashian herself helped create. Thanks to Instagram, Twitter, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kim and her family have built their careers by championing a lifestyle—fashion, travel, face contouring—that few people could ever realize for themselves. That’s all well and good—to stan is to peer longingly into the universes of the idolized—but at a time when a pandemic is taking lives, raising unemployment, and keeping people locked indoors, sharing how good one has it can seem a bit gauche.

That, dear reader, is the lesson Kardashian herself learned this week as she entered her 41st year.

It started, as these things often do, with a tweet. Kardashian, who has been on a social media blitz in recent days chronicling the events of her 40th birthday celebrations, posted a series of photos from a recent trip with “some of the people who have helped shape me into the woman I am today.” The pictures show her friends and family traipsing in a tropical location, maskless, enjoying what appears to be a lavish vacation. The event made her feel “humbled and blessed,” Kardashian wrote, adding “there is not a single day that I take for granted, especially during these times when we are all reminded of the things that truly matter … Before Covid, I don’t think any of us truly appreciated what a simple luxury it was to be able to travel and be together with family and friends in a safe environment.”

You see where this is going, right? For anyone unable to travel, for those who are sick or fearing coronavirus infection, for those who didn’t have “simple” luxuries before Covid-19 and likely won’t have them after, this felt tone-deaf at best, cruel at worst. It had all of the self-awareness of celebrities singing “Imagine” in their palatial quarantine digs and saying “we are in this together.” Then came the kicker. Above a pair of photos showing various members of her crew enjoying the revelry, Kardashian wrote: “We danced, rode bikes, swam near whales, kayaked, watched a movie on the beach and so much more. I realize that for most people, this is something that is so far out of reach right now, so in moments like these, I am humbly reminded of how privileged my life is.” Also, “After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time.”

Yes, a private island. Again, it’s the simple luxuries, the normal things. When I say Twitter was not about to let this privilege go unchecked, I mean it. Within hours, users began posting that last bit of text next to their own interpretations of Kardashian’s tweet. Some posted images from Jurassic Park, others from Game of Thrones or Cast Away. Still others pointed out Kardashian’s obtuse insensitivity with replies like, “Happy birthday. I hope someone got you an alphabet book as a gift, so you can learn to read the room.”

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Everything you need to know about engagement, power likes, sponcon, and trust. 

As Twitter drubbings go, it was pretty standard. But it also pointed to something deeper when it comes to comfort in the time of coronavirus. As the weeks of quarantine have turned into months, and as the US faces a new uptick in Covid-19 cases (not to mention the most fraught election in recent history), the media people turn to varies widely. Some folks devour 24-hour news, searching for answers; some watch documentaries or read histories about pandemics past, seeking clues to the future; others merely want escapism. The latter seems fairly common. Some may get lost in films or TV with even uglier truths than the current ones, but lighthearted fare about the days of our lives pre-2020 can provide a nice reprieve from the dark timeline the world is on now.

But there’s another threat—a threat from inside the organization. A threat that too many leaders don’t quite believe in, until it’s too late.

I’m talking about the zombie employee.

Unlike in the movies, they blend in, but you can still spot them with practice. They’re killing ideas. They’re not contributing. They’re devouring overall productivity. They’re not evil nor are they intentionally doing anything wrong; Zombies don’t sabotage a business on purpose. In fact, they aren’t to blame for their miserable state.

No, the business itself created them. It was zombification through a thousand paper cuts.

Outdated tools? Cut. Broken processes? Cut. Not fixing known problems? Two cuts for that one. Ineffective managers? Cut. No career trajectory? Big cut. Asking for feedback and taking zero action in response? Deep cut.

The zombie employee is the inevitable outcome of a feeling of futility. It’s a survival technique. When someone just can’t survive the workday anymore, they turn undead. (I want to point out that it’s very different from burnout, which many employees are understandably feeling during the pandemic. Burnout is a matter of employee wellness—and a very serious matter at that.)

When a business creates zombies, they don’t just transform the employee in a negative way. They kill innovation. They sicken the culture. All the required elements of a thriving business and the real benefit of a powerful employee experience never have a chance to flourish. And the worst part? It’s contagious. The ablest employees run while the rest stay put, get frustrated by a passionless and unmotivated cohort and get infected. It’s apocalyptic.

But there’s hope!

Unlike in the movies, zombification is not permanent. There’s a cure. And the first step toward obtaining the cure is deciding to do something about it.

Acknowledge the zombie

According to research (our own and that of others), when employees onboard with a feeling of futility, they feel like they don’t matter to the business. This is where managers are crucial. Too many managers focus on performance, not the person. Since the kind of disengaged employee we’re talking about will do enough to skate by but little else, most managers give them a stamp of approval. In doing so, the manager inadvertently validates the employee’s overall disengagement through an overly mechanical grasp of employee performance. In a similar vein, managers often focus on their own mandates and needs, rather than those of the employee.

The solution? The purview of managers needs to shift from mere monitoring and evaluation to coaching and mentorship. They also need to be empowered to address issues they see—especially those that make life harder for employees. After all, their real purpose is to serve as the connective tissue between employees and executive management, and they need to be seen by the employees as having both parties’ interests in mind.

Lastly, recognition programs help—a lot. Employees need recognition from leaders, but peer recognition is also vital in reinforcing a sense of belonging (i.e., being an important part of a team). Rewarding micro-actions and attitudes is also a strong motivator. But these things might not appear on the radar of managers and executives, because managers and executives don’t always see day-to-day goings-on. Peers do. Empowering colleagues to reward each other with some kind of currency (i.e., formal social recognition or small rewards) shows employees that they’re both seen and heard.

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Facebook, which gave employees $2,000 stipends to kit out their home offices earlier this year, has also fashioned itself into a hybrid company. It expects that half of its employees will work remotely in the next five to 10 years—but office space is still critical for the other half. The company has even expanded its footprint: This fall, Facebook bid on REI’s brand-new, 400,000-square-foot corporate campus in Bellevue, near Seattle. REI, which laid off hundreds of corporate employees in the spring, decided it would sell the headquarters to go “remote-first.”

In the hybrid model, companies seem to be selling a corporate vision of having it all. You can have the office, with the fancy ergonomic chairs, or you can have a stipend to buy one for your house. You can come here for your meetings and see teams in person, or you can take them at home with Zoom. You can even take a little from column A, a little from column B. Based on Gartner’s research, Penn says there doesn’t seem to be a huge difference between satisfaction among people who are always remote and sometimes remote, but the option to choose where to work does seem to have an impact. Things like productivity and work-life balance generally improve when employees have the option to decide.

Still, the promise of flexibility comes with some fine print. Consider workplace surveillance. “Back in April, less than half of organizations were tracking productivity,” says Penn. “As of August, that has jumped up to over 70 percent.” Before, managers may have kept an eye on when people came and went from the office—not exactly a scientific measure. Remote work isn’t necessarily better. Mostly, Penn says, companies are tracking metrics like virtual clocking in and out, Outlook and Calendar usage, or time spent online. Now, with the pressure to always appear online, some employees are working much longer hours or wasting time on performative productivity: things like excessively chatting on Slack or setting up useless meetings, just to show that they’re there.

The model could also disadvantage employees on teams that are mostly in the office, or mostly remote, or people who want to keep different hours from the rest of their team. “Hybrid remote work perpetuates two very different employee experiences, and that can affect things like equity, inclusion, and belonging, or even career trajectory,” says Melanie Collins, the VP of people at Dropbox. Earlier this year, Dropbox found that its European employees—who had previously been the outliers on the Zoom screen—finally felt on equal footing with the Californians, because everyone was on the screen. That was a surprising upside of everyone working remotely. “Our teams in Europe have expressed how Zoom has been a great equalizer for them,” says Collins. “No one’s left out of the conversation.”

Last month, Dropbox announced that it would become a “virtual-first” company. The company plans to turn its offices into a series of meeting spaces, where teams can occasionally come together in person. Otherwise, and for the majority of the time, employees will work remotely. (It will also provide a stipend for coworking spaces, like WeWork, for employees who prefer to leave the house.) The change is significant: Before the pandemic, only 3 percent of Dropbox’s 2,300 employees worked remotely.

Collins believes that the future of work has less to do with where it’s done, and more to do with when it’s done. “Many things that were broken before feel even more broken now,” she says. “We’re working longer hours, we have back-to-back meetings, and they’re all on Zoom, and that’s exhausting.” To fix that, Dropbox is also moving toward a model where employees come together for meetings and the like during “core collaboration hours”—a four-hour window of time each day—and otherwise control their own time. “That doesn’t mean our workdays are shortening,” says Collins. “We just want this to result in a nonlinear workday.”

That’s the question posed in a last-minute anti-Trump ad for the Win America Back political action committee. The 90-second ad went live on Twitter Wednesday afternoon and has already garnered more than 3 million views on the platform, including a retweet and shoutout from director Judd Apatow.

With $2,000 left in its coffers and less than two weeks before the election, the Win America Back PAC’s founders—Hollywood film producers Micho Rutare, Benjamin Rosenblatt and Michael Silver—approached veteran commercial advertisers and filmmakers Gabriel Miller and Andrew Laurich about creating the spot.

After a brainstorming call, Miller and Laurich settled on an idea that framed the election as a job interview. Then they started calling in favors and recruiting friends, including actress Zabeth Russell, who plays the starring role as HR lady in the spot, to participate for free.

“It was a no-budget commercial shot on the fly,” said Russell. “I have an improv comedy background, and I knew that Andrew would let me have some fun with it, and he did.”

The spot centers on a friendly, upbeat hiring manager who sits down with a job applicant to go through his resume. At first, she seems impressed by the applicant’s real estate history and television experience, but her positivity starts to falter. After reading about 26 accusations of sexual assault, she reaches for more hand sanitizer.

The screen goes dark, and words flash across the screen asking viewers, “Would you hire Trump?” and urging them to vote on Nov. 3. Before it ends, the spot hits on one more point: the hiring manager pulls out the applicant’s letter of recommendation only to find that it’s in Russian.

“The idea sort of tapped into people’s sense of injustice that Trump doesn’t deserve to be where he is,” said Miller. “If he was anyone else, he wouldn’t even get past the initial screening.”

Rosenblatt, Rutare and Silver founded the PAC in August with a mission to “make cinematic political ads with a sense of empathy,” the organization told Adweek.

Win America Back’s website expands on that mission, saying, “We see every Trump supporter or undecided voter as a loved one who is in danger and needs our help.” While most political messaging amounts to “a negative assault on your senses,” the group aims to create “stories of empathy, of tragedy and redemption, fighting misinformation with meaning.”

The PAC launched another, more apocalyptic ad earlier this month, though Miller and Laurich weren’t involved in that production.

In that spot, a grandfather sits with his granddaughter on a park bench. When he says a number, the girl lists the associated president, but the game ends at 45. When the girl asks her grandfather, “Did you vote for Trump?” the old man is too distraught to answer. The camera then pans out to reveal a smog-filled sky and a cityscape full of Trump towers.

Win America Back PAC is expecting to release one more ad before Election Day on Tuesday.