Jaguar Land Rover Latest Brand to Lend a Helping Hand Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

Another case of a brand doing good during the coronavirus pandemic.

The automaker Jaguar Land Rover said it has deployed more than 160 vehicles globally to support emergency organizations during the crisis. More than half of the wheels were sent to the British Red Cross, which will use them to deliver medicine and food to vulnerable cases across the nation. Jaguar Land Rover has also offered a hand of support to the British government in the way of research, engineering, machine learning, AI, data science and other areas.

Other vehicles were distributed to Red Cross operations in Spain, France, South Africa and Australia. The auto brand said the models were available to be put to good use in the crisis because launch events they'd been earmarked for were postponed.

"Jaguar and Land Rover will do everything we can to support people in need around the world," said customer experience director Finbar McFall, who noted that the company's relationship with the Red Cross and Red Crescent goes back 65 years. "We can all play a part in helping the vulnerable during this global pandemic."

CMOs of Companies Like IBM, PepsiCo and LVMH Join Forces on Coronavirus Threat, as Ad Industry Braces for Slump Over Pandemic

All those ads and nobody to look at them. The ad industry is
bracing for a decline in 2020 revenue due to coronavirus.

It's not only the airlines, hotels, retailers and restaurants that are getting hammered by coronavirus — advertising, like those industries that feed it, are also feeling the pain. The ad-buying giant Magna, which prior to the pandemic had projected ad revenue to grow 6.6% this year, has adjusted its forecast to reflect a 2.8% decline in revenue, as the Journal reports. Meanwhile, as Variety reported, Google and Facebook alone stand to lose more than a combined $44 billion in ad revenue this year due to coronavirus.

A Magna executive characterized the current situation as unprecedented for the marketing community, commenting that the closest equivalent would be a combination of the Great Recession and 9/11.

In an example of brands doing good during the crisis, the marketing chiefs of nearly two dozen of the world's top corporations, including McDonald's, Shell, Anheuser-Busch, PepsiCo, Target, IBM, Tencent and LVMH, to join together under the auspices of the Association of National Advertisers to help the marketing community address the fallout. The execs are all members of the ANA's Global CMO Growth Council, which the ANA founded and which it jointly operates with the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The council is focused on brand experience and innovation, according to the ANA — two areas that have been greatly impacted by the pandemic.

Among the immediate goals of the group, which has been labeled the Global CMO Leadership Coalition on COVID-19, are identifying the most pressing issues faced by marketers, to help them make the best decisions; share their collective experiences with one another; and identify trusted sources of information marketers can turn to for support. The group launched last week with a virtual meeting attended by execs from the U.S., U.K., France, Switzerland and China.

COVID-19 and its effects may be unprecedented in our time, but pandemics and reactions to them are not unprecedented. Time magazine remembers newspaper ads from a century ago, during the Spanish Flu of 1918, urging citizens to wash their hands thoroughly and wear protective masks.

Time noted the many businesses at the time that sought to take advantage of the global panic, taking out ads to promote supposed flu remedies ranging from malted milk to massage therapy.

If only three dozen cans of tuna and a year's supply of toilet paper could do us some actual good.

More Americans Are Watching Streaming Shows During the Coronapocalypse, But Advertisers Aren't Rushing to Reach Them

From the Netflix series "Tiger King"

"TV streaming time in the U.S. went up 12% last week compared with the previous week, according to Wurl Inc. But even as viewing grows, advertiser demand is falling amid the sudden halt of much economic activity. SpotX Inc. said it saw a 16% increase in video ad inventory from March 19-22 versus two weeks earlier. Inventory for digital video was up 13% in the same period." -The Wall Street Journal

Another Magazine Goes Into the ICU: Hearst Converts Storied Pub to Occasional Pamphlet For Generation With No Attention Span

So, Hearst honcho Troy Young insists it's not because of coronavirus, but there are obvious parallels. Everybody's business is going south at the moment, of course, but magazine publishing — having already been in the ICU for some time now — got a head start to hell.

After writing about this business for so long, I suppose it shouldn't come as a shock or evoke any feeling of loss or exasperation whenever another magazine shuts down, or slices its frequency to next to nothing, or arrives in my mailbox as wafer-thin and bereft of engaging content as a visitor's guide to Plymouth Rock. But as someone who still actually enjoys the tactile experience of consuming news and information via print media, well, this just sucks that Esquire is going to 6 issues per year — particularly in the case of a publication with such a legendary pedigree and one that lately, under the guidance of new EIC Michael Sebastian, had become a stronger, more relevant read than it had been for a while.

Interestingly, around the same time I heard about the magazine's retreat, I got a promotional email inviting me to subscribe to TWO Hearst titles — Esquire and Men's Health — for the combo price of something like 5 bucks a year. I know I'm going to sound like a broken record here (not to mention as old as Methuselah), but how, as a publisher, do you expect to gain high-quality readers and attract likewise high-quality advertisers to reach those high-quality readers if you give away your product for less than a 3-course meal at the Waffle House (if you can find one that's not shut down yet, that is)?

I've only been making that point for, oh, a few decades now, but I still contend that, even in a world awash with free, mostly crappy content, people will still pony up for the good stuff — and as a publisher, aren't those the readers you want?

The New Yorker still gets that, as does The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and a few other periodicals charging a worthy price for what they sweat out — and the last time I checked, the circulations of those pubs were robust and growing.

These are companies that have figured out how to continue to make print vital even as they have built a formidable digital business.

So what's keeping other publishers from doing it?

Coronavirus, Content and Companies That Need a Course in Corporate Responsibility

With us media types (like everybody else) stuck working from home for the time being — or as I call it the other 24/7/365, working — I can't help but notice how many of us are resorting to that which we so often do when there's too little actual news to report: writing about ourselves. A number of journalists, including me, have stayed busy chronicling what other journalists are doing to produce and disseminate content against challenging odds, and just generally patting ourselves on the back for being "wartime reporters" — even though 99% of us haven't left the house except to walk the dog or buy more Fritos and gin. One of the most exhaustive such accounts comes by way of WWD, which details how People — the country's largest magazine in terms of circulation and, at almost 50 years old, the granddaddy of celebrity journalism — managed to crank out an issue with virtually everybody working from the kitchen table in their pajamas. As EIC Dan Wakeford notes, "We're much more proficient on Zoom, WebEx, FaceTime and Slack calls." Aren't we all, Dan, aren't we all.

On the topic of newfangled communication tools, though some people find them in poor taste, there are plenty of very funny memes floating around regarding this pandemic and our all working from home, while #WorkingFromHome continues to be a trending topic on Twitter. Here's the best one I've seen, perfectly summing up the predicament we're in:

As far as the content that's being produced by all those journalists is concerned, you've probably noticed that much of what's out there is light on actual information and heavy on those favorite old standbys at times such as these: speculation, sensationalism and scare tactics. If ever there were a time to stop indulging in the (admittedly highly snackable) feed of the Daily Mail and turn OFF those blaring, blustering cable news channels, it would be during this pandemic — though, totally unsurprisingly, the exact opposite is happening, with ratings for CNN, MSNBC and Fox News through the roof, as Forbes reports. And then there are those content purveyors like AARP, which, instead of trying to terrify older Americans and the rest of us, is putting out stuff that actually does the reader some good, like this helpful, common sense and science-based piece on how we can work to boost our immune systems. It's just one example of what makes AARP a truly kick-ass brand and a reliably solid source of information.

On the topic of brands doing good, those of us who write about business and brand marketing in particular have made note of the many companies working overtime to help out in this crisis. Like Tito's vodka, which announced this past weekend that it was going to start producing the life-saving hand sanitizer that is in such short supply. Meanwhile, 3M has picked up the production of respirators and Zara's parent company is distributing face masks to healthcare professionals. On the flipside, there are, as ever, those brands that can't seem to get out of their own way (or maybe take their heads out of something?), ones that appear to be following the same playbook as that Starbucks store that charged hundreds of dollars for cases of bottled water at Ground Zero when there were still pulverized remains of human flesh permeating the air of lower Manhattan, a stupid stunt that embarrassed the brand and for which corporate had to apologize. Among the businesses that could also use some pointers right now on how to not treat their customers like dirt? Well, there's United Airlines, Airbnb and Seamless, just to name three, as PR maven Drew Kerr points out. It's called corporate responsibility (or, just being a forthright, respectable business) — look into it.

Meanwhile, as the Journal reports, a number of brands are scrambling to pull or alter advertising content that once had seemed clever but that now can be filed under the "totally tacky and tasteless" category thanks to coronavirus. "Encouraging people to eat cheese dip with their fingers or suggesting they pull back from using social media in favor of bonding in crowded bars isn't the best guidance amid the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe," as Suzanne Vranica and Sahil Patel explain. On the other hand, maybe it's an opportunity for KFC to update that old brand messaging (something about fingers) toward doing some good in a newly germophobic world?