Celebrating the company's birthday amidst lockdown caused by a second wave of pandemic forced us to shift away from the typical festive narrative and look for new avenues. Synapse Original is now seven year old; a well-established creative agency with 360° services offering its assistance to multiple local and international blue chip companies, but this year instead of opening bottles of champagne, we decided to put our shoulders to the wheel.

Despite all the challenges, we support our clients in daily communication with their stakeholders and media. We urged our partners to lead the conversation with their employees, their consumers and other enablers asking how we can all be relevant in our respective field helping Myanmar to go through this difficult time. Our partners responded with various projects offering support to the community, be it donating a part of their profit like NIVEA in a month and a half long CSR promotion, or KBZ MS offering complimentary COVID-19 coverage and flu vaccine to their consumers, or donating much needed equipment and cash to local COVID-19 task force by Yoma Central Project, just to name a few.

We too have decided to step up and offer our community an access to what we have best - our expertise. To celebrate our company's birthday we have launched Synapse Sessions, a series of bite-size lessons in industry and space to share our expertise and ready-to-implement tips from our top managers.

As creativity is one of our four main values, we also focused on exploring new ways to provide our clients with creative solutions to the problems 2020 has created. Although shifting to a digital way of working takes away opportunities to directly interact with your audience, it also gives brands a chance to directly engage with people across the country. Live press events and launches became our bread and butter this year and we are proud to announce that going digital brought us and our campaigns viable results, often times more effective than a typical outdoor activity. Thousands of fans have tuned into our Heineken Afterwork event with popular celebrities such as ArtT and May Myat Noe, and our ExtraWhitening TikTok challenge with social influencers and models brought NIVEA many new fans. Proving that the true value of our expertise lays in the way we can apply our knowledge to fast changing circumstances and lead the market with innovation and agility.

But we are not congratulating ourselves just yet. The times are unprecedented and we understand the magnitude of the situation. Our seventh anniversary turned out very different from what we originally had planned, yet we have made the choice to believe that every crisis unleashes new opportunities. We hope together with our partners, we are ready to lead the market with a message of compassion and kindness.