83 – Brands and Pandemic

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. The situation is looking grim as the pandemic Covid19 reached across the world, effecting major countries like the USA, Italy, Spain, and now India. Each day we see the number of COVID positive cases are climbing exponentially some brands standing out to help and Trying to give back to society.

Brands like Coca-Cola, Audi, Volkswagen, Macdonald are preaching social distancing which is a need of an hour, They are doing it just by redesigning their logos.

Coco-Cola running an ad with the slogan “Staying apart is the best way to stay connected.”

The renowned sports brand “Nike” on the other hand running a social media campaign with the slogan. Play inside, play for the world. Advising people to stay indoors, avoid venturing out.

Sun pharma pharmaceutical has decided to donate Rs 25 crore of drugs and hand sanitizers to fight against Covid19.

While the state governments are planning to set up a Covid19 dedicated hospital, Reliance industries ltd step up and sets up a 100-bed center, in Mumbai for COVID19 positive patients.

Tata Trust and Tata group, one of India’s biggest conglomerate pull out the big guns by announcing to spend 1500 cr to tackle the pandemic in India.

The government is doing their level best, but it takes two to tango, with the help of brands, philanthropists, and people we will overcome with the pandemic and rise again.

82 – A disaster year : 2020

In the year 2019, no one predicted or foresaw the future of how the year 2020 will be like. The new year started with the huge tension escalating between the two rival countries USA and Iran, as the USA eliminated the top military commander of Iran General Qasem Soleimani.

Before people were able to recover from that, one more devastating incident hit the world, Australia bush-fire, wildlife fire which spread rapidly and not only destroyed the Australian forests, homes, farms, and businesses and killed a lot of wild animals.

and things went downhill after that when China decided to cancel their new year celebration because of a new viral disease outbreak which turned out to be lethal as the death toll roses to 258 by the end of January. According to a few media reports, Dr. Li Wenliang was the first person who raised the alarm to the authorities and to government officials but instead of appreciating the doctor’s efforts. Chinese officials booked him and accused him of spreading rumors and making false statements. Unfortunately, Dr. Li Wenliang is no more, died because of Coronavirus. What’s heartbreaking is how China ignored initial reports of the virus outbreak and unable to curb it on time, which is now spread all over the world and became a global pandemic with over 265,495 confirmed cases and 9,785 deaths, cities and citizens are under lockdown and normal life is at a halt, hope things will get better soon.

81 – History of Digital World

The inception of the internet can be traced back to the year 1983 but it becomes publicly available from the year 1991 and ever since then the internet and technology advanced significantly over the years. I am from the 90s generation when we used to shop things the old school way, going out with the family to a store to buy perishable and non-perishable products or be it anything, back in those days we Indian consumers still believed in touch and feel is the best way to shop.

Online shopping wasn’t even a thing in the 90s. The Internet introduced in India in the year 1995 and not everybody could afford it, as it was costly and India was still going through the developing phase, even buying a computer was unaffordable for a normal middle-class Indian family, it was a distant dream to buy a computer and on top of that internet services were exorbitantly high.

The world wide web expanded rapidly, in the year 1998, and the rise of a small company begun which changed the course of digital advertising, the internet, search engine, and the worldwide web. 27th September 1998 is the day when Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded “Google”, initially they used to call this search engine ‘Backrub’.

80- Brands and COVID 19

A viral disease outbreak which turns out to be an epidemic to a pandemic, COVID 19 or novel Coronavirus as WHO(World Health Organization) declared, it took the world by storm. China, South Korea, Italy, and Iran are amongst the hardest hit countries because of COVID19.

Impacting globally, it becomes a high level of concern and a threat across the world, cities are locked down. Major conferences and sports events like Facebook F8 developers conference, NBA and India Premier League postponed or suspended.

Major brands faced a catastrophic hit because of COVID19, let’s deep dive into and see how brands are tackling and fighting against the deadly menace of coronavirus.

Amazon – Surgical facemasks and hand sanitizers two of the most essential products to keep ourselves safe from the virus are running out of stock from the stores, whereas some of the online sellers selling it on Amazon at an exorbitant price. As a preemptive measure Amazon warned and blocked the sellers who aren’t adhering to the fair price policy.

Facebook – Following Amazon’s footsteps, Facebook banned the sale of surgical face masks on its platform.

Delta airlines – When it comes to a crisis, a company’s most prominent stakeholders are its consumers. As most of the countries put the travel ban, the aviation industry hit the most and when it comes to boosting the morale of the consumers, Delta ‘s CEO Ed Bastian is the person we look for, Mr. ED circulated an email to the customers explaining how the airline is taking effective measures to curb the current outbreak. He breaks down the strategy in pointers

“We’ve Prepared”

“We’ve Learned”

“We’ve Taken Action”

Uber – Ride-hailing app Uber announced, it will delist or suspend accounts of drivers and passengers who are exposed to COVID-19, the company will also provide free disinfectants to the drivers to keep their vehicles germ free and clean.

Microsoft, Facebook, Linkedin, Amazon all the major companies ask their employees to work from home.

“What we know is a drop. What we don’t know is an ocean”

79 – Deepfake

In the world of superfast internet, social media websites and apps which can make anything go viral in no time, the lines are blurring between what’s believable and what’s unbelievable. Fake news is a threat to society and ever since smartphones and the internet reached the farthest corner of the earth, people are not only just consuming content, they are spreading it too.

Spreading without verifying and validating information, which turned out to be dangerous for some people who lost their lives because of the fake news which was circulated through WhatsApp.

Rumors of child abductors looming around the village spread through WhatsApp and Facebook in a small town of India, the mob gathered and lynched the innocent travelers assuming they were the abductors.

As technology is evolving rapidly, deepfake is a video, image or audio recording that replaces existing users to someone else which seems real but has been manipulated through Artificial Intelligence. Nowadays, Deepfakes are majorly used in election campaigns in countries like the US and UK.

Initially, it was used in Hollywood movies to superimpose actors face and for the CGI scenes but it was time-consuming, costly and not easy as it sounds but now with the help of apps even a layman can do. In the recent elections in India, a video was circulated of one of the election candidates, Manoj Tiwari, who was talking in Haryanvi and English fluently and appealing for votes, the video was morphed and manipulated by AI.

78 – Ethics

There are 7 deadly sins according to Christian theology.

Pride
Envy
Gluttony
Greed
Lust
Sloth
Wrath

and when you talk about Public relations you talk about ethics too because it’s a sin to be an unethical PR Professional.

Since the dawn of public relations, people debated and even declared public relation fraternity as manipulators or spin doctors, we can discuss it over a cup of coffee because it is debatable but when you read about the case studies and campaigns which predominantly beneficial for not just a bunch of people but a society, city or village you realize it isn’t much but it is honest work.

A company or brand doesn’t run or survive in the long run if it isn’t ethical and PR is all about projecting and highlighting the good deeds.

We have learned from our mentors when the crisis hits, admit your mistakes, don’t hide the blunder. Apologizing and being ethically right is much better than hiding and covering the damage by being morally wrong because maybe the world will never know what you did but you know and you have to face yourself in the mirror every day.

It’s easy for others to sit back, target and criticize what we do, how we do, but deep down we all know a PR professional has to adhere to what the client wants, what company wants, what a journalist wants. Sometimes it does get difficult to manage but we have to remember PR is all about relationship building and you can not build a bridge of a relationship without the pillars of ethics and trust.

77 – Virus Attack

Ebola, Nipah, Sars, Coronavirus all of these deadly viruses created havoc in the past few years. While China is still fighting to curb the menace of coronavirus and quarantining the cities, issuing an advisory to the travelers and keeping an eye on the outbreak.

While we wonder about where do all these viruses come from, where is it all begun and why these viruses turned out so fatal. We can take a look back at the Ebola outbreak which created havoc in Africa 11,000 deaths were reported. Sars which is known as a severe acute respiratory syndrome, began in China in 2002 which killed 800 deaths. Coronavirus outbreaks in China which reportedly killed 1,500 people.

In all of these epidemics, one thing is common, it all comes from the animals and to be precise from the bats and it’s not the bat’s fault its the fault of us, we are the ones who are invading in their territories and consuming them. In Malaysia spreading commercial pig farms in the bat inhabited territory was the main reason for the outbreak. In Africa, bushmeat is very famous were fruitbats are hunted, sold and consumed.

Bats do appear to carry more human-killing viruses than any other animal, around 60 human infecting viruses. Guess we can love batman but not bats though.

76 – Warfare

While people are speculating and debating over world war III, we can take a look at how countries spending more and more on the military budget. According to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute top five countries who spends a massive amount of money on arms, ammunition and military are China, the US, Russia, and India.

Political leaders may talk about peace and prosperity but escalating tensions around the globe between the countries are a major concern for everyone, spending on the military, deadly weapons increased just after the 9/11 attack that’s when President Bush announced a crackdown on Al-Qaeda and sent troops to counter-terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 1990 the US and Soviet Union invested big bucks on military spending, whereas in the year 2018, things drastically changed as China jumped the share from 2% to 14% second largest behind the US.

War tactics changes by time, apart from relying on the military, countries like China and Russia preparing for cyber warfare too, cyber warfare is all about attacking and damaging the enemy country’s information systems and network.

Edward Snowden the renowned American whistle blower revealed how the US is spying on many countries and its people. China and Russia training the hacker army under the radar.

75 – Spam Scam

Spam calls, we all get spam calls, not even weekly or monthly but daily, they are relentless, annoying and irritating. According to a report published in December 2019 by Truecaller, an average Indian mobile user receives 25.6 spam calls user/month and according to its reports, it is increased 15% as compared to the previous year.

While we keep wondering where and how these scammers get our information and identity and that’s when we realized how knowingly or unknowingly we share our private information and account details or phone numbers on different websites, third-party applications or to school or colleges while filling the forms and from there, someone steals or buy all the credentials and sell it into the market.

We can take it as fun and games until we realize how some of the innocent peoples get duped because of these spam calls and lose their lifetime savings, money or jewelry, a spam call can give a higher benefit at lower cost and chances of getting caught or traced are slim, sometimes it gets even harder to catch the culprits because victims don’t even report the case to the police because of fear of shame.

Some of the things which we can keep in our mind as precaution measures are

It’s always good to download applications like Truecaller which identity and flag spam call.
Avoid answering calls that are coming from unknown numbers.
Avoid sharing personal information, bank account details or debit or credit card number or your CVV number.

74 – China and Corona

It’s the time of New year and celebrations, I am not talking about India’s, I am talking about China’s, it’s a rat year or year of the rat as they call it. Chinese people celebrate their new year on the 25th of January according to the Chinese calendar. Chinese people plan their travel and holidays to enjoy and celebrate the new year with their family in a different city or country but this year thing turns around when news breaks about a deadly disease which is effecting, spreading and even killing the people who got in contact with the virus, corona-virus.

According to South China Morning News, because of Coronavirus 40 people have been died and 1400 people are infected, the first case of coronavirus is surfaced in Wuhan province of China, the outbreak is spreading fast and WHO (Wolrd Health Organisation) planning to call it Public health emergency as the virus spread across the countries and has sickened people in Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, and the United States.

China declared an emergency and canceled all the new year celebration programs, Chinese police officials quarantined Wuhan province and locked down all the roads, airports and transport ways, so no one can go in or out of the city to prevent the virus from spreading. According to news portals, science journals Coronavirus is a group of viruses that can be found or originated in bats or civets and can be transmissible from animals to humans and humans to humans, no medicine or vaccines has been developed to cure the diseases which makes it a lethal one.