Hey everyone,

It's Josh, and I hope you and your family are feeling well. On Friday, we learned that Microsoft did something few think a corporation, especially one as large as Microsoft, can do. It behaved ... compassionately.

The tech giant sent a memo on April 6 to its 144,000-person staff saying that parents can take a 12-week paid leave to be with their kids. This is, in a word, huge.

Many parents right now are caught between taking care of their children while also expected to perform their jobs at the same level in the Before Times. Seeing a company like Microsoft lead with compassion, explicitly telling their staff, “Don’t worry about work, your family comes first” is the kind of leadership all companies can follow.

The CEO of a media company with more than 300 employees told me on Friday that he has weekly “town halls” but also also has directed his top lieutenants to make sure they are doing at least two video conferences with their teams each day.

“These aren’t for directives,” he said, “but instead, I want to make sure managers are looking into their direct reports' eyes at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. It’s about connection. Look, everyone is struggling right now, depressed. We have to let staff know that we put them first. The business will come.”

Even as the coronavirus has upended our notions of “work,” leadership still falls into a Churchillian model: crisis emphasizes the difference between good and bad leadership.

The idea of compassionate leadership, it seems, deeply resonates with workers.

Take this viral tweet, for instance:

Many of the replies say the same thing: I want to work for your boss.

I took to Twitter to see how companies’ leadership were leaning into compassion, and the responses had a common thread: transparency and communication.

Of course, that stems from leadership’s actions before we all worked remotely. Many execs say they have an open door policy, but fail to realize that it’s a two-way street. Saying you have an open-door policy is not the same of actually having one. They need to make an effort to talk with staff, not wait for staff to come to them. And if you haven’t already established yourself as someone who is empathetic with your staff, all of a sudden flipping on that switch in a crisis can come off as disingenuous.

“The difference between mere management and true leadership is communication,” Churchill once said.

Here are some examples of true leadership.

Horizon Media’s CEO sends a daily note "reassuring that he is in this too. thanking teams. calling out birthdays. his wife gives daily wellness ideas. one employee replied all and said ‘Thank you and stay encouraged. I appreciated your transparency today.’ the teams/agency feels closer."

McKinsey’s leadership holds weekly AMAs addressing concerns. But also has introduced “special PTO if you’re in a situation where you truly can’t work from home temporarily (connectivity, etc), free subscription to headspace app, subsidized emergency childcare... the list goes on and on. I feel cherished at work.”

Salesforce has a “90 day no lay off pledge, putting family and health before work, flexible work schedule and time off, benefits for working parents, offering virtual workouts and meditations.”

Let me know how your manager and/or leadership team has shown compassion during these exhausting times. Be healthy, be safe, be smart. See you next week.

Josh Sternberg
Media and Tech Editor, Adweek

The economic impact of the coronavirus crisis on the advertising industry has laid bare the ugly truth of ad tech: that many in the ad-tech ecosystem were media resellers, despite positioning themselves as tech companies. We all know why this is: Tech is bankable—media not so much.

The fragility of this wishful thinking was exposed when Teads literally cited an “act of god” (or, rather, its business equivalent force majeure) upon reneging on earlier payment guarantees to publishers; same with GumGum proposing extended payment terms. (That said, credit to them for being upfront.)

The metaphorical act of god that happened, however, was the opening of Pandora’s Box, revealing all the shortcomings of the ad-tech world.

Microsoft said it will offer 12 weeks paid leave to employees with children while schools remain closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Microsoft evp Kurt DelBene sent employees an email about the new initiative on April 6. The memo specifies that parents can take this leave on a “continuous, reduced or intermittent basis,” meaning they can take it all in one chunk or take a day or take a day off or more per week during the planned academic year.

The company previously offered two weeks paid leave to affected parents in March, but since then, most schools in the United States have closed and children have either stopped schooling entirely or moved to distance learning programs. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.

One month ago, the annual May upfronts week was upended as all the major media companies canceled their presentations en masse and switched to virtual events amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The TV advertising tradition is now in the process of dissolving entirely this year, as most presenters have decided to delay their virtual events for several weeks, or rethink their plans entirely.

Most of the upfronts week presenters—including NBCUniversal, Fox, Discovery and Disney—told Adweek that while they haven’t set a timeframe for their respective virtual presentations, they will no longer be held during upfronts week, which was supposed to kick off on May 11. WarnerMedia and Xandr have also decided to call off their joint event, scheduled for May 13, according to a source, though both companies declined to comment on their plans.

The World Health Organization has enlisted a fake human to help with a very real challenge: how to get accurate, vetted information about COVID-19 in front of millennials and Gen Z.

Knox Frost, a virtual influencer with more than 1 million Instagram followers, is now helping solicit donations and tout social distancing, hand washing and other best practices to fight the coronavirus crisis.

Marcel is here.

Near the end of March, Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun announced in an internal video that the holding company was accelerating the global launch of its AI-driven connectivity platform Marcel, beginning with the U.S. this week, citing the need to stay connected to meet both employee and client needs.

Publicis Groupe chief strategy officer Carla Serrano told Adweek that a beta version of Marcel was introduced in the U.K. last summer and optimized throughout the year. The company had previously planned on a global launch for June.

“We were monitoring U.K. usage. When COVID-19 started to hit, usage went up,” Serrano said.