Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

Hurrah! Goodbye 2020, you tricky lil bitch. Hello 2021 – a fresh start, a new tomorrow, a bold new year, a chance to start again… Oh. Yeah, of course when the clock moved into 00:01 on 1st January 2021 – nothing changed. We’re still stuck in this endless hellscape feedback loop, each day bringing a new type of doom mongering headline (MUTANT COVID STRAIN NOW ATTACKS PIGS) or a brand new revision on the concept of incompetence from the British Government. What did you get today on Pandemic Bingo? I had “Shadowy private firm literally steals food from children’s mouths”. Do I win?! Buzzzzzz.

What’s this SCAB about you might be asking at this point. Well as a student in Ad School at this very point in time, it can sometimes bring to mind the theatre usher asking Mrs Lincoln if she enjoyed the play despite John Wilkes Booth barging into the VIP area (or whatever the equivalent was in 1865) and popping a cap or two in old Abe’s ass. Basically, why are we learning about trying to sell things when the world is on fire? 

Perusing Campaign newsletters is a barrel of laughs – with daily reports of BUDGETS SLASHED, REDUNDANCIES IMMINENT and CREATIVES PUT ON HOLD making up around 97% of all headlines. Trying to take a step into advertising at this point feels a little like trying to defect into East Berlin on 8th November 1989. David Hasselhoff is about to start dancing, and your face is gonna melt. However, there is a perverse thrill in leaning into something in such a difficult period. Surely the skills picked up in this time will bear far more prominence and usefulness in the brave new, post COVID-19 world than before. We’ll emerge keener, sharper, with more of a heightened sense of opportunity and with the benefit of living through  a once in a century experience that changes the world forever. The SCA class of 2021 could emerge from its hermetically sealed zombie ad bunker, blinking, into a brave new world populated with an exhausted but elated set of civilians with their shackles finally unlocked. They’re vaccinated and they’re ready to paaaartay like it’s 1925. We’ll see your Spanish Flu and raise you COVID plus Matt Hancock. We. Deserve. This.

Are we heading for a 21st century version of the swinging 20’s, with decadent cabaret parties, lavish spending, nine holidays a year and bacchanalian orgies every other Sunday? Budgets will be higher, assistants will have assistants, the phrase blue sky thinking will non-ironically come back into our daily lexicon and Bitcoin will just keep on rising? 

Hope so.