Hurricane Ida has ravaged New Orleans and left nearly one million Louisiana residents without power, yet a number of ad agencies in the city have managed to stay operational, largely due to lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina 16 years earlier, and also due to the fact that many of their employees have already been working remotely due to COVID-19.

New Orleans shops Zehnder Communications, Trumpet Advertising, Firmidable, and Hoffman Miller said they took early safety precautions before the storm bore down upon them on Sunday August 29. Henry Chaissaignac, president of Zehnder, an agency with 55 employees across three locations including 35 employees based in New Orleans, says most of its employees in that city evacuated a day earlier except for about seven people. 

“My first priority of business [Monday] was 'I need a roll call to find out where everybody is,'” Chassaignac told Ad Age. "In one case we had to reach out to someone’s mother that lives in Minnesota and was on the emergency contact list. She confirmed they're okay that their cell phone was not working. They got in touch with their mom through a friend of a friend.”

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The power outage has caused Zehnder employees still in the city to be resourceful, such as charging their phones in their cars or just hoping texts sneak through somehow, Chassaignac says. The agency, which has offices in Nashville and Baton Rouge, will be looking to make temporary accommodations for the employees who didn’t evacuate, as the city recovers.

“Our next order of business will be helping them find some temporary shelter because you can only live that way [without power] a couple of days,” Chaissaignac says. “We have several people here [in Nashville] that have extra rooms. So we're talking about maybe letting them stay in some of our houses. In other cases it might be better to have short-term rental options; our director of operations is looking right now about that. And then we have our Nashville office, which is open, of course, we're working remotely. So worst comes to worst, we could have a couple of people in there. That's not the first choice and I don't think it'll come to that, but we worked down the list of possibilities.”

Since Hurricane Ida touched down on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it can be easy to compare the two; however there are some key differences.

"I’d be lying if I said this didn’t bring back some ghosts, but I don’t think it really compares to Katrina," says Pat McGuinness, CEO, and founder of Trumpet Advertising. "I’m obviously not back in the city yet, and we’re hearing that power may be down for weeks, but I haven’t seen or heard anything regarding Hurricane Ida that compares to the tragedy and widespread devastation we saw when the levees broke 16 years ago." 

Nathan Chapman, founder of Firmidable, a law firm-focused marketing agency, says the city had far less notice this time around but luckily, unlike Katrina, there wasn’t as much significant flooding. The agency, which has 16 employees, adapted after the effects of Katrina. 

“We realized we need to be aware that at any moment we might have to pick up and leave,” Chapman says. “Starting 16 years ago we switched everybody to laptops and on the first day of hurricane season, every year, we have a practice where everybody works from home and make sure people can log into the server from long-distance.”

Zehnder also adjusted after Katrina by diversifying its locations, opening a Nashville and Baton Rouge office to complement it’s New Orleans office. The agency also diversified its portfolio. “We needed to have bandwidth in different industries so that we could withstand these kinds of events that might affect one industry over another or might affect one area of the country over another,” Chassaignac says.

In some ways having worked remotely throughout the pandemic has helped some agencies like Hoffman Miller Advertising. 

“Given we were already remote, I do have some employees who are not in the area,” Nathan Hoffman, the agency's founder says.”My creative director is on the west coast, my accounting is in South Dakota. Art directors and writers are local but everyone did leave.”

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The three agencies all took the day off in some way Monday with some looking to get back to work as soon as today or others considering taking the week off. While many were able to evacuate in time, the truth is there is likely a long road of recovery ahead for the Big Easy and Louisiana as a whole. However, all the agencies we spoke to remain optimistic about the strength of the city.

“You won't find a group of people more resilient than [those in] New Orleans,” Chassaignac says. “I have no qualms that the people will be back as soon as they're allowed to be back and the sense of community that was created after Katrina really was mind-blowing. I really give credit to the people that came to help rebuild the city and never left. I think the spirit exists in a way that is just indescribable to anyone that's never been there.”

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