Insights

In June Yes& promoted two veteran marketing communications professionals: A.J. Guenther, to Vice President of Public Relations; and Mark Pedersen, to Vice President of Marketing Strategy.

Yes& was called upon to deliver this year’s 16th annual Chesapeake Bay Report Card during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the question was—how to generate media interest without a live media event?

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 has kept people at home and off the roads.

As you’ve likely heard, in January 2020, Google announced that they would be getting rid of the 3rd party cookie. So what does this mean for marketers? Actually, what does this mean for everyone?

The question might be gauche, were it not for the fact that all of us have a coronavirus story, just as those who remember 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and the Great Depression have stories about living through those historical events. Our audiences gain insights, and form opinions, by what we choose to show and tell. Years from now, our collective stories will likely include stay-at-home orders, face masks, and toilet paper shortages, and perhaps the background noise of partisan divisiveness and the angst of economic recession. Individually, we’ll expose how these times shaped us, challenged us to do things differently, and hopefully compelled us to do better.

Many government agencies have suspended their outreach efforts during this time of pandemic. The National Safety Council postponed the observance of Distracted Driver Awareness Month; the SEC postponed its National Compliance Outreach Seminar for Investment Companies and Investment Advisors; the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation jointly decided to cancel the 2020 National Inter-agency Community Reinvestment Conference (NICRC); and even the U.S. Census has had to push back by several weeks its on-the-ground outreach and canvassing work.

COVID-19 has easily disrupted everything in your life, but it doesn’t need to mean cancelling your large event, conference or summit. With the right strategy, tools, and creative team behind you, you can carry on virtually with just as much success.

In a time when we spend more and more of our professional and personal lives online, it’s mission-critical that the valuable information your organization creates is not only findable, but also highly compelling and easily shareable.

In his recent book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein makes the argument that combining knowledge and experience from multiple fields is the optimal path to success. He relies heavily on the worlds of sports, science, corporate culture, and higher education to make his compelling point.

While local news has struggled for years to find a profitable business model in the digital age, some PR and marketing shops are finding solid footing with local-centric content and wider distribution options.

The communications foundation and engine for marketing efforts. An essential consumer/member/stakeholder touchpoint. A major organizational investment. A key embodiment of a brand. A transactional powerhouse for sales and services. An organization’s website is all this and more, providing myriad good reasons to optimize its ROI through astute strategy and planning.

These last few weeks have taught us something about the customer journey: it’s ever-changing. What we thought was true a month ago has been completely altered, reevaluated, and, really, blown up! What we once couldn’t imagine, we now see as harsh reality. It’s difficult to navigate as the paths meander and end.