The truth is that the leap year 2020 started off auspiciously for my company: this year Notorious Agency has been in existence for 10 years and only me and my partner (Marco La Fiura, ed.), and a few others, know what it cost to realize this vision. A vision born at least four or five years beforeOctober 2010 (date on which we opened the VAT number): I remember the port of Marseille against the backdrop of our plans for the future in the summer of 2006, the thick smoke in the bathroom on the top floor of my parents’ house while Marco explained to me what our life would be like Communication Agency in the winter of the same year (and it was something quite different from what it is now) or of all the times that we put aside our frustration as workers, interns, collaborators – “I pay you in visibility” – in the midst of the most great economic crisis of the last twenty years before the one that is unfolding, now, before our eyes, aware that at a certain point we would have taken the bull by the horns and would have done with it what we would have liked.
The most famous start-ups in the world were born in basements or garages, Notorious was born between Marseille, the toilet of my parents’ house and a loft in an industrial area. Is it poetic too?
I want to truly tell this story because it radically changed what I thought I would become in life, and it resonates with many people of my generation – those who found themselves with no prospects, no jobs, labeled as “bamboccioni” (slackers), and stuck with endless intern contracts.
When I started Notorious I was 25 years old, and, in addition to disillusionment, I had a degree in literature, a journalist’s card, some experience in event organization and a fairly unique musical-narrative project: basically a hipster who tried to match their humanistic purity and the skills of a copy with the new opportunities offered by digital revolution. Basically a hipster, as it would be called shortly thereafter.
Social networks already showed a certain nihilistic potential but they also represented a new way of telling stories, if you knew how to do it well. And that’s all I know how to do practically: tell stories.
This is how we started offering the professional management of social profiles, just ten years ago. Customers looked at us as if we were talking to them about quantum physics. Today this is one of our core businesses.
However, I’m one to ramble, it usually happens to me. I want to get to a point but I need to make these assumptions to get there.
What has supported the development of Notorious in this decade is undoubtedly Marco’s long-term vision. I make fun of him because he is a visionary and I am down to earth (only in everyday life because otherwise I am an incurable dreamer) but I know that it is precisely this dichotomy that makes our company and our team work.
Marco imagined overcoming the serious economic crisis of the 1910s by going through a period of two-three years in which to give ourselves time to position ourselves on the market in order to have the right expertise when the crisis had faded and investments had returned. From then on the path was already marked: social management, content marketing (by vocation), visual storytelling, e-commerce, virtual reality. We knew we had to go through a phase in which operations would be preparatory to the recognition of our strategic capacity. So in 2020 we are recognized as one of the most creative companies in our territory and sought after for our ability to manage complex communication processes.
Overcoming the 2008-2012 crisis was tough and required a lot of mental and physical energy, personal and professional sacrifices.
Today we find ourselves once again in the midst of an economic disaster. Luckily this time we have broader shoulders and Marco once again has a vision that I will have to be able to tame and channel into everyday life but which I hope will lead us to live the next ten years with the same passion as this first decade.
Our vision contemplates a completely transformed world, PC and DC (before Covid-19 and after Covid-19). A watershed that all of humanity will struggle to accept and will completely change our lives from whatever angle we want to look at it.
A few days ago, I read an interview with Tremonti that left a strong impression on me. I’m not a right-wing person but I have always considered Tremonti a smart person.
When I was a kid I was a real rebel and I remember that the jocks (worst possible epithet for those completely conformed with Prada or Fornarina shoes) called us NoGlobal thinking of offending us. But we were just that, NoGlobal. At school they taught us “globalization” and to us it seemed like absolute evil. After twenty years Tremonti agrees with us and compares this period to a war. He states that after the Second World War there was the Resistance and that this is consolatory.
But I wonder, what kind of resistance will we be? Of course we won’t go and hide in the mountains as Pavese says in “The House on the Hill” and we won’t slaughter fascists. But then what should we do to resist?
We will have to reinvent ourselves and my generation has learned this well. We have ridden the wave of the digital revolution, we have created professions from nothing, we have imposed a new way of sharing (and I’m not just talking about posts on social media).
What we will have to do will be to manage the second wave of the digital revolution, just as it was in the past for the industrial revolution or for the agricultural revolution going even further back.
We will learn that we cannot grow disproportionately in absolute disregard for everything around us (but do you remember the theory of Happy Degrowth?), we will find a way to recover the damage done to Nature, use the web intelligently, and find an ally in technology (while being mindful of its tendency towards depersonalization).
In the difficult, extraordinary, unique, surreal situation that the world and our Italy is experiencing these days, the web is showing, in addition to its dark side made up of ignorant people at the keyboard, also its best guise. Indispensable tool for smartworking to continue working and not screw everything up despite a war without bombs (as my eighty-year-old grandmother defined it), a great opportunity for those who sell online, a precious source of entertainment in the days of quarantine, via to travel and learn about art and culture in the days of quarantine, a magnificent means of communication to continue to be close to friends and loved ones even when we cannot be physically close.
Corporate communication in the time of Covid-19? For now it’s all to be written but it will have a great future if, at the end of all this, we have learned to handle technology by applying intelligence and study to it despite the current tendency to all be experts in nothing and to want to pass it off as experience. Some will be swept away but it will be a fair cleanup. Harsh but fair.
Experience is not blah blah blah.
I realize now that I’ve written a text of 7,200 characters, something that would be an appendix if I were writing for a newspaper.
I could write another 7,200 jokes but then I wouldn’t find a publisher willing to publish my stream of consciousness.
And to think that my happy plan for 2020 was to throw a big party for the tenth anniversary of Notorious!
So come on Italians, friends, colleagues, customers. We’ll do it again, I know because we’ve already done it once and we know how to do it.
I’ll leave you with a couple of songs that accompanied me while writing this text, hoping that music can also be an antidote to a bad mood for you, as it is for me.
The Raconteurs, Somedays (I don’t feel like trying)
Fantastic Negrito, A Letter to Fear
