The light in my kitchen turned the color of weak orange soda around ten in the morning and stayed there. Ash on the windshield. A fine grit on the porch rail that came back an hour after I wiped it. My neighbor walked her dog in a paper mask. Powell's was packed at two on a Wednesday, which is what happens when a whole city decides that indoors is a destination.
Somewhere in the middle of that week, a brand I will not name posted about how fast summer was flying by. Sunshine emoji. A photograph of a picnic.
It went out because somebody loaded a content calendar in June and never looked at it again.
I do not think that brand is callous. I think it is absent. And absent reads worse than clumsy, because absence is the one thing your audience can verify without any help from you.
A scheduling tool is not a strategy, it is a bet that the world six weeks from now will look enough like the world today, and half the job of running a brand is knowing when to cash that bet out early.
Three things I would build into the next planning cycle, before the next thing happens.
One, somebody looks at the queue every single morning. Not the intern, not only on Mondays. A person with the authority to kill a post and no obligation to explain the decision to four other people first. The cost of pulling a picnic photo is zero. The cost of leaving it up is a small permanent dent.
Two, write down in advance what counts as a pause. Air quality above a number. A local emergency declaration. Otherwise every incident becomes a debate, and debates are slow, and slow is how the picnic photo survives.
Three, decide whether you have anything real to offer before you decide to speak. Salt & Straw did not need a statement, it needed to be open with the doors shut and the air clean. A few food carts closed and said so plainly. That is a communication. A paragraph about how deeply you are thinking about your community is not, and everybody can tell the difference on the first read.
And absent reads worse than clumsy, because absence is the one thing your audience can verify without any help from you.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where the calendar becomes a small monument nobody wants to be the one to disturb. Somebody fought for that slot. Somebody approved the copy twice. Disturb it anyway.
Truffles spent the smoke week asleep on the cool tile by the back door, and Barnaby sat in the window watching a sky he had no opinions about. They were the only two in the house not checking a number on a phone every hour.