Category: Insight

Even as countless fans queued up to enter Disney World in Orlando, the company’s sister park, Hong Kong Disneyland was, once again, closing its doors.

The park only remained reopened a few weeks and chose to close again after officials in Hong Kong tightened social distancing restrictions. The move was a blow to Disney, as the entertainment company struggles to find the right narrative message between protecting its staff and guests and inviting people to enjoy their parks.

The US airline industry continues to struggle with how to manage the significant loss of income due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Low ridership, combined with the steady uptick in both positive cases and quarantining people, continues to strain the travel industry as a whole and airlines in particular.

In a recent statement, Southwest Airlines Chief Executive Gary Kelly put a numerical threshold on the problem, saying passenger numbers needed to triple its current business to avoid layoffs by year’s end. “Furloughs and layoffs remain our very last resort; we can’t rule them out as a possibility obviously in this very bad environment… (recent spikes and restrictions) are not positive developments for our business, and we are concerned about the impact on already weak travel demand.”

When a brand or individual is involved in a legal battle, a pragmatic approach would be most suitable for a client to safeguard their reputation.

Litigation PR professionals must observe some simple yet lifesaving concepts to increase their client’s chances of success.

Here are five simple concepts that litigation PR pros can ignore at their peril.

Any business that is looking to grow and reach more audiences, and in turn, get more leads is able to achieve those results by using paid media.

Paid media is a method of using paid content, which includes video ads, pop-ups, and other types of social media posts in order for the business to reach target audiences. Paid media is essentially any type of content that businesses pay for so they can reach more people.

Among the big-name acts that closed their doors at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak was the popular circus acrobatics stage show, Cirque du Soleil. At the time they suspended shows, the company didn’t know when – or if – they would be able to resume. Now, that plan is coming together, and they are excited to share that with fans.

This fall, millions of sports fans expect that their favorite pro athletes will be back in action, in some form or another, as all major US sports leagues have announced some working plans for reopening their next seasons, or in some cases, restarting their season already in progress. NASCAR is already racing, the NBA is working on a playoff plan, as is the NHL; and the NFL plans to begin the regular season with fans in the stands, though that’s subject to potential change.

The collision of technology and privacy has become a hot topic internationally in the digital age. Consumers worry if too much of their personal data is being shared online, and others wonder if there’s any limit to what kind of data companies can gather on them. However, they still love being connected and the convenience of online mobile devices and social media applications, for whom data collection is a key part of their business model.

Another week, and the New York Times editorial team is still in the headlines, as the fallout continues over the publication of an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, which some Times’ staffers considered controversial. Now, editorial page editor, James Bennet, has resigned and Jim Dao, a deputy editorial page editor, has been “reassigned” to the newsroom. Deputy editorial page editor, Katie Kingsbury, will take over for Bennet and Dao at least through the national election in November.

Not long ago, most retail market experts were forecasting the end of malls and their anchor department stores. More and more big brands were closing locations or going out of business altogether. Then came COVID-19 closures, and many said those empty shopping centers were the last straw. But, something interesting and, some have said, unexpected has happened. Macy’s is putting up better-than-expected numbers after reopening since COVID-19 temporarily closed its doors.

While the company expected to see at least a one-billion-dollar operating loss in Q1, customers have come flocking back, which has led Macy’s to drop its loss projections well under a billion. Still not great, but much less bad news in this environment is still good news.