did you see the cheese-dip ad?
The Importance of Reviewing All Communications During Unusual Times
I didn’t. But I heard about it. Evidently some phone company was promoting a shared-minutes plan of some kind by showing a small group of happy people all sharing a cheese dip. Fine. Nice, right? But it was a disaster. Why?
Because it aired during the initial, most critical, fear-packed time of the pandemic, when everyone was terrified about spreading or catching this disease that was rapidly slaying tens of thousands of people around the world. All of a sudden, the sharing of cheese dip didn’t look like some cheerful, tasty encounter. It looked like a death trap.
This poor company wrote and shot this ad long before the pandemic broke. They booked the ad space and time months before the ad appeared. Had they been more agile, they would have pulled the ad at the last minute. Somehow they failed to consider how blatantly insensitive it would come across at that unique time of crisis.
Don’t be that way, especially when extraordinary things are happening in the world, or the nation, or your organization. Sure it costs good money to pull a mailing, or cancel a campaign, or make an abrupt shift at the last minute. But much better to suffer that cost than to suffer a big, nasty, memorable hit to your reputation.
love, joy, peace … Michael
www.michaeljaffarian.com. Michael is a freelance consultant to nonprofits, with an emphasis on research. Contact him for a free, one-hour consultation. emichaeljaffarian@gmail.com.
Vol. 1 No. 25