The plan to vaccinate America has stalled. These ad execs have some ideas to get it jumpstarted.
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Welcome to this weekly roundup of stories from Matt Turner, Insider’s co-Editor in Chief of business. Subscribe here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Sunday. Plus, download Insider’s app for news on the go – click here for iOS and here for Android.
What we’re going over today:
- How to sell the vaccine to the unvaccinated, according to 6 advertising executives who are pros at persuasion.
- Spotify spent $230 million on Gimlet. Leaked data shows it’s lagging behind other studios at the audio giant.
- Wells Fargo’s CEO has transformed its leadership team, with nearly 90 senior hires from top competitors.
- There’s a battle brewing over salaries for remote workers – and it could change the way everyone gets paid.
Samantha Lee/Insider
What’s trending this morning:
- A leaked Amazon document revealed nine compensation packages for various roles – one had a max pay of over $715,000.
- A Portland native writes in a powerful essay that he loves his hometown – but he’ll never move back.
- Tired of Slack and Zoom? Try picking up the phone.
- Startup unicorn Project44 was valued at $1.2 billion this year, and it’s still aiming to add more acquisitions. Here’s what its CEO is looking for.
- The pandemic endgame isn’t here yet – but these steps could help us get there by 2023.
Ad execs share how they’d sell the vaccine
The ad industry succeeds every day at selling beer and pickup trucks across the political divide. Could that same magic make everyone want a vaccine? We spoke with ad executives to find out – and here’s what one told us:
Culturally, it feels like our country is going through a civil war. Your audience is essentially one side of that, and the perceived megaphone is coming from the other side. You’re fighting against some major headwinds. And the benefit is mostly invisible. There’s a low barrier for the consumer – it’s just a shot. But it’s also a high barrier because of the politics.
We have to go back to knocking on doors and treating this as a full-on awareness campaign with the kind of budget and tactics you’d see a political party use to get out the vote. Here in Nashville we brought the city’s coronavirus czar to an outdoor Easter service with a 3,000-member congregation. We wanted them to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Have a dialogue. Debunk the myths.
When it’s close to home, it pricks the heart. I know a young woman who was waffling about the vaccine, until her mother had a close friend pass away. Then she reached out to folks to ask “should I?” Someone she really trusts said yes, and now she’s doing it.
Read experts’ advertising approach for vaccines:
Also read:
- Tech startups are raising millions to diversify clinical trials. But experts say the problem runs deeper than technology.
- Biopharma salaries revealed: How much companies like Novartis, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna pay scientists, engineers, doctors, and lawyers
Spotify insiders describe internal tensions at podcast studio Gimlet
Reuters/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo
Spotify paid a reported $230 million to acquire Gimlet, boasting that it had nabbed a “best-in-class podcast studio” known for prestige programming. But Gimlet has struggled within the audio giant’s expansive podcast empire:
Spotify’s Gimlet deal, the largest up to that point for a podcast studio, ignited a frenzied two years of consolidation in which podcast businesses continued to command higher and higher prices.
“In hindsight, it seems like what Spotify bought with $230 million was essentially the narrative,” said Nick Quah, who writes industry newsletter Hot Pod. “It was a statement that they were open for business. ‘We want to invest and own the talk space. We want to move beyond music.’
Two-and-a-half years later, Gimlet is struggling to find its place within Spotify’s podcast universe, according to internal data and interviews with 10 current and former staffers at Gimlet and Spotify.
Insiders said the disconnect can be traced to a lack of clear goals from Spotify; attrition of key Gimlet leaders, many of whom moved into larger roles at Spotify; and a battle over Gimlet’s culture that played out publicly last spring on “Reply All.”
Read the full story here:
Also read:
- Ex-WeWork CEO Adam Neumann just hired a veteran crisis PR firm to revive his brand
- Ex-Hearst magazines boss Troy Young is advising Apollo as it prepares to take over Yahoo
Wells Fargo’s stunning leadership overhaul
Wells Fargo; Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Samantha Lee/Insider
Since 2019, Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf has made significant changes to the bank after years of scandal. From poaching top execs from JPMorgan to restructuring the management team, here’s an exclusive look at the bank’s new org chart:
Since the bank’s wide-ranging sales practices scandal first erupted in 2016, Wells has seen two CEOs resign and rounds of top leadership leave the bank. But Scharf, a one-time protege of JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Wells’ first outsider CEO since the scandal broke, has been taking that to the next level.
“Our management team is fundamentally different today than what it was a year and a half ago,” he told analysts during a conference in May.
Wells has now brought in nearly 90 executives from outside the bank since the beginning of 2019, replacing leaders in existing roles or creating new positions like those focused on risk management, an Insider analysis showed.
More than half of the firm’s 18-person operating committee is new, with Scharf and 10 other members who are new to the company since fall 2019.
See Insider’s full Wells Fargo new-hire breakdown:
Also read:
- JPMorgan is stepping up its fight to hold onto private bankers with an unusual move – going after a firm an ex-employee founded
- Point72 alum David Fiszel on why he’s betting big on buy now, pay later names like Klarna and how he keeps his $1.5 billion hedge fund away from meme-stock hype
There’s a battle brewing over salaries for remote workers
Samantha Lee/Insider
Remote workers who have relocated out of high-cost cities are vying to keep the same pay as before the pandemic. Some employers say that their compensation is geographically-determined – which could mean a pay cut for suburban flockers:
Tech workers are in an uproar. Why should I get paid less for the same contribution? they’re wondering. I’m actually saving the company money by not taking up office space.
Employers have responded more or less along the lines of what a Google spokesperson told Reuters: “Our compensation packages have always been determined by location.” In other words: This is how it’s always been done. It’s true, but it’s a strangely ironic position for an industry whose entire business model is predicated on disrupting the status quo.
The fight over remote compensation – whether employees can take their big-city wages with them wherever they choose to live – is the next big battle in the war over working from home.
Read the latest on the work from home war:
Also read:
- Wall Street’s return to the office is going to be weird
- Work from home is getting more miserable as companies use new tech to force the worst parts of an office onto remote employees
Finally, here are some headlines you might have missed last week.
– Matt
- REVEALED: 22 questions from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to help prep prospective interns for intense ‘superday’ interviews
- Unrest at the big house: federal prison workers are fed up, burned out, and heading for the exits
- One of the original masterminds behind Amazon Web Services is going to its chief cloud rival, Microsoft, sources say
- A job posting shows that $83 billion data company Snowflake is building a team to take on rivals like Databricks and Datadog head-to-head
- Kraft Heinz tried to supercharge its e-commerce strategy by looking to Amazon. Instead, it created ‘a clash of cultures’ between the old-school food industry and tech types.
- A day in the life of 29-year-old star broker McKenzie Ryan, who’s closed over $34 million in sales this year – and did her first deal in high school
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