Digiday Research: Agency professionals more likely to stay remote than publishers

This research is based on unique data collected from our proprietary audience of publisher, agency, brand and tech insiders. It’s available to Digiday+ members. More from the series →
Eventually, most of us will have to go back to the office — but a much bigger slice of agency employees will have the option of staying home, according to new Digiday Research.
While the picture of how — and when — everybody goes back to work remains up in the air for large chunks of the media and marketing industries, agency employees are more than twice as likely to have the option of working from home permanently. Digiday surveyed 329 professionals in the media and marketing space in April, including publishers, agencies, brands, platforms and vendors. Publishers and agencies made up the largest groups.
More than one fifth of the survey’s agency-side respondents said that they could continue working remotely, compared to less than 10% of publisher respondents.

Sample: 71 agency, 109 publisher professionals
An identical percentage of publisher and agency respondents — 30% — said that they hadn’t received word from their employers about when they would return to office work, making it the most common response to the question. The next most popular response was “in the third quarter of 2021.”

Sample: 71 agency, 109 publisher professionals
As the pandemic and its knock-on effects continue to echo through the global economy, it has offered regular reminders that individuals have done a bad job of estimating how long it would take for things to return to anything like normal.
The same survey found, for example, that the percentage of people who wound up attending in-person events within the time frame they expected was tiny compared to the percentage of people who continued to put off attending.
More in Media

Why publishers are questioning the effectiveness of blocking AI web crawlers
Publishers are unsure if blocking AI web crawlers is enough to protect their content from being scraped and used to feed AI tools and systems.

Meta adds a human element to AI, while others warn it all could be too ‘human like’
New features include a new chatbot called MetaAI, Bing search integration, new AI image tools, and dozens of celebrity characters.

Financial Times targets U.S. and global readers with subscription app products
The Financial Times has launched another lower-priced, subscription-based mobile app product a year after the debut of FT Edit to reach international readers.