June & Jeopardy: The Peculiar Madness of Corp Comm at the Half-Year Mark

Every December, PR teams across the country sit down for the same ritual – the Annual Plan. The vision is always beautiful – neat content calendars, proactive media pitches, a CEO who reads his briefing notes, campaigns that sail through Legal in the first round.

And then June happens.

So let’s talk about the half-year reckoning nobody talks about.

Ask any corp comm professional what mid-year feels like and you’ll get one of two responses: a shrieky laugh, or a very detailed account of the crisis that landed right in the middle of earnings call prep. The half-year mark isn’t a milestone. It’s a mirror held up to that beautiful, leadership-approved annual plan. And the reflection isn’t pretty.

The plan had three marquee campaigns, ten new journalist relationships, CEO positioned as top industry voice, crisis framework done and dusted.

The reality had one campaign that launched late because Legal had concerns, three journalists who’ve since jumped to fellow Corp Comm roles, one interview that went slightly off-script, and a crisis that the unfinished framework was supposed to handle.

This isn’t failure. This is the business.

The chaos isn’t you, it’s the function.

Corp comm is structurally designed to absorb shocks nobody else wants to touch. Finance has a bad quarter? Comm manages the narrative. A product goes sideways? Comm coordinates the response. A senior leader says something unfortunate at a panel? Comm is already drafting the holding statement before they’ve left the stage.

Studies have found that comms professionals spend nearly one-fifth of their time counselling the CEO on things that have nothing to do with communications. That’s almost a full day every week gone before a single pitch has been sent. And the media landscape, because it enjoys the chaos, keeps fragmenting. The beat reporter you spent two years building a relationship with has left for a Substack with 200,000 subscribers.

You’re recalibrating your media list at the same time you’re managing Q2 reporting season. Same two-person team. Double the brief.

The half-year mark isn’t a milestone. It’s a mirror held up to that beautiful, leadership-approved annual plan and the reflection isn’t pretty.

What nobody outside the function sees.

Externally, it looks like BAU. Events happen. Coverage lands. The LinkedIn page is active. Internally, the team is closing H1, reviewing what didn’t happen and why, fixing the H2 plan, handling this week’s fresh crisis, and putting together the mid-year review that leadership naturally needs by the end of June.

No other function is asked to manage the present, defend the past, and plan the future simultaneously, without additional headcount.

What the good teams do differently.

They’ve stopped being surprised. They hold back capacity in Q2 deliberately. They treat the mid-year review as a real recalibration, not a performance. And they’ve learned the hardest lesson in comms: the seat at the table means nothing if you keep saying yes until the table collapses.

The annual plan wasn’t wasted. The thinking, the stakeholder mapping, the scenario planning, the narrative architecture becomes the muscle memory you draw on when June inevitably shows up and starts breaking things.

And around November, someone books the annual planning meeting again.

You open a blank slide deck.

It starts over. History repeats.

– Shirsha Majumder,

Senior Manager – PR & Comms, Ola Electric