President-elect Joe Biden is appointing a team of veteran communicators who served in his campaign and in the Obama-Biden White House – and it’s an all-female cast.
Biden turned to two Obama administration veterans to lead his White House’s communications strategy and serve as its public face.
Kate Bedingfield – who served as Biden’s communications director while he was vice president and on his presidential campaign – will be the White House communications director. Jen Psaki, who served as White House communications director for the last two years of Obama’s administration, will be Biden’s White House press secretary.
Biden rounded out his White House communications staff with five other women – the first senior White House communications team comprised entirely of women, Biden’s transition team noted in its announcement.
Pili Tobar, who worked on Biden’s campaign and previously worked as deputy director of the immigration reform advocacy group America’s Voice, will be the White House deputy communications director. Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as chief of staff to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris during the campaign, will be the principal deputy press secretary. She previously worked for the advocacy group MoveOn.org.
Symone Sanders, who served as national press secretary on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign before signing on early to work for Biden’s campaign, will be a senior adviser and the chief spokesperson for Harris. Ashley Etienne, a former aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who went on to work for Biden’s campaign, will be Harris’ communications director.
And Elizabeth Alexander, who worked for Biden while he was in the Senate before serving as his press secretary in the Obama administration, will be Jill Biden’s communications director. Alexander also worked on the Biden campaign.
Psaki is the third Biden administration hire who has ties to WextExec Advisors, a Washington consulting firm filled with Obama administration alumni. Psaki worked as a senior adviser there after leaving the White House. Antony Blinken, Biden’s choice for secretary of State, co-founded the firm, and Avril Haines, his nominee for director of national intelligence, is a former principal there.
Holiday Shoppers Take Advantage of Early, Thanksgiving Weekend Deals
An estimated 186.4 million consumers took advantage of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and shopped in-store and online this year, according to the annual survey released this week by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics.
“As expected, consumers have embraced an earlier start to the holiday shopping season, but many were also prepared to embrace a long-standing tradition of turning out online and in stores over Thanksgiving weekend to make gift purchases for family and friends,” said NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay. “Many things have changed since the onset of the pandemic, but the commitment by retailers to meet the consumer where, when and how they shop at the prices they want to pay never changes.”
While the overall number of shoppers from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday dropped slightly from 189.6 million in an unusually robust 2019, this figure is still significantly higher than the 165.8 million shoppers in 2018.
Black Friday and Saturday saw tremendous growth in online activity. For the first time, the number of online Black Friday shoppers passed the 100 million mark, up 8 percent over last year. The number of online Saturday shoppers grew even more, up 17 percent compared with last year. Online-only shoppers increased by 44 percent for the entire weekend, for a total of 95.7 million.
With retailers enticing consumers with generous deals as early as October, more than half (52 percent) of holiday shoppers said they took advantage of early holiday sales and promotions this year. Of those, 38 percent said they checked off holiday purchases in the week leading up to Thanksgiving. More than half (53 percent) felt the promotions over the weekend were the same as they had been earlier in the season.
As expected, in-store shopping was down given both the state of the pandemic as well as the number of retailers who opted to close on Thanksgiving Day. With consumer traffic moving to online channels, the number of in-store shoppers on Thanksgiving Day dropped by 55 percent from last year and those on Black Friday dropped by 37 percent. An earlier NRF survey found that a large majority (70 percent) of holiday shoppers say they feel safe shopping in stores this holiday season given the precautions retailers have taken for COVID-19.
Over the five-day period, shoppers spent an average of $311.75 on holiday-related purchases such as gifts or decorations, down from last year’s total of $361.90 but comparable to 2018’s $313.29. Of that amount, nearly three-quarters ($224.48) was spent directly on gifts.
Consumers have continued to stress the importance of holidays throughout this year. In fact, the majority of holiday shoppers (55 percent) said recent developments around COVID-19 cases had no impact on their holiday spending plans this year. Most (51 percent) also feel that given the pandemic, they are more interested in holiday decorations and seasonal items. They were also eager to support small businesses, as 77 percent indicated they were more interested in doing so this year.
Top gift purchases over the weekend included clothing (bought by 52 percent of those surveyed), toys (32 percent), books/music/movies/video games (29 percent), gift cards/certificates (29 percent) and electronics (27 percent).
Shopping destinations included department stores (visited by 40 percent of those surveyed), grocery stores (39 percent), clothing stores (33 percent) and electronics stores (31 percent).
NRF defines the holiday season as Nov. 1 through Dec. 31 and has forecast that sales will increase between 3.6 percent and 5.2 percent over 2019 to a total between $755.3 billion and $766.7 billion. Over the 2020 holiday season, NRF expects that online and other non-store sales, which are included in the total, will increase between 20 percent and 30 percent. In total consumers plan to spend $997.79 on gifts, holiday items and additional “non-gift” purchases for themselves and their families this year, according to NRF’s annual survey released in October.
Read more about the holiday season at the NRF Winter Holiday Headquarters.
Pandemic Mic: Coronavirus Outbreak Fuels Word of the Year
Pandemic has defined our lives in 2020, so it’s no surprise that the global disease outbreak was named Mirriam-Webster’s word of the year.
Sometimes a single word defines an era, and it’s fitting that in this exceptional – and exceptionally difficult – year, a single word came immediately to the fore as the dictionary company selected pandemic as its word of the year.
The word won out based on a statistical analysis of searches in in the company’s online dictionary while also showing a significant year-over-year increase in traffic in the search for meaning of it all!
The first big spike in dictionary searches for pandemic took place on Feb. 3, the same day that the first COVID-19 patient in the U.S. was released from a Seattle hospital. That day, pandemic was looked up 1,621% more than it had been a year previous, but close inspection of the dictionary data shows that searches for the word had begun to tick up consistently starting on Jan. 20, the date of the first positive case in the U.S.
People were clearly paying attention to the news and to early descriptions of the nature of this disease. That initial February spike in searches didn’t fall off – it grew. By early March, the word was being searched an average of 4,000% over 2019 levels. As news coverage continued, alarm among the public was rising.
On March 11, the World Health Organization officially declared “that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic,” and this is the day that pandemic saw the single largest spike in dictionary traffic in 2020, showing an increase of 115,806% over lookups on that day in 2019. What is most striking about this word is that it has remained high in lookups throughout 2020, staying near the top of our word list for the past ten months – even as searches for other related terms, such as coronavirus and COVID-19, have waned.
Pandemic is defined as:
an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affects a significant proportion of the population.
The Spin Cycle is so ready for a new word in 2021!