🧠Industry chaos is opportunity. But this too shall pass.
Navigate the professional waters during "difficult times." Context Collapse #175
In this issue: PR/advertising/marketing during an economic downturn.
Before I begin writing about how the current recession/recession-y situation is messing up the comms industry and about the worries about AI taking creative jobs away, I need to state one very, very important thing:
I am awful at separating my work and personal life and live immersed in work pretty much all the time.
Many of my friends work in the industry. My wife works in the agency world. My leisure time is spent with stuff that’s related to the industry. I spend much more time dealing with media, advertising, marketing and PR than is generally healthy.
With that said…
MORE BENEATH THE FOLD
The current downturn’s hitting the tech sector hard. This is having all sorts of knock-on effects for the greater mass comms world; tech companies have been massive customers of all sorts of marketing, advertising and PR services.
We’re in a phase of layoffs, diminished budgets, shrunken retainers and making do with less at the moment. I don’t anticipate this changing anytime soon.
It sucks, but it’s also something you can’t control. But there are upsides to downturns.
Now is a good time for your agency to be working on weird, creative and outside the box projects. Now is a good time to get experimental to see what works. For larger agencies, downturns are complacency shakers that can help them slash some really dumb expenses (LOL just ask me next time over drinks for stories of $$ waste from the agency days). For smaller agencies, downturns are times when they can adapt to changing market conditions more nimbly than their larger counterparts and land more work. For freelancers, it’s time to reach out to agencies and in-house departments of all sizes to take on work from the overworked employees who are remaining after the layoffs.
In-house? Practice your low-budget, high yield experiments. New pricing techniques to keep your customers in the family. Creative social media posts that get eyeballs. Emails that get read. You know the drill.
In other words… Chaos happens, but figure out how to make it benefit you.