Volume 20: Everything to change forever. Except the stuff that won’t.
1. Everything is going to be changed for absolutely, like, forever.
Tl;dr: Work from home cabin-fever sends prediction clickbait into overdrive.
Like a bad science experiment, we’re now seeing what happens when you take people who love the sound of their own voices and give them way too much free time locked in small rooms with nothing but a laptop and a Medium account for company. It looks a lot like the infinite monkey theorem creating the collected works of Nostradamus.
Lives? Changed forever! Education? Changed forever! Celebrity? Changed forever! Consumers? Changed forever! Supply chains? Changed forever! Work? Changed forever! IT? Changed forever! Retail? Changed forever! Leadership? Changed forever! Media? Changed forever! Advertising? Changed! For! Ever! WWE Wresting? Yup, you guessed it.
You and me? I’m guessing we’re pretty much the same.
Like rats running through a maze, these self-anointed experts from across the full spectrum of business have become instant experts in a post-pandemic future. It’s so exhausting and riddled with evidence-free BS that I just can’t keep up. Please stop.
One final thing, though. If you are at all tempted to spew future-drivel nonsense about how no-one will ever touch each other again, please take a quick peek at history first. The “Roaring Twenties” followed the hyper deadly Spanish flu outbreak of 1918. Yeah, things change. But rarely in the direction people predict.
2. Private equity and pandemic profiteering. See, not so much changes after all.
Tl;dr: Somebody break out the orange jumpsuits.
Private equity, if you aren’t already aware, is a vast shadow banking system that owns vast swathes of the economy, operates with little regulation or oversight, and likes to cloak itself in a shroud of secrecy. The most rapacious of financiers, PE firms strip operating businesses of capital, then load them with debt that they use to pay themselves vast dividends and management fees, force the elimination of jobs and benefits, and take on massive financial risks they’ll just walk away from should they go bad. Boiling it down, all you really need to know is that businesses under PE ownership are ten times more likely to enter bankruptcy than those that are not.
So, while shocking and utterly unconscionable, it’s no surprise that some things never change. In the midst of a public health crisis, private equity companies are slashing doctor and nursing salaries and engaging in wholesale layoffs of healthcare staff. Why? Because COVID-19 treatment is less profitable than the elective surgeries it replaced.
Worse, private equity companies are also middlemen in the business of distributing critical PPE supplies, depriving the same doctors and nurses whose salaries they are cutting of the supplies that they need, and driving prices through the roof in the process. If you thought a guy in Tennessee with a garage full of hand-sanitizer was bad, he’s a rank amateur compared to the PE guys in the pandemic profiteering stakes.
I could go on. Like the fact that leaders of the same PE company cutting doctor salaries are also advising Jared Kushner on the national pandemic response, or to highlight how the (ultra-capitalist) PE industry is lining up at the (socialist) trough of government bailout money to increase their power at the taxpayer’s expense. But I won’t.
3. Increase your ad-spend at all times. Wait, what?
Tl;dr: So hard to know what to do.
It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the East and setting in the West that as the economy takes a turn for the worse advertising agencies and their proxies break out the “increase your ad-spend in a downturn” orthodoxy, without any irony that it’s immediately following the “increase your ad-spend in boom-times” orthodoxy. Really, they should just say “increase your ad-spend at all times” and be done with it.
But all kidding aside, there’s a very real question of how marketers should handle a situation the likes of which we haven’t experienced for 100 years, especially as this current crisis is so asymmetric in its impact. Some industries have declined to almost zero, some have pivoted quickly to meet the needs of the moment, and others are literally booming.
There are some good thought-pieces out there on what to do in the recession that will likely follow soon after the current crisis (assuming you have the cashflow to make these kinds of moves). Right now, though, I suspect it’s more about ramping up customer service to take strain off folks on the frontline, empathetic behaviors that focus on societal needs, and rapidly shifting the customer experience in ways that work for our locked down reality.
4. BAT spits in the eye of irony. Brings the laughs with sheer awfulness.
Tl;dr: Bad design and blatant lying marks BAT unintentionally hilarious.
Amidst a world of bad news, it’s really important to find something to laugh at. Which is why I’m so grateful for the recent re-branding by British American Tobacco. I’m pretty sure that if you look up ‘awful’ in the dictionary, this is what you’ll see.
I’m not going to spend much time talking about their ‘80’s throwback logo or the 'looks like it was made with Flash website,’ or those eye-searing colors. Look at the Brand New review if you want to get into more of those details. Instead, I want to take a closer look at that blatant lie of a tagline.
You might remember I called this sorry lot out a few weeks ago because of their investor comms propaganda piece claiming they have a deeper purpose. Well, they’re doubling down, claiming the title of “a better tomorrow”.
I’m not sure how exactly a tobacco company feels it can claim a better tomorrow, but maybe launching during the worst right-now for a hundred or so years was a smart move. It might be hard for tomorrow to be worse. Or maybe they’re just one of the infinite monkeys I mentioned above. Either way, this is so bad and so obviously dishonest that it’s kind of awesome in a very weird and twisted kind of way.