Every person on this planet is
living with a stark, new reality as the coronavirus and the disease it causes,
COVID-19, travels from nation to nation, to almost every community we know.
At the time of this writing, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reports there are nearly 190,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States. Many more people are becoming ill. Others are losing their jobs as companies cut back and governments at every level struggle to respond.
If you’re a public media
salesperson like the ten account executives I work with at WAMU in Washington,
D.C., you’re seeing clients cancel their marketing schedules, or hesitate to commit
to new ones due to economic uncertainties. You might be wondering, “Is it even ‘okay’
to present my station’s marketing solutions during
this crisis?”
I think so. In fact, as many
professionals must now work from home, making a “sales” call is an opportunity for
connection. Your clients will appreciate hearing from you. When you handle
these calls well, everybody wins — stations and their listeners, brands and
their customers. This is especially true given the affinities that public media
and quality podcast listeners have for brands that support the content they
rely on daily.
According to NPR’s “State of Sponsorship Survey,” completed by Lightspeed Research in March 2019, 75% of NPR listeners hold a more positive opinion of the sponsors that support NPR, and 69% of NPR listeners prefer to buy products or services from those sponsors. By having corporate sponsorship conversations with marketers today, you can help their businesses.
There
are three ways that companies can reinforce their brand values with strong messaging
during this time.
1. Demonstrating
leadership
In a recent blog post, Twitter branding executives Alex
Josephson and Eimear Lambe write: “In times of crisis, people look to leaders
and institutions for guidance, reassurance and information. Increasingly, they
also look to businesses.”
Josephson
and Lambe cite Olive Garden as an example. The national restaurant chain announced March 9 that all its hourly employees
will receive permanent, paid sick leave benefits to help them through the
coronavirus health crisis.
Responding to Olive Garden’s announcement, Rachel Mercer, of business consulting firm R/GA, tweeted:
She meant
how brands behave, and she’s right. This
is where public media salespeople can shine. Brands need to get messages out about
how they’re behaving well.
Twitter
executives also point to corporate messages by JetBlue and British Airways about
elimination of flight cancellation and change fees, and by Slack on how it is wrestling
with managing its own work from home business model.
2. Communicating responses
to the crisis
“If you
have useful and reliable information that might help people navigate the
uncertainty, or keep people calm, you should share it,” Josephson and Lambe
write.
At WAMU, local account executives
Sarah Cumbie and Emily Morrison recently helped two sponsors use their on-air
messages in this way.
Cumbie reached out to
nationally known bookstore Politics and Prose. After demonstrating that WAMU’s average
quarter-hour share grew by 11% since NPR’s coverage of the spread of COVID-19
began, she convinced her client to share how the bookstore is helping their customers
and employees during the crisis.
Here is the message copy she
crafted for them:
Support for WAMU comes from Politics and Prose. During this unprecedented time, Politics and Prose is taking steps to keep their customers and staff safe, including delivery, curbside pickup and virtual events. Politics-Prose.com.
And Morrison worked with a local
business improvement district for a D.C. neighborhood on this message:
… Van Ness Main Street, funded by DSLBD. Working to assist small businesses in Van Ness and Forest Hills affected by the public health crisis. The Van Ness Main Street growth fund helps them continue their work.
Working creatively, these two
sales professionals helped their clients pivot intelligently in unprecedented
times — while also helping to preserve the corporate support WAMU relies upon.
3. Building brands
Mark Ritson, a columnist for
the London-based trade publication Marketing
Week, estimates that
during the global health crisis brands may face cuts of up to a 50% in their marketing budgets.
While brand managers feel pressure to engage in promotional tactics and lead generation in the short term, Ritson writes, “The smarter play is to actually focus [a budget] on the longer-term brand-building mission.”
What might that mean for a
brand? First, avoid communications about COVID-19. Let the scientists, doctors
and public health professionals handle that. They’re the experts after all. A
brand can’t deliver value talking about things it has no business talking
about.
Instead, brands should consider
their own expertise, their own value propositions and what it is they do best —
then let customers in on it. As Twitter’s Josephson and Lambe put it: “It’s about understanding the unique role your brand
plays in people’s lives, how that has changed, and how your brand can help or
be useful during this crisis.”
Ritson also applauds Uber Eats
for doing it right. The food delivery service “made
significant changes to its app with a new protocol that allows consumers to
request a delivery at the doorstep rather than in person,” he writes in another
recent column. Competitor DoorDash also began “no-contact” delivery in response to COVID-19.
To follow Ritson’s advice, public
media sponsorship folks could propose that their clients air messages that add
real and authentic value to their customers’ lives during the pandemic —
stemming from what those businesses normally do every day. That’s
brand-building.
Public media builds brands
Think of the FCC guidelines
for public media sponsorship messages. Calls-to-action and lead generation campaigns
aren’t allowed due to our noncommercial mission. That means our sponsorships
are all about branding.
Even before the coronavirus
upended the economy, I used recently aired copy many times for the proposals I
built for WAMU’s corporate support team.
Most messaging ends with a tag to visit a brand’s website address as in
“More at Google.com.” However, the carmaker Honda simply shared a message about
its research and development, closing with: “Honda: We’re here, helping you
stay on the move.” The message copy that we routinely develop with sponsors
dovetails perfectly with the brand-building tactic Ritson suggests.
For salespeople in public
media, the marketing solutions we offer remain valuable and strong. Our
audiences are educated, affluent, community-minded, culturally active and
influential — all characteristics most marketers seek in the targets of their
campaigns.
As long
as a brand is “thoughtful with copy and tone,” it can contribute to the
conversation happening around COVID-19, Twitter’s Josephson and Lambe conclude.
And Ritson has a great way of
putting it: “The coronavirus crisis will test us all, but marketers need to
think long-term and keep building their brands.”
Matching your clients’ marketing initiatives and unique value propositions with public media’s desirable audience is an effective way to move sponsors toward ‘yes’ in these uncertain times.
As an integrated media specialist with Market Enginuity, Michael Jortner writes marketing communications for WAMU’s corporate sponsorship team.
