Holding Company CEOs on Racism; Seth Meyers Cover Story: Monday's First Things First

Welcome to First Things First, Adweek’s daily resource for marketers. We’ll be publishing the content to First Things First on Adweek.com each morning (like this post), but if you prefer that it come straight to your inbox, you can sign up for the email here. How Holding Company CEOs Are Addressing Systemic Racism Internally To hold the holding companies accountable on the topic of racial equality, Adweek requested interviews with the seven largest agency holding companies. CEOs at Interpublic Group, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe and WPP agreed to speak with reporters Minda Smiley and Erik Oster. Havas' CEO answered questions via email, while Dentsu Aegis Network and MDC Partners declined to participate, but provided statements. Over on our Agency Spy blog, you can read the full Q&As with each CEO. Topics in the interview included: How are they supporting Black employees now? What are their long-term plans to address racial inequalities? Whether they track diversity data internally, and if they plan to share those numbers publicly. What the CEOs had to say: While many of the CEOs had short-term plans in place, the holding companies were generally vague about their future plans to address racism. Related Stories: IPG CEO Michael Roth Shares IPG’s EEOC Diversity Statistics in an Internal Memo IPG's diversity statistics showed that 84.9% of its senior/executive level managers are white. See the full breakdown of its employees. Saturday Morning Pens Letter Asking Industry to Take ‘Bold Steps’ to Protect Black Lives Industry veterans Keith Cartwright, Geoff Edwards, Jayanta Jenkins and Kwame Taylor Hayford released a letter calling on the industry to help fight for equality. Read the full letter here. Seth Meyers on Filming Late Night at Home and Expanding Beyond Linear TV Seth Myers, like many other TV hosts, has taken his nightly show remote. In an interview for this week's Adweek magazine cover story, Myers gives an inside look at producing the show from his attic. Myers also gave an interesting insight into the show's strategy to put its signature segment, "A Closer Look" on YouTube BEFORE the show airs. The network found no sizeable drop-off in viewers, as those who watched the segment online made up a different audience than would normally watch at night on TV. Read the whole interview: Myers provides details on two shows he produces, A.P. Bio (which is moving from NBC to Peacock) and IFC’s Documentary Now! More TV news: WarnerMedia Axes HBO Go and HBO Now After Bumpy Launch of HBO Max For nearly a year, AT&T and WarnerMedia execs had maintained that consumers would be able to navigate their multiple HBO brands. [Narrator's voice] They were wrong. And so HBO Go and HBO Now are no longer a thing. Here's more insight into why. Global Advertising Market Expected to Recover in 2021 Media companies: there's some good news and some bad news here. We'll start with the bad—Magna Global projects U.S. ad spend in 2020 will drop $11 billion to $213 this year. The good news? It projects a rebound in 2021 with a 4% increase in spend. 2020 being an election year should help stave off even more dramatic drop-offs. Get more details on the report here. More Data and Insights: Google Expects Quarantine Consumer Trends to Outlast Stay-at-Home Measures Before the pandemic hit, home-centric living was already a trend as searches for grocery delivery and remote jobs were rising. Now, those topics are top of mind for Americans, as are other home hobbies like cooking and crafting. See what else Google's trend report found. Institute for Brand Marketing: Technology in the Creative Process Adweek's Institute for Brand Marketing is back with its third course, which covers how AI can enhance your creative (you can also view the first two courses on Advanced Marketing Technology and Monetizing Engagement). We design these courses, which are complimentary, in collaboration with IBM Watson Advertising. Each interactive lesson takes about 10 minutes to complete, and the first four lessons for our third course are now available. When you finish a course, you'll receive a badge that you can apply to your LinkedIn profile. Quiz: Think you know AI tools that aid the creative process? Take our challenging eight-question quiz.