On Thursday, I was informed that my position with GE Capital would be eliminated. After a few pulls on a bottle of bourbon with some good company, I decided to turn on 30 Rock, an NBC show that is owned by GE. I sent a text to a former coworker comparing it to seeing a former girlfriend with another guy. While Jack Donaghy was high atop 30 Rockefeller Plaza, I was pondering my next move.
Surely, thousands of people will be let go from postions, with word spreading to their family, friends, professional nemeses, and network. And the company who let them go has a fiduciary duty to their stakeholders to keep turning profits, and that usually includes a mix of advertising and marketing. But here is the question, should these companies take a brief break from advertising to let the dust settle after major layoffs?
The news of layoffs is going to be negative PR and is generally not helping stock prices (this week’s biggest job-cutters, GE and Citi, both saw share prices fall throughout the week). Additionally, these job cuts are likely known to be coming in advance and surely in enough time to limit media buys.
In a must-read post on the Ad Contrarian blog, Sharon Krinsky of Hoffman/Lewis notes that the message must change in a bad economy, but I would contend that the frequency should be briefly altered as well. Probably only a matter of a couple weeks, but at the same time those two weeks give a company the ability to recover from some of the bad press, stay out of the limelight as a faceless corporation, and even save some money for buys when the dust has settled from the layoff.
