My calendar coughed up a reminder last Tuesday for a client workshop scheduled on March 12, 2020. It was never held and never deleted. It has been sitting in there for a year, a small ghost with a conference line that goes nowhere.
I have been going back through what everyone did that week. Most brands pulled everything. Paused the media buy, killed the campaign, held the newsletter, sent the one email about unprecedented times and then went quiet.
Which was defensible. Nobody wanted to sell throw pillows into a wall of news.
Some of them started talking again in May. Some in September. A few of them, twelve months later, still have not.
Silence during a crisis reads as restraint for about six weeks, and after that it reads as a brand that left the room without saying goodbye.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and the pause was almost never a strategy. It was a budget decision wearing a strategy costume. The brands that came out of this year with more audience than they went in with did three things instead.
One, they changed the subject rather than the volume. Powell's stopped talking about browsing the stacks and started talking about what it means to mail a stranger a book. Same brand, different doorway. Salt & Straw shipped pints and made the shipping itself part of the product.
Two, they treated operations as brand work. Curbside pickup, the plexiglass, the sign on the door about capacity. That signage was the campaign. A year of customers read those signs more carefully than they have ever read a headline.
Three, they kept a human byline. The updates that landed came from a named person who sounded like a person. The ones that vanished came from the team, and got filed accordingly.
Here is the part that gets lost. The clients of mine who stayed quiet are not being punished for saying the wrong thing. They are being forgotten for saying nothing, which is a harder hole to climb out of, because there is no apology tour for absence. You cannot correct a record you never made.
You cannot correct a record you never made.
Two of them are calling me now, this month, asking about a relaunch. They want to know how to come back. My honest answer is that they are not coming back, they are starting over, and the sooner they price that correctly the better the work will be.
The karaoke bar in Southeast is still dark and I still check on it like a superstition. Truffles and Barnaby noticed none of this. They kept talking the entire year, loudly, at four in the morning, about nothing at all. In fairness, it worked.