Organizations still spend too much time thinking only about outbound marketing and communications strategy. WHAT we are going to say, WHO are we targeting, and WHEN are we gonna launch it all? They furiously toil to proactively define their brands and products and often stop there, like that’s the whole game. It also makes them very unprepared to react quickly when it’s important.

In some ways, it’s like that person at the party who spends all the time thinking about what to say next, instead of listening to what people are actually talking about, or responding to what people actually ask.

It’s important in today’s environment of pandemics, quarantines and disruptive (but of course meaningful, overdue, important and hopefully transformative) social unrest, to think about what’s really going on for your audience.

There’s a very good chance they are in a totally unreceptive state to your message.

I’ve been marketing media and advertiser brands all over the world for over 20 years, including launching Logo, the first-ever 24/7/365 LGBT media brand. From 30-second commercials in the golden, pre-digital days (looking back I call those “the easy days”), to today, leading social media and VR projects, scrapping it out for microscopic millennial attention spans.

Nothing prepared me or my team, however, for what happened on a recent campaign for online travel company, Orbitz. After launching the social media video campaign, we watched as thousands of Facebook comments started in a rapid-fire chain.