There are times during the year when it can feel like a stretch to get to the next long weekend. Like the time between Presidents’ Day and Memorial Day that we’re currently in. (If you didn’t have Presidents’ Day off, our thoughts are with you.)

To address this problem in today’s era of burnout and resignations, some agencies have been offering employees more paid time off, among other perks. The Martin Agency is one of the latest to amend their time-off policies, adding holidays to the company calendar to ensure that employees receive a three-day weekend at least once a month.

Take the day

According to the agency’s holiday schedule, employees have Fridays off labeled “March Madness,” “Spring Break” in April, and “August Adventure,” in addition to federal holidays like Veterans Day, Juneteenth, and Labor Day.

Rewind: In the last two years, Carmina Drummond, chief culture officer at the Martin Agency, said the company moved to unlimited PTO; however, she’s noticed employees continue to work even when they’re technically out. “I think people say they take vacation, but I don’t know anybody that really truly disconnects, and we need to learn it’s a discipline to do that,” she said.

It’s part of the reason why the Martin Agency chose to add more company-wide holidays.

• The initial plan was to allow employees to choose a three-day weekend in April and August, but based on the success of a company-wide mental health day early in the pandemic, they found it was easier on employees and clients to close the agency completely.
• “We got a lot of positive feedback from [employees] saying, ‘Wow, it was wonderful because the whole agency was closed,” Drummond said, which relieved pressure to work while out of the office.

By the numbers: A 2019 LinkedIn survey found that nearly 60% of American workers check in with bosses and coworkers at least once a day while on vacation. On top of that, people with unlimited PTO tend to work more in general. According to a study by HR software company Namely, those with unlimited PTO take fewer days off than those with a set number of days, in part because “they don’t know where to draw the line between acceptable and excessive.”

Drummond said top-down pressure also factored into why people weren’t taking time off. When they asked, employees would say, “‘Well, because leadership is still on.’ And then leadership’s managers are still on, and so we’re like, ‘Okay, we need to lead by example,’” she said.

Read the full story here.—KH

It started with gifts, as it so often does in influencer-land.

“My background was in celebrity PR,” Lauren Stephens, CEO and co-founder of Dudley Stephens, a clothing brand that specializes in upscale fleece turtlenecks, told Marketing Brew. At companies like Lancome and Gucci, it was her job to shower celebs with their products—think thousand-dollar bags for the Oscars.

And she didn’t see why Dudley Stephens couldn’t gift its signature turtlenecks in the same way.

• So, when the brand started in 2015, it started treating mommy bloggers and fashion influencers like the celebrities Stephens worked with in her past life.
• Stephens co-founded the brand with her sister, COO Kaki McGrath, so it’s safe to say Dudley Stephens started small. But then again, so did some of the influencers the brand sent gifts to in its early days.

Big picture: Some of the influencers the brand initially worked with in the early days have grown their followings a lot over the last seven years, causing their rates to increase. But Dudley Stephens has grown as well (last year it did eight figures in revenue for the first time, according to Stephens), so the brand’s larger influencer budget allows it to meet those demands. According to Stephens and McGrath, Dudley Stephens continues to work with roughly 50–60 influencers who’ve been posting about the brand since its start.

Dudley Stephens’s founders recently walked us through how its influencer gifting program has evolved since day one. Read the story here.—PB

Each Tuesday, we spotlight Marketing Brew’s readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

John Franklin has taken an untraditional path to marketing. At 17, he joined the Royal Air Force in the UK, serving as a maintenance and safety officer for 21 years. “During that time, I was awarded an MBE (one award down from a knighthood) by the Queen at Buckingham Palace for a safety campaign during the Gulf [War],” he told Marketing Brew over email.

In 2011, he joined the European Union Aviation Safety Agency—which he describes as “like the FAAt for Europe”—where he initially analyzed aircraft accidents. Since 2019, he’s led its safety promotions team, a role that involves leading “a team of experts who promote and market safety initiatives” across the European Aviation Community.

“Once other teams have analyzed safety occurrences and identified the things we need to do as an industry to keep the traveling public safe, we then promote this to the industry,” he told us.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? I lead a team of safety marketeers in a public regulator for aviation in Europe (kind of like the FAA across 31 countries). We create content for aviation professionals and private pilots to help prevent accidents and keep the traveling public safe.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? Our post-Covid “Ramp-Up” campaign to make sure flying opened up again without any problems, despite quite a few pilots and other staff not having been near an aircraft for a while.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? Working in the public sector, I have to pick a classic public-safety announcement. In the UK, everyone of a certain age crossed the road safely thanks to the Green Cross Code Man. The actor later became Darth Vader in the original Star Wars films.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile? That I’m a little older than the average marketing person, but thankfully I had an easy newspaper round in the 1970s.

What’s one marketing-related podcast, social account, or series you’d recommend? The Twitter account of Tom Moylan (@moylato) a guru of public engagement in Europe. He’s our Yoda.

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Design: Saturated colors and playful fonts—the graphic design trends you need to know in 2022.

Pose: Tips and tricks for shooting e-commerce photography.

Redo: Why Baskin-Robbins overhauled its “childish” logo.

Looking to hire the best marketers out there? Submit your job openings to our new, free Marketing Brew Job Board to reach our community of 250K industry leading marketers.

Today’s feature openings:

• Senior Product Designer at Almanac
• VP, Communications at Upwork
• PR Account Manager at Kickstand Communications

See more jobs or post your job opportunities here.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Agencies and media companies hope new programs will boost diversity in advertising
• Why Willa is flying influencers from LA to Coachella
• The gaming industry wants advertisers to take it seriously

Social media is for everyone, but women continue to rule the paid influencer roost. Female influencers make up what percentage of influencer marketing deals across social media?

1. 73%
2. 83%
3. 63%
4. 90%

Keep scrolling for the answer.

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