What a difference three weeks makes. Three weeks ago, an agency could shoot a commercial for Corona beer with college kids laughing, hugging, and drinking, hopping a plane to Mexico, building a human pyramid in the sand before falling all over each other. Today, such an ad is unthinkable. This all happened in just three weeks.
Last month, this image was motivational. Now, it's irresponsible.
Everything you knew about marketing only a month ago is now irrelevant. All of your imagery, all of your video, all of your copy needs to change. Stock photography libraries should start embargoing images of high fives and corporate retreats by the pool now.
When the civil war started, it is said that fashionable D.C. elites took picnic lunches out to the hills to catch a glimpse of the battle that would become the first battle of Bull Run—the first major carnage of the war. It was only after the wounded and dead were brought back to the hospitals that it dawned on the elites that this thing was real. Everything had changed.
So it is with virtually all current corporate imagery. Yesterday’s teambuilding video should be iced. Last week’s group classroom tutorial video can go deep into a file on Dropbox.
If you’re lucky the past week, you’ve had a home where you could binge Netflix or Hulu with your family or roommates, waiting for things to go back to normal. Admit it, some of the scenes in the shows make you cringe now, right? And the commercials can be downright irresponsible. Two weeks ago, SNL featured a sketch where the always hilarious Cecily Strong repeatedly tried to put her hand in Michael Che’s mouth on air. Watching it in Seattle, where the crisis first hit, we cringed. Now everyone in the world would cringe.
Messaging and hope are going to be a crucial part of pulling Americans together to get through this, and when the worst is over, to rebuild our economy and society. But the “me generation” messaging is dead. The scene with the self-indulgent couple arguing over which model Tesla they prefer before they embrace and high five the dealer is an artifact.
The new messaging should contain some of the traits below:
- Smiling, laughing over visual software like Microsoft Teams, Apple FaceTime, Zoom, Skype
- Heroic stories of medical professionals
- People helping people, especially seniors but from a distance
- Young people laughing, chatting, dancing over technology
- TikTok
- Families or two close friends/roommates
- Different ethnicities interacting in a small group or over technology
- Different age groups interacting over technology
Marketing will be creating images with individual people, especially youth, that convey hope and ... [+]
Marketing should inform, but it should also take the audience members' minds off of the current predicament and let them imagine a better future that, by the way, may include your product. So no more Facebook group ads with a cast of thousands gathering together. It seemed like a good idea at the time—what if we could show that a virtual community was a real community? But after lavishing millions of dollars on the “Ready to Rock” SuperBowl ad (at the top of this piece) featuring Chris Rock and Sylvester Stallone with a cast of hundreds at the “Rocky Steps” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it’s time to mothball the piece, no matter how much they spent on it.
As marketers, we need to realize that this is a new era. We need to be responsible. But we also need to keep being creative. We can continue to engage and entertain audiences. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work on building imagery for the new world.
