MAM
Survey reveals 61% Indians suffer mental health-related issues under lockdown
MUMBAI: Covid2019 has been the biggest impending crisis in the current era and has given rise to the new normal way of surviving, both personally and professionally. With uncertainty clouding over nations across the globe, economies have come to a standstill and India has been no different. Companies have been forced to adopt the “survival of the quickest and the smartest” mantra, while the economy struggles to come back to normalcy. With individuals restricted with the four walls of their homes, mental health has taken a severe hit. According to the Rebooting 2020: A Story of Covid2019, and shifting perceptions survey by reputation management advisory, The Mavericks India, 61 per cent Indians are experiencing mental health related issues due to the lockdown, uncertainty, and looming financial crisis.
Mental health takes a beating this lockdown
Gen-Z and millennials have been impacted the most with 27 per cent of Gen-Z and 19 per cent of millennials expressing that this crisis has taken a significant toll on their mental health. Baby boomers are least impacted or perhaps better experienced and prepared to handle the crisis.
Furthermore, women are struggling more than men as their workload has increased significantly with them carrying multiple responsibilities without any assistance from domestic helpers.
Work-from-home the new normal?
46 per cent of CXOs surveyed believe that working remotely will be the most significant change in the post-COVID world. While Work From Home is quite prevalent in the western world, the concept was confined to a handful of sectors and very often, limited to a few functions in India. This lockdown has forced all industries to explore innovative ways to get their workforce to operate remotely. Given the success of the forced experiment, many CXOs are exploring options to get a major portion of their workforce to work from home for a longer period of time post-COVID, or permanently in some cases. With salary cuts implemented with immediate effect across all industries, the WFH proposition offers saving time and money while bringing down the real estate costs for the employers significantly. WFH is being touted as a win-win scenario.
On the contrary, the workforce is itching to get back to working from office with 75 per cent Indians finding WFH very challenging and further blurring the boundaries between work and personal lives.
Indian economy’s road to recovery – a bleak future
90 per cent CXOs expect the recovery to be slow and painful and this is likely to be reflected heavily in their decision-making as they try and navigate the turbulent times. A whopping 72 per cent of Indians do not expect the economy to recover in less than a year with 26 per cent being further pessimistic, not expecting the recovery before two years. A slow recovery stacked with depleted earnings and an expectation to save more spells impending doom for discretionary spending.
The rebooted consumer mindset is good news for shared economy brands while brands in luxury, travel and assimilation of material assets are likely to struggle and bleed on their way to recovery. However, the premium mobile phones market is expected to make a V-shaped recovery and dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and automatic washing machines market is expected to grow substantially.
“Early lockdown was the best solution to controlling the spread of COVID.”
Overall, 70 per cent of Indians and 79 per cent of CXOs are supportive of the Central Government’s response in handling the crisis with the only exception being, lack of planning and implementation in accommodating the plight of migrant workers. It is likely to prove to be a major impediment while putting the economy back on the path of recovery and eventually, growth.
Reduced dependencies on China the next big move for India?
51 per cent of the CXOs and 40 per cent of other respondents believe that China will suffer a global backlash as the world perceives that China could have responded more responsibly in handling the crisis that has gotten the world down on its knees. It’s a great opportunity for India if we respond quickly to bring in policy reforms, making it an attractive investment and consumption market, while focusing aggressively on the Make in India initiative and encouraging Indians to going #VocalForLocal.
Media consumption shifts to the online medium
Indians are tuned in to Zoom and Google Hangouts/ Meets for most part of the day, besides being pushed to bring in the digital transformation to some of their most loyal habits like consumption of traditional media. 70 per cent of the respondents are reliant on online news sources and apps and only three per cent of the millennials hold on to their old habits.
Sustainability is the name of the game
58 per cent of respondents are likely to have increased appreciation towards sustainable environmental practices while 63 per cent are committed to leading a healthier lifestyle with a special focus on physical fitness and building better immunity.
Say no to travel till there’s a vaccine
As expected, the travel and hospitality business is likely to take the longest time to recover as social distancing will continue to be the new normal for a while and definitely until they are vaccine-protected. At least 67 per cent of the Indians are not likely to travel for the next six months unless it is absolutely necessary.
The Mavericks founder-CEO Chetan Mahajan said: “Reputation, transparency, and trust will be the new currencies of the post-COVID era. Brands that are living their purpose and are conscious about building sustainable business models will enjoy preference and will recover faster. Furthermore, digital transformation will change the storytelling game and authentic change the storytelling game and authentic influencers will become the key carriers of the brand story.”
For more insights, you can download the full report https://www.themavericksindia.com/covid-19
Digital
The creative cull: how AI is coming for the marketers, ad men and researchers
Robots aren’t taking over yet, but the writing may already be on the wall for some of the US’ most glamorous white-collar jobs.
CALIFORNIA: The robots are not, it turns out, storming the factory floor. They are sitting quietly at a MacBook in a Soho agency, rewriting your copy, summarising your focus groups and generating your mood boards, and nobody has been sacked. Yet.
A new report from Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, offers the most rigorous look to date at what artificial intelligence is actually doing to jobs, as opposed to what doomsayers and boosters claim it might. The verdict from economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory is nuanced but pointed: there is no mass unemployment so far, but some sectors have good reason to be nervous. Marketing, market research and the arts are squarely in the crosshairs.
The researchers introduce a new measure called “observed exposure.” It goes beyond theoretical speculation about what AI could do and instead tracks what it is already doing, drawing on real Claude usage data. The approach is clever. They weight automated uses, where the machine performs the job entirely, more heavily than augmentative ones, where it merely assists. They then map this onto roughly 800 occupations, weighted by how much time workers actually spend on each task. For now the target user base has been the US market, but the findings offer a glimpse of what may be happening in other countries as well.
The results are sobering for the creative and analytical classes. Market research analysts and marketing specialists clock in at 64.8 per cent observed exposure, meaning nearly two-thirds of their daily tasks are already being performed, at least in part, by AI in professional settings. The leading automated task is preparing reports, illustrating data graphically and translating complex findings into written text. In other words, this is the kind of work junior analysts spend most of their days doing.
Arts and media fare little better. The sector shows meaningful theoretical exposure, as large language models can in principle handle the lion’s share of tasks, though observed usage still lags behind capability. The gap is narrowing, however, and the direction of travel is unambiguous.
Here is the sting in the tail. The workers most exposed to AI disruption are not, as popular mythology suggests, low-paid drudges. They are older, better educated, more likely to be women and considerably better paid, earning 47 per cent more per hour on average than their least-exposed counterparts. Graduate degree holders are nearly four times as prevalent in the high-exposure group. The creative professional, the senior analyst and the market researcher with an MBA are precisely the people who should be paying attention.
“We’re not talking about the checkout operator,” the paper implies. “We’re talking about the account planner.”
The most alarming signal in the data concerns not those already in jobs, but those trying to enter them. Among workers aged 22 to 25, hiring into highly exposed occupations has slowed measurably since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022. There has been a 14 per cent drop in the job-finding rate, a figure the authors describe as “just barely statistically significant.” Young people are, in effect, finding the door to exposed professions quietly closing. Whether they are staying in education, taking different jobs or simply giving up is not yet clear.
For a bright graduate eyeing a career in market research or media production, this is not merely an academic data point. It is a flashing amber light.
The paper is careful about what it does not find. Unemployment among highly exposed workers has not risen in any statistically meaningful way since the ChatGPT era began. The apocalypse has not arrived. Even in the Computer and Math category, the most theoretically exposed of all, Claude currently covers just 33 per cent of tasks in practice. The gap between what AI can do and what it actually does at scale in professional workflows remains vast.
Think of it less like a tsunami, the authors suggest, and more like a slowly rising tide. The internet did not destroy journalism overnight. It took 20 years and the collapse of a generation of classified advertising revenue. The China trade shock also took decades to fully register in unemployment statistics, and economists are still debating the numbers.
What does this mean for the luvvies, the admen and the pollsters? The honest answer is: not much yet, but watch this space. AI is already doing the grunt work, including data summaries, draft press releases and boilerplate creative briefs. The question is whether it stops there or continues climbing the value chain.
The authors are building a framework to track exactly that and promise to update it as new data arrives. If the tide does come in, they want to see it coming before the sandcastles are already gone.
For now, the creative industries can breathe, but perhaps not too deeply. The machine is not at the door. It is already at the desk.
