Five weeks in and we’ve learned a lot about dealing with Covid-19. Our lives have been disrupted in ways we never would have imagined. We’ve learned a new vocabulary and veer between news obsessed and news avoidance, depending on the level of stress on any given day.
From a business perspective our focus has been on serving clients who are also adjusting to the impact of the pandemic as well as seamlessly adjusting our work process to support our virtual team.
As an agency focused on the entertainment industry, we’ve come up with virtual festival campaigns for filmmakers whose projects were unable to screen at shuttered film festivals, pivoted film release campaigns to VOD, supported corporate clients coming up with innovative, new ways to tackle Covid-19 and executed business as usual campaigns for our television and streaming media clients.
This is not the first time we’ve had to weather a crisis. The ’92 LA Riots taught us the importance of monitoring the situation in real-time to make sensible decisions. The Northridge earthquake reinforced the importance of having a communications plan that enabled us to contact our team and assess their needs, enabling us to come together for them when it counted. Then there was 9/11, a devastating time for the entire country. Each time we learned valuable lessons which have helped us to face the next one.
Fortunately, we solved our technology problems a couple of crises ago so we’ve been able to concentrate on how to best use it to do business. We’ve had a work from home plan in place for two years so best practices were already developed. Of course, that plan did not include everyone working virtually at the same time so we went through a learning curve on that front.
As a member of PROI, we’ve been fortunate to share best practices with some of the smartest PR minds in the world and have been reassured that everyone is facing the same problems. We’re not in this alone.
People have been remarkably generous, whether sharing information, respecting social distancing, making noise at 8pm to show our support for first responders or offering to do errands.
And probably because of our social distancing, we’ve become more social than ever, thank you to video conferencing. Who knew we would be using it for drinks and dinner in addition to doing business!
So while we don’t know when this will end, we will continue to adapt and learn new ways — professionally and personally — and of course, still enjoy our virtual happy hours!