Page 24 - AdNews Magazine Jul-Aug 2020

Bogged down in
lockdown or freed
from commuting hell?
The mental load was near crippling as the industry was sent home to escape COVID-19 but as the kinks in systems smoothed, many liked what they found.
WORDS BY
CHRIS PASH
Feature
Aimee Buchanan’s four-year-old kept asking why she wasn’t at work.
“I’ve had quite a few entertaining moments where my four-year-old has asked me if I’ve forgotten to go to work today,” says the CEO of OMD Australia.
“My six-month-old is loving it because he gets a few extra cuddles in the day, but my four-year-old is abso- lutely perplexed about what’s going on and why I’m not going to the office.
“So I’m doing a lot of going out of the garage and saying goodbye and slinking back in the front door so she thinks I’ve
gone to work — that was my best strategy until she uncov- ered me.”
About three weeks before lockdown, OMD had a vis- itor from the UK who became a suspected COVID-19 case. This, Buchanan reflected afterwards, had set up the group for the lockdown when it arrived.
“We had to shut down the Sydney office and we made the Channel Nine news,” she told Russel Howcroft in a podcast sponsored by SCA. “I remember thinking, ‘We’re the first business in Australia to shut,’ but three weeks later the whole country shut down.
“The one thing it did — and luckily the case turned out to be negative — we were totally ready for working remotely. It felt like a bit of a dress rehearsal.”
She remembers telling the executive team about two days into working from home that the entire focus could not be on operations.
She said: “This needs to be pivoted, but show our clients how we are navigating what is probably the most challeng- ing time in their business they’ve ever faced.”
Buchanan sees that shift in the discussion as the piv- otal moment in ensuring that 95 per cent of business was: What is the solution? What are we putting in place for this client? And what is their path forward?
About three months into social distancing, Willie Pang, CEO of MediaCom ANZ, went into the office for the first time. “I had to get up and put on a shirt for the first time in