I don’t imagine there’s a company on the planet that had a contingency plan for the Covid-19 pandemic.
Nobody was fully prepared. No government. No business.
We were all caught by surprise.
This is uncharted territory.
I’ve been trying to figure this out for my own business.
And one of the tasks I set myself was to watch what’s going on in the world of marketing and promotion.
In particular, I’ve been watching the kind of messaging companies have been putting out.
I’ve been around long enough to remember what marketing was like before the arrival of the web.
Back in the 1980s I was a print copywriter, writing ads for magazines and newspapers.
I loved the craft. And I worked with an art director who was equally passionate about his work.
Our ads were highly polished. We spent days or sometimes even weeks on a single ad. The final results were as near perfect as we were able to achieve.
Truth be told, we cared more about the opinions of the next industry awards committee than we did about the opinions of our readers.
In a very real sense, we lived and worked in an adland ivory tower.
But that was then. And now is now.