Technology companies are cutting their brand publishing teams as they slash budgets and staff more broadly, bringing into sharp focus how nascent the discipline remains and how much work remains to be done to convince executives of its worth.
The tech industry has seen widespread layoffs over the past nine months, largely thanks to changed customer behavior post-pandemic and a period of overhiring. According to layoffs.fyi, more than 200,000 tech jobs have been lost since the start of 2022. Within tech companies, marketing teams are among the worst hit. And since publishing groups typically sit within marketing departments, they’re finding themselves on the chopping block too.
While it’s difficult to get a sense of how many brand publishing or editorial staff have been laid off in recent months, recruiters and editors paint a bleak picture of how the economic climate has affected journalists working for tech brands.
“Move in a direction of practicality”
“My view is that you’re seeing tech companies move to a direction of practicality,” said Meghna Rao, who runs editorial and content at Mercury Bank. “If brand publishing hasn’t defined a direct goal then it does fall into that category of a nice-to-have.”
One editor who worked at a social media giant said they were laid off twice in the past six months. This was despite receiving high marks for their performance at both companies. It’s resulted in a “feeling of being fed up with being in content.” (This person is now exploring non-marketing and content-related roles, and asked to speak under condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize their job-hunt.)
Editors across a variety of tech brands said they believe budget cuts and layoffs within brand publishing teams result from marketing execs who still don’t understand the value of brand publishing.
Publishing and marketing groups are often structured in a way that leads to internal competition over resources and goals. For example, at one company the above editor worked at, articles they published were free to access, but needed an email address to read. At one point, a customer service team layered on a competing pop-up asking for feedback on a product, resulting in a “mish-mash” of demands from readers. “We often felt like we were competing with each other instead of working together,” said this person.
Those kinds of internal squabbles are often a reflection of a lack of understanding of the role of brand publishing within a broader organization. That means that during any kind of tightened economic period, publishing teams are among the first to be shown the door.
At another firm that had a small number of layoffs, cuts were a direct result, said a marketing executive at the company, of not being able to connect brand publishing with revenue. The company had not made many strides in improving its metrics abilities when it came to brand publishing, such as instituting email gates to track lead generation, or even basic tracking pixels to see how users were behaving or engaging with content. For the company’s editorial director, who was laid off, it feels particularly hurtful as they had erroneously expected brand publishing to be more stable than traditional media.
Brand publishing is also often a victim of the debate between so-called “performance advertising” and brand marketing, which focuses on telling a brand’s story, often through content. During tight times, budgets often shift to performance marketing instead. It’s an argument many have been trying to refute recently: Speaking to the WSJ, Jim Stengel, former global CMO at P&G said that new developments have it possible to track and measure brand marketing just as well as performance marketing.
For Rao, the current situation may say more about specific companies than the value of brand publishing more broadly. “I work at a well-capitalized company where layoffs are not on the horizon, so I feel that in a well-run company where people understand the value of content, it’ll be OK. For brand publishing to have value the founder, CEO all have to be in on it.”
Pressure to show growth
Rao added that the current market situation has created new pressures.
The expectation at the company now is growth across the board, including for its brand publishing endeavors. But brand publishing takes time, and patience. “To me, it feels like there are two different tenors in brand publishing – the large established company where publishing has hit its stride, and then the growth stage company where expectations are higher and everything is in the service of growth,” said Rao.
Indeed, growth is an impetus: For nearly every company that instituted major layoffs in the past few months, it was because they were growing slower than investors expected, which meant cost-cutting was next.
For another brand publishing director who got laid off from a fast-growing tech startup, that pressure to show growth displayed itself in different ways. “They had less room for slow narrative storytelling, which is what I was hired to do,” this person said. “They needed content that was much more fast-twitch, different. So it meant my role essentially became pointless.”
Tech’s rallying cry right now is efficiency. It’s no different for brand publishers, where “doing more with less” was the resounding consensus earlier this year when execs were asked what they expect from 2023.
Take Shopify, for example, where the company is undergoing a reorganization that has transformed its publishing team to a team of two, according to editor-in-chief Courtney Symons.
“The team has stretched larger, and smaller, and we’ve moved people around to different parts,” she said, adding that publishing and content teams also do play more double duty and help out with other parts of the business often as well. Shopify got its layoffs out of the way early, cutting 10% of its staff (1,000 workers) last summer.
But even the scrappiest of teams still need resources, and the current environment has made those quite scarce. Freelance budgets are slashed, hiring is paused at many firms. Even at places that are doing well, there are other niggling issues – access to engineering talent for small changes like instituting an email pop-up, for example.
“You’re expected to hit bottom lines but also work without access to internal designers and engineers,” said Rao. “You aren’t really the priority.”