This is an OTM podcast Extra. I'm Bob Garfield. A long, long time ago, like January,

advertising was just advertising. Sometimes trying to make a product or service look indispensable,

sometimes portraying a brand as hip or subversive, sometimes offering something free in

addition to the main offering, sometimes

trying to touch your foolish heart. With the onslaught of pandemic, though, all of that went out

the window. Now advertisers are dividing their messages between, we're with you in these uncertain

times every step of the way way and promising we can buy what

they're selling without winding up on a ventilator. The stark change in tone and approach is what

Atlantic staff writer Amanda Moll calls disastertizing. Amanda, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. So I'm watching a commercial for

pizza delivery, and the message isn't about lots of cheese or tangy sauce or 15 minutes to your door.

The message is, we won't touch your food. At Papa Johns, we want you to to know that from our 450 degree oven to box to you,

it's our policy that your pizza has never touched once it comes out of the oven.

And we're taking extra steps like no contact delivery to ensure it.

If they had run that three months ago, it would sound like parity.

I mean, I would think that would be the absolute minimum brand promise.

We'll do our best not to kill you. You're seeing a lot of this stuff. What's happening?

Yes. The nation's pizza delivery change have really been the torchbearers in this new type of

advertising where suddenly consumers' ideas of what they want and ideas of what they want

to hear about and their needs have changed.

So what the pizza delivery companies and after them a lot of different types of businesses

have done is sort of figure out where it is that consumers' anxieties lie, where they are

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