The year 2020 establishes undoubtedly a before and after in history and the current pandemic is will go down in history and its tale will be read and studied for decades to come. The changes it will bring about in the long term in almost all areas once known as “normal” are a mystery, the term “new normal” could not be further from the truth, and nothing will be normal for many years. However, some of the changes we will have to live with are already there; work from home (for those who have managed to keep it), use of face masks and multiple sanitizing substances.

The biggest mystery will be probably to know how many media will survive and the type they will be using. Will they be able to adapt to the new reality? The “traditional” media were already witnessing a significant loss of advertisers or a drastic decrease in the budgets allocated to advertising. And many of them had already closed their doors before the current health crisis and many more will not reopen after this.

The media formally known as “non-traditional” are now becoming the ones most used by many generations as sources of “reliable” information, despite the wide-ranging campaign against and preventing “fake news.”. As a result of the global lockdown these social media increased exponentially the number of single users per day and the “traditional” media who were wise enough to adapt and to bet on the digitization, thus filling that gap, are now not only in the eyes of the audiences but also of the advertisers.

The media impact and record figures witnessed recently by Instagram is very significant and the record achieved is now 4 hours 44 minutes to reach 1 million followers (32 minutes less than the previous). The outstanding thing is that the owner of that account is a 94-year-old renowned English environmentalist, who had never had an account on any social media and decided to use that platform to send a message of both warning and hope on the damage humanity is causing the planet. We are talking, perhaps, of the most famous voice in documentaries dedicated to wildlife and the planet, Sir David Attenborough (@davidattenborough), and the response he got from Instagram users is remarkable, considering that generation Z is the biggest percentage of users followed by the millennials generation.

As communicators we have to rethink communication strategies to reach those generations which are becoming more relevant to the major brands with each passing year. We have to innovate as regards the methods we use to overcome the commercial barriers imposed by each of the different platforms and which are stricter every day. We should also bear in mind that the means to reach the audiences of these media are people of flesh and blood (wrongly called Influencers) who have now become the “medium”; but like any other medium they need an advertising guide to survive and platform rules forces them to state if a certain post is sponsored, thus making it a de facto 21st century infomercial.

Now, more than ever, communicators have to come up with new tricks to keep creating magic in order to position their customers among their target audiences.