Search results for: Category: Key Takeaways

Key Take Outs – Media Innovation

Harnessing Media Innovation to Drive Businesses Growth

The media industry has talked about innovating for years but it took a global crisis to teach us an important lesson: urgency spurs innovation. So how can we keep the flames of innovation burning as we return to ‘normal’? The World Media Group invited a panel of experts to share their experiences around how innovation has shaped their businesses.

The panel was chaired by Gordana Buccisano, EVP, Managing Director, Global Clients Transformation, Havas Media Group, who began by asking whether some of the biggest technology trends of the pandemic are here to stay.

Don’t predict the future based on the past

Liam Brennan, Global Director of Innovation, MediaCom, is concerned that brands will blindly latch on to the successful trends of last year without thinking about their own business focus. “So much innovation is just fluffy. It gets you lots of PR, but if you’re not improving the business bottom line, then it’s a waste of time,” he said.

While trends like streaming, e-commerce and gaming certainly grew during the pandemic, Brennan pointed out they were not new technologies, and became a digitalisation of existing behaviours. Rather than brands jumping on these trends, Brennan hopes it will be a wakeup call, forcing them to pay more attention to what’s bubbling under the surface. “The brands that succeeded in 2020 and in the first half of 2021 weren’t necessarily brands that threw everything out the window in mid-March and then pivoted into these three areas. They were brands that were prepared for this because they’d been trialling things beforehand and learning how they worked.”

Survival, speed and solidarity

When the FT had to reinvent its Live events business as a virtual offering almost overnight, Leyla Boulton, Development Editor, FT Live, and Senior Editor, Financial Times, said “the three S’s” were key: survival, speed, and solidarity. Showing the world that FT Live was still a valid business required a speedy response. The solidarity came from the FT’s culture of pulling together in an emergency and thinking entrepreneurially. They quickly procured a digital platform and invited the FT’s chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, to host a test event, which generated a respectable 6,000 registrations.

Six week’s later, the FT Live’s Global Boardroom launched with 120 speakers over three days, generating 52,000 registrations – double the total number of attendees at FT events for the whole of 2019! The FT plans to hold its first hybrid event on September 4th, with the return of the FT Weekend Festival to Kenwood House in London and online, allowing it to retain the global audience it attracted during the pandemic.

From zero to hero

For Kevin Young, Head of Audience at The Economist, innovation has centred around transforming The Economist’s “traditional” media approach to a digital-first strategy. Following a complete overhaul of The Economist’s social media platforms, Young initiated a new focus on Instagram, which has become a “shop window” for the visual journalism previously only accessible to readers of The Economist’s print magazine.

The Economist’s Instagram account now has 5.5 million users, with two thirds aged between 18 to 34. Of all the media brand’s social channels, Instagram is the biggest generator of subscriptions, having gone from delivering zero website referrals per month two years ago to delivering one million today.

During the pandemic, Young standardised the way the global social media team worked, democratising processes to ensure that if someone fell ill, the team could still operate without compromising its outputs. They began crowdsourcing content from all over The Economist encouraging picture editors, data journalists and video producers to showcase their work to this vast new audience.

The strategy clearly worked: The Economist won ‘Best Use of Social Media’ at the International News Media Association awards.

Recognising which trends are important

According to Jean Ellen Cowgill, GM of Bloomberg QuickTake and Global Head of Strategy and Business Development, innovation stems from identifying the trends that are happening around your business. QuickTake, Bloomberg’s streaming news channel, began in 2017 in response to audiences going to Twitter first when news broke. With the initial wave of concern around fake news on Twitter, Bloomberg recognised it could offer trusted quality content in those moments.

More recently, Bloomberg recognised the shift away from cable and traditional broadcast towards streaming, and saw QuickTake as an opportunity to address the needs of a new generation of business leaders. QuickTake launched as a full 24/7 streaming channel during the pandemic, producing longer form video content, including documentary series, and available across various streaming platforms.

“Once you recognise the trends happening under your feet, you can start to talk about how, as a business, you’re going to address them,” said Cowgill, but it’s important to make sure you have staff responsible for “tackling those trends and marshalling the traditional divisions within the business to go after those new opportunities.”

And they have to be the right opportunities for your business. Young said he was initially questioned about why The Economist wasn’t on Clubhouse. “It’s easy to be swayed by the latest thing – to try to innovate and adapt to everything, but it’s really important to stick to business goals. Our business goals are to drive referrals and to drive subscriptions, and on some platforms that’s difficult because the platforms don’t want you to leave.”

Experimentation drives innovation

For Jarrod Dicker, VP Commercial, The Washington Post, experimentation is essential to innovation. “When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post back in 2013, we started to think about how we could leverage the reputation of such a strong technology founder to build more opportunities outside of traditional revenue streams for journalism,” he said. They started experimenting with ways to better equip the newsroom and soon realised it made sense to build their own technology.

What started as an experimental project has become Arc Publishing, a massive SAAS business which enables 1500+ brands and publishers globally to tell better stories and reach broader audiences without investing in software teams themselves. More recently, the Washington Post has built commercial tools to help publishers drive more revenue, including a model that will compete with Facebook and other programmatic marketplaces.

Dicker sees The Washington Post as the beta lab for innovation. “It’s an amazing breeding ground to test new concepts, whether that’s products, new ways to make money, or new tools and services. Everything happens in that sandbox. We’ll test products out and often they will continue to exist and drive The Washington Post business, but sometimes they’ll be more effective being licenced out to marketers or local news organisations. The Washington Post is the core; we rapidly innovate there, and then we fly it out.”

Setting innovation KPIs

So how do you measure innovation? According to Dicker, innovation KPIs should be based on how many ideas went live. “You should set goals for that, whether that’s two a month or four a month, or six a month. Being able to actually put these things out there in the market should be the number one goal that innovation teams are measured against.”

Wrapping up the webinar, Damian Douglas, MD EMEA, TIME and President of the World Media Group echoed the panel’s sentiments around the importance of innovation in understanding and preparing for the future. He signed off with a warning: “Unless you have a culture that steps into innovation and looks for signals in data that allow your brand to go to certain area, you will stay routed in the past while audiences shift dynamically around you.”

Cookie-Pocalypse: Will the death of third-party cookies kill digital advertising?

With Google Chrome set to pull the plug on third-party cookies in January 2022, marketers will soon lose the primary tech system that tracks identity across the web, opening up huge questions about the future of digital advertising. The World Media Group invited a panel of experts to discuss what losing access to third-party data means to the industry, and how marketers and publishers can prepare themselves to benefit from this significant shift in how we use personal data.

The panel was chaired by Emily Roberts, Programmatic Trading Manager, BBC Global News, who set the scene by reminding the audience about the difference between first-party cookies – those that only share data back to the owners of the website you’re visiting at the time – and third-party cookies, which track your browsing habits to create a profile that is then used to target you with advertising based on your interests.

While other browsers have already undergone similar policy changes, Google Chrome’s 70% market share means the impact of third-party cookie removal will be far greater. While Roberts described it as “privacy milestone” for website users, she warned that if the industry doesn’t have a working alternative in place, publishers are likely to see huge drops in revenue.

Paul Coffey, Director of Platforms, Partnerships & Privacy, Google EMEA, said the changes are part of a long-term evolution of the online advertising ecosystem in response to consumer expectations. He said that 70% of users feel they are being tracked by advertisers, technology providers or other companies almost all the time, and over 80% feel that the potential risks they face from data collection outweigh the benefits.

Chrome’s commitment to phase out third-party cookies is a reflection of this and the broader changes happening in the industry, but Coffey explained there are plans in place to support advertisers, agencies, publishers and marketers, such as Google’s ‘Privacy Sandbox,” an industry-supported initiative to create privacy-led advertising solutions. Google is also pioneering an initiative called ‘Floc’ – Federation learning of cohorts, which anonymises individual data to create large groups of audience cohorts for advertisers.

Find the right partnerships

Elizabeth Brennan is Head of Advertiser Strategy at Permutive, an audience platform that enables premium advertisers and publishers to plan, build and activate cohorts while keeping everyone’s data safe. Brennan referenced a Permutive-commissioned study by Forrester Consulting, which shows that, as of March 2021, 41% of advertisers rely exclusively on third-party data for targeting and measurement. With potentially just nine months left to find a new solution, Brennan says brands must “wean themselves off third-party data” and future-proof their strategies. She suggested one way to do this is to form strategic alliances with publishers to take advantage of their audience insights and wealth of actionable first-party data.

Jay Glogovsky, Executive Director, Revenue Analytics and Operations, at The New York Times, agrees. The media brand has embraced the change, meeting its goal of removing all third-party cookies by the end of FY 2021, and, according to Glogovsky, without sacrificing any insights in their move to a purely first-party strategy. He stresses that advertisers need to have close relationships with their trusted premium publishers, who can be part of the solution. “We’re brilliant technologists and we’re going to solve this and be able to create products and experiences for our readers that embrace this first-party model,” he said.

Respect your consumers

It is those readers, and consumers in general, who stand to benefit from the changes to data regulations in the long run. As Ratul Shah, Head of Product Marketing, SAP Customer Data Solutions, pointed out, privacy regulations such as GDPR came as a result of what consumers have been asking for, for a long time. He believes brands need to respect consumers and allow them to feel in control of the relationship. “It all comes down to the customer experience, knowing who your customer is and how they want to be treated. And the only way to do that is through a trusted relationship, giving them transparency over why you’re collecting their data and why you need it. And, of course, control over how you’re using it.”

Shah believes that marketers who adopt that point and have the technology base to help them to create that relationship – to turn people from anonymous to known – will drive advocacy amongst customers by giving them what they want: “a trusted relationship with the brands they’re doing business with, ads that mean something to them, and experiences that keep them coming back for more.”

Balance contextual targeting

It’s estimated that the third-party data market is currently worth $19 billion a year. A poll during the webinar suggested that 56% of the audience expects that money to be reinvested into first party data strategies, while 31% said it would go to contextual targeting and 13% to direct partnerships.

Roberts asked the panel if the changes to third party data would mean more people would focus on contextual targeting. Erin Laughlin, Director of AdTech Products and Services at Dow Jones, (parent company of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s MarketWatch, Mansion Global and Financial News) said that brands still want to target people, not just on the content they consume, but who they are. Dow Jones isn’t reliant on contextual targeting, but it has leveraged its digital community of three million members to create its own unique contextual product called DJ Thematic that is performing up to three times better than the average industry benchmark.

The product is able to target people based on their job title, their job industry and their job function because of the value exchange Dow Jones delivers: “Our readers are providing that information to us today because they know that they’re getting access to this premium content that’s helping them make really important business and financial decisions,” Laughlin said. When publishers can provide that sort of value exchange, they can go beyond typical contextual targeting to provide a far more sophisticated solution.

For publishers who don’t have high subscriptions or login rates, however, Permutive’s Brennan points out that contextual targeting offers an opportunity to reach beyond the known portions of the web. It allows advertisers to drive scale through their digital marketing strategies while respecting the data that they have access to, and, as such, it’s still a valid element of a diversified advertising strategy.

Commenting on the results of the audience poll and the redistribution of funds to first-party data, Brennan agreed with the majority of the audience, saying that “advertisers and publishers who really want to thrive, in the short term and long into the future, need to move towards privacy and make investment in world-class data, privacy collection analysis and activation infrastructure.”

Embrace the opportunity for positive change

As the discussion came to a close, Roberts asked each panellist to offer one piece of advice for the audience to take away.

For Glogovsky, it comes down to respect: “Privacy is an opportunity and it doesn’t sacrifice performance or insights – it actually enables innovation. My recommendation around that would be to communicate and experiment. Have conversations with your partners; have them internally with your stakeholders, and don’t be afraid to experiment. Lot of publishers are going about this differently, as are advertisers and agencies; I’m not saying any one of them is right. The only thing that I will say is respecting privacy is the right solution. So, however you go about doing that, I encourage you to experiment and communicate, so we can get this right as an industry as a whole.”

Brennan’s advice is all about preparation: “Really review how much first-party data you have now, what collection practices you have in place, understand the gaps that are there, and build strategies in order to address them. That could be through partnerships or better internal ways of working.” She views this as an “incredible opportunity” to maximise the value of first-party data but says that “understanding where the pockets of value are, and how you should be activating” against them is key.

Coffey’s advice is similar: “Whether you’re an advertiser or a publisher you need to think about what your value exchange is, and, once you’ve got that consented data, think about how you’re going to leverage it; how are you going to use the platforms? Don’t think of this as an imposition by platforms; this is really an industry-wide dialogue and discussion about how we work in lockstep to reflect user and regulator expectations.”

Laughlin views this as an opportunity to embrace change: “The death of third-party cookies does not mean the death of your digital advertising strategy. What it’s doing is essentially accelerating the first-party roadmaps of publishers and platforms in a way that we’ve never seen before. It’s providing insights and solutions that we would have never seen if we were still reliant on third-party cookies. So, get excited about this change, embrace it.”

Finally, Shah says, “A marketer’s job is to know who the customer is, to help drive the experiences that they want, and this new opportunity allows us to connect the dots inside of our organisations; to have new conversations. Marketers can sit across the table from privacy professionals to redefine what it really means to build a customer-first experience, not just within your organisation but across the ecosystem.”

It may be the death of the third-party cookie, but Shah would like re-name it “the rebirth of new customer experiences.” Whether you’re an advertiser, a publisher or platform, that’s something we can all get excited about.

Sustainability: From Pledges to Progress – Key Take Outs

With sustainability high on the agenda for many businesses, particularly in light of COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in November, the World Media Group invited a panel of sustainability transformation experts to discuss how businesses make the move from talking about sustainability to undertaking concrete action. The panel was chaired by Katya Ionova, Creative Director, Business Insider, who began by asking each representative to explain the role of sustainability communications in their business.

Sofia Lotto Persio, Assistant Editor at Forbes explained that although Forbes has been covering sustainability issues for a while, it has been siloed across different channels such as business, finance or lifestyle, which hasn’t necessarily presented the whole picture. “It’s something that needs a holistic approach and needs players from all industries to get involved in, to share knowledge, share awareness and best practices,” she said. To this end, Forbes is launching a sustainability channel next month, with a more intersectional approach to coverage.

Enabling change throughout the supply chain

For Santosh Sethumadhavan, Interim Global Head of Communications, B2B, at HSBC, communications play a role in dismissing the growing narrative that businesses are part of the problem. Describing HSBC’s “Business plan for the planet”, an initiative that promotes the idea that business can be part of the sustainability solution rather than the problem, Sethumadhavan said most businesses “want to make the change, but they just don’t know how to get started and they need help.” HSBC is committing between 750 billion and $1 trillion over the next nine years to drive sustainable transitions, supporting its clients, and, importantly, their supply chains, to thrive in a low carbon economy.

Turning to Devapriyo Das, Senior Communications Advisor, Market Communications and Sustainability at Ørsted, Ionova asked him how the company came to be one of the most interesting examples of sustainability transformation. Ørsted has reduced its carbon emissions by 87 percent over the past 14 years. In 2020, the company generated 90 percent of its energy from renewable offshore, onshore wind and solar sources. They are on their way to being carbon neutral by 2025 and net zero by 2040. “Becoming sustainable is not just about changing your own business, but about changing the partners you work with and the impact you have on the globe,” he said. This means tackling the difficult challenge of decarbonising heavy industries like steel and fuel for transportation, but he believes that increasing demand will put pressure on innovators to come up with the right, low carbon solutions.

The same applies to a business such as Capgemini, which works with companies across many different sectors, including finance and energy. In the race for net zero, Emmanuel Lochon, Chief Marketing Officer, Capgemini Invent, said having a very clear action plan and measurable steps towards the next objective was essential. Research and insight into the evolution of sustainability, from energy to mobility to the circular economy, forms the basis of Capgemini’s communications strategy. Lochon cited a recent example of an actionable project that Capgemini Invent developed for the Gates Foundation, which identified 55 high-impact, climate technology projects that can help Europe meet the 2025 net zero emission targets. He said they are continuously researching how sustainability is evolving so that they can offer clients implementation support to put their own sustainability strategies in place.

Avoiding greenwashing

Ionova’s next question to the panel was how to avoid the label of “greenwashing.” According to Sethumadhavan, the problem arises when companies stand up and shout about how sustainable they are without any real transition. It can’t just be the marketing team pushing a company’s sustainability merits. “It needs a strong leadership commitment and collaboration across the organisation to make this a reality. It truly happens when the organisation comes together and recognises sustainability as a priority, then the whole organisation mobilises in that direction,” he said. “Without that, it becomes a hollow promise and maybe just another nice marketing campaign.”

According to Ørsted’s Das, maintaining credible consistent communication, sticking to the facts and putting it into context is key. “We take great pains to show how much we have actually reduced in terms of emissions, but also how we are contributing to an accelerated build out of green energy. And I think as much as numbers can be tedious and facts can be very heavy, we need them to support our story.”

Lotto Persio said that one of the biggest issues she comes up against when covering sustainability initiatives for Forbes is a lack of actionable evidence. “The press release will say, we’ve decided to create this goal and we’ll be carbon neutral by 2030. But it’s always lacking in the details as to how they’re doing it. Explaining the mechanism as to how these actions happens is very important in our coverage.” She also warns against developing initiatives that may create a catchy headline but don’t actually align with what the business is about, or its goals.

Expectations for COP26

As the topic turned to COP26, Lochon pointed out that this too should not be viewed as a marketing opportunity but as a chance to make a difference. “It’s not about sponsoring the event,” he said. For Capgemini Invent “it’s about taking part in it, taking the floor and sharing, insights in front of a panel of decision makers. It’s a very concrete and very direct way of involving ourselves.”

Continuing with the theme of concrete action, Das said the one message he would like people to take away from COP26, and particularly for some of the emerging economies, is “that green energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels in two thirds of the world’s countries. There is simply no economic reason not to act on the climate crisis,” he said. He felt that there was a lot of momentum to make sure COP26 was a success, and, with the new administration in the US, there was the potential to really kickstart the action needed for change.

Lotto Persio agreed that President Biden’s decision to re-join the Paris Agreement was not only hugely symbolic but also opens up the sustainability conversation in the US again, putting decarbonisation at the top of the agenda. “With some leadership in this topic again, I think the message will be more powerful and will echo to normal people,” she said. However, she urged companies to think about the context, framework and relevancy of any communication they were planning for COP26, as it was unlikely to filter down to the general public.

The celebration of transition

Ending with a question from the audience, Ionova asked Sethumadhavan how the media and marketing industry could credibly focus on messaging around sustainability when also faced with the physical carbon cost of the internet, which if it were a country, would be the sixth largest carbon emitter on a planet. Sethumadhavan replied that the internet is no different from steel or any other resource and “needs to be held to equally high standards as any other company.” However, with the goalposts constantly moving, Sethumadhavan believes we need to be mindful about the “celebration of transition”. If a company, or sectors like the internet, start making transitions towards being more sustainable, if we as marketers and advertisers try and find even small steps that can quantify and make some kind of meaningful impact, I think we should celebrate those things,” he said.

Wrapping up the discussion on a positive note, Sethumadhavan said that HSBC was seeing interesting ideas coming out of really small businesses around the world that showed real hope for the future. “I might be one of the few optimistic people about this but the kind of changes we’re seeing bode well for the future. People are making real change happen and really, there’s a lot to look forward to.”

Five learnings from lockdown to carry into 2021

On Thursday, World Media Group members came together for our annual Think Tank, a lively event that offers members the opportunity to ask top international editors about their predictions for the year ahead. Unable to meet in our usual festive venue, the last gathering of the year predictively happened on Zoom!

The event was chaired by Dan Stewart, International Editor of TIME who was joined by Tom Standage, Deputy Editor, The Economist, Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief, National Geographic and Katherine Dunn, Associate Editor, Fortune Magazine.

In a year like no other, we asked members to share any positive learnings from 2020 that they planned to carry with them into 2021. Five key themes emerged:

1. Work smarter

According to Daniela Stawinoga-Carrington, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, 2020 has been about “focusing on what is truly important both personally and professionally.” We were all forced to rethink our priorities, adapting to the challenges of remote working, often while juggling family responsibilities. Now that we know we can all work from home and still be as productive, we can use that flexibility to benefit our work/life balance. Samantha Adams, BBC Global News, says she’ll continue to “work smarter, with less commuting and do more checking in with my network.” Robbie McCawley, Electronic Arts, has honed his video conferencing communication skills. His key learning is to “use fewer words and more simple language to get to my point across quicker.”

2. Support mental health

2020 has opened up the conversation around mental health, allowing people the permission to talk openly about how they are feeling and to receive any support they need. Everyone agreed that mental health must remain front of mind as we head into the new year. “Talking about mental health, checking whether colleagues, friends and family are ok, and caring for each other is something we need to hold onto for 2021,” said Mark Rose, BP. His other advice for improving your mental health? Stay off Twitter!

3. Use technology for good

Although we’ve been forced to spend more time in front of our screens this year, there’s clearly an upside – from reducing our carbon footprint to re-establishing relationships with friends and colleagues. Rob Alexander, Headland Consultancy, plans to “continue to embrace meeting technology to connect with friends and clients around the world and reduce my flying carbon footprint.” Sital Banerjee agrees that he’ll continue using technology to connect with his network and peers more regularly in 2021.

The innovation and adoption of new technology has impressed Darren Plimmer, Fundamental Media: “It’s been great collaborating so easily with colleagues globally despite being stuck in the spare room at home. The Zoom pub quiz, however, can remain in 2020!”

4. Have faith in trusted media

While trust in the media has taken a downturn in past years, the Covid crisis saw consumers returning to quality media outlets for accurate information and advice. This has been reflected in an increase in subscriptions across many of the World Media Group brands Jemima Villanueva, The Atlantic, would like to see “the increase in demand for trusted quality news sources and a willingness to pay for it” continue on into 2021.

Katya Ionova, Business Insider, agrees that one of the key outtakes for her has been a notable change in “the real value of trusted news sources,” and she hopes to see this reflected in reports such as Edelman’s Trust Barometer next year.

5. Encourage community spirit

2020 has inspired empathy, a deeper sense of community and a willingness to look out for others on both a personal and profession level. “People seem to have looked outward more this year, caring more about things beyond their patch,” said Alison Harbert, Investec. “Let’s hope for more of that in 2021!

Jack Dyson, SAP, agreed: One positive outcome is a greater focus on corporate purpose and appreciation for community over individual. Not just in Covid and climate change, but also inclusion and equality, education…and being a better neighbour!”

This sense of greater purpose was reflected in the editors’ predictions for the year ahead, where a large part of the discussion centred around 2021 being the turning point in the debate and action on climate change. While there was some negativity about the effect individuals and companies could have without governments taking on the bigger emissions issues such as agriculture and steelmaking, there was a definite sense that positive momentum is growing. As Fortunes’ Katherine Dunn put it: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good – just start.” Wise words for all of us as we endeavour to carry the many positive learnings from the Covid crisis into 2021.

CIM Financial Services Marketing Leaders’ Summit 2020 Round Up

Leading editors discuss the trends affecting the financial sector at the CIM Financial Services Marketing Leaders’ Summit 2020

The World Media Group was delighted to support the CIM’s Financial Services Marketing Leaders’ Summit this week. Four of the world’s leading financial editors from the US, Asia and Europe attended a panel to discuss the key trends affecting the economy, for a virtual audience of senior global marketers from the financial services sector. The panel was moderated by Francesco Guerrera, Head of International, Barron’s Group.

 Vaccine “transformative” for the economy

 Guerrera’s first question to Faisal Islam, Economics Editor, BBC News, was about the significance of the announcement confirming a Covid vaccine was ready for rollout in the UK. Islam described the news as “transformative for the economy.” He said it would stop the negative, self-fulfilling spiral of expecting things to be worse, planning for them to be worse, and therefore having fewer jobs and fewer investments.

He highlighted two areas for caution: Firstly, people may be more careful about social distancing over the next few months, potentially affecting the retail and hospitality sectors. Secondly, any scientific setbacks would have a negative effect on asset values, house prices and stock.

Persuading people to take the vaccine is crucial to its success. The extent to which the vaccine is mandated for various activities, such as travel will have an impact.

Jason Karaian, Editor, DealBook at The New York Times, highlighted the effect a vaccination passport, dovetailed with testing, could have on business: “You might need that to go into the office,” he said. “Potentially there are some privacy issues, but the pressure to get vaccinated or tested to prove that you are immune is something that I know boardrooms are dealing with.”

Moving to James Kynge, Global China Editor at the Financial Times and Editor of the “Tech Scroll Asia” Newsletter, Guerrera asked what the impact had been in China.

Kynge explained that while China had been blamed by the US and European countries at the start of pandemic, it was now in a position to win back some of the kudos it had lost. With four vaccines rolled out very quickly, he said the Chinese economy was “roaring back”. Kynge said China was taking steps to “ameliorate the huge haemorrhage it has suffered in terms of its international image,” by delivering vaccines and helping with the debt problems of countries in Africa for example.

 The impact of the Biden administration

Turning to the US election, Guerrera asked The New York Times’ Karaian about the effect that new roles within the administration may have on business. Karaian said that Biden was trying to strike a difficult balance between capitalism and socialism and was unlikely to “tap full Wall Street types for official roles”. For large banks or businesses, that raises the question of who they can lobby. However, a more controlled, coherent messaging strategy with fewer leaks, may “make it easier for businesses to get their head around the new administration,” he said.

On the prospect of a stimulus package, Karaian said that while most people believed it was needed, it was “bogged down in partisan gridlock” and was likely to be issued under Executive Order, after Biden’s inauguration.

The battle for banking

 Introducing Julie Santoriello Chariell, a Senior Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence covering the Fintech and Payments sector, Guerrera asked about her predictions for this rapidly growing sector.

One of the themes for 2021 will be around the “battle for banking” Santoriello Chariell said, as many “‘non-banks” added more banking services to their apps. She had observed a shift to non-traditional banking during the pandemic with people looking for more ways to pay online, and an increase in digital debit card services.

Santoriello Chariell described four key “non-bank” groups: The first is challenger banks, such Transferwise, Monzo, Revolut, Chime and Varo, which are beginning to chip away at traditional banking. The second, and the group Santoriello Chariell is most excited about, is Wallet providers, such as PayPal, Square’s Cash App and the hardware-based Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. Originally free, peer-to-peer payment services, they are now being monetised through debit cards, credit cards, Bill Pay and, significantly, direct deposit. “If a user starts to use direct deposit of their payroll into their Wallet, that starts to become a primary account,” she said.

The third group are the new lenders, such as “buy now, pay later” app Klarna. Tied in with debit cards, these apps, which allow users to spread the payment for an item over a several instalments, are popular with millennials and Gen Z.

The final group is big tech – Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, who Santoriello Chariell said are more inclined to partner with traditional banks. “This could be a nice way for the big banks to catch up digitally to reach a younger audience, and to be able to really harness the power of big data,” she said.

 The challenges of economic reporting during Covid

 Guerrera asked the panel to share some insight into the challenges they had experienced while reporting on the financial sector during the coronavirus crisis.

Islam talked about the importance of finding the right balance between aggressive accountability journalism and the public service aspect of the BBC, particularly in a crisis. He recalled being able to communicate the extraordinary news about the UK’s unprecedented fiscal intervention to pay the wages of millions of workers during the pandemic, following an unusually open exchange with the Bank of England Governor. Holding the government accountable at the beginning of the crisis and asking difficult questions was essential to the BBC’s credibility, he said.

For Karaian one of the big differences at The New York Times has been a move to more live journalism, constantly updating briefings on certain topics and tackling the disinformation related to the election and the vaccines. “Getting into the mode of putting things up quickly and then filling them out, and having lots of different formats, not just the 1500-word story that comes out in print, is not necessarily unusual for digital media, but it’s been a fairly major revolution inside these virtual walls,” he said.

A large part of Kynge’s role at the Financial Times is investigative journalism, which relies on sources. He says the pandemic has been disastrous: “You not only miss the face-to-face contact, the whispers over lunch, but you also miss that vital aspect – the serendipity of a natural conversation, where they let something slip that they didn’t intend to. That type of interaction, which is so vital for journalists, just doesn’t happen in this type of format.”

The same holds true for Santoriello Chariell, who says body language is key when she meets CEOs and CFOs in person: “The words can be really clear, direct and all buttoned up, but the body language can tell you something else.”

The economic impact of ESG

The final question to the panel was about the trend towards ESG and its economic impact. Santoriello Chariell said that strong interest around ESG from the investment community had prompted Bloomberg Intelligence to build up its team of ESG analysts and to add ESG to every company primer.

ESG investment is also a huge topic for the Financial Times, but Kynge believes that work needs to be done around clarifying what the definitions mean: “The definitions are extremely vague, it’s very easy for a company to claim that it’s abiding by environmental standards when it’s actually not, and the same is true of social, and of governance,” he said.

Karaian has seen an interesting shift from ESG investors having to “needle” companies to change their behaviour to increased pressure from the government, employees, suppliers and customers, and the idea of stakeholder capitalism versus shareholder capitalism, which is pushing everyone in the same direction.

While government initiatives around ESG may have been put on a back burner during Covid, conversations are still likely to be happening at a company level. Islam says that the pandemic has made the channels of communication between employees and their bosses more fluid, allowing subjects that may have been left unsaid in an office environment to surface digitally. As a result, he believes that employees will have higher expectations of their bosses and their boards when it comes to the issues, like ESG, that matter to them.

 

US Elections webinar – Key Take Outs: The implications of a Biden presidency for businesses around the world

Across the globe, people have been on tenterhooks watching the US election play out. While Joe Biden was finally declared winner on Saturday, his battle for power may just be beginning. We invited a panel of leading international journalists, chaired by Robin Bew, Managing Director, The Economist Intelligence Unit, to discuss how the change in presidency will impact the domestic business environment, and what it will mean for international trade and investment.

Georgia is going to be key to the Senate

Bew’s first question to the panel was how challenging it would be for Biden to implement his policy agenda with the Democrats unlikely to carry the Senate. According to Jacqueline Alemany, Politics Reporter and author of the ‘Power Up’ Newsletter at The Washington Post, there’s still a chance for the Senate to tilt in the Democrats’ favour: “I think the runoffs in Georgia could give Democrats the majority they need to be productive members of the federal government,” she said, having been on the ground in Georgia in the week leading up to the election. She described a “burgeoning blue wave” in the state that had been building since 2016. If the Senate didn’t flip, however, it would be difficult for Biden to get anything other than a relief bill through in the first few months.

Derek Thompson, Staff Writer at The Atlantic, pointed out that Georgia was a 50:50 state and the runoffs were likely to be split equally between Democrat and Republican candidates. With the Republicans still controlling the Senate, it would be very difficult for Biden to push through anything productive, he said, and agreed with Alemany that Biden’s first bill would be some sort of Covid stimulus package.

Bew asked Jennifer Cunningham, Executive Editor, Business Insider and Insider News whether she felt Biden could use his “charm” to reach out and bridge some of the partisan divide. Cunningham felt Biden would leverage “what little goodwill there may be and try to turn that into actionable policy.” She also agreed that Biden would work on a stimulus package but stressed that it would be difficult to find one that both sides agreed on.

Courts may not favour executive orders

The panel’s outlook was pessimistic when Bew asked them whether they thought that the courts’ steady shift to the right would also make life more difficult for Biden. Thompson said it was going to be hard for Biden to do anything legislatively after he passed the Covid stimulus bill. “As result you’re going to have Biden leaning more on executive orders and those are more likely to be challenged in court.”

He said the Republicans’ game plan had been to establish themselves in the judiciary over the last four years, so that “when Democrats started to pass progressive legislation or do anything progressive from executive order, Republicans were already aligned like chess pieces on a board.” This was one of the reasons Biden was trying to cultivate individual relationships with Republicans to get things done, he said.

Stimulus package to help kickstart the economy

With the panel largely agreeing that it will be difficult for Biden to make much progress, Bew asked what this means for business leaders in America or those running a foreign business invested in the US economy.

According to Alemany, “The landscape will certainly be far more stable, which I think any business would welcome.” With the Coronavirus and other domestic issues a priority, a stimulus package would keep everyone afloat until there’s a vaccine, she said.

Charlie Campbell, East Asia Correspondent at Time, agreed that getting a handle on the coronavirus was key: “The world’s biggest economy is hobbled at the moment, so even if Biden is hamstrung or deadlocked by the Senate, if he can enact an aggressive policy to get a handle on the virus, this will be fantastic for any business which has to deal with the US, because at the moment it’s very hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Foreign policy an easier win for Biden

Bew asked Campbell what the change in presidency would mean from a South East Asian perspective. Campbell said there was a chance that if Biden was completely gridlocked in domestic policy, he may well look for some early successes with foreign policy. When it came to the trade war with China, however, Campbell questioned how much Biden would want to undo Trump’s attempts to impose tariffs. Thompson agreed that while Biden’s rhetoric may be more polite than Trump’s, not much would change underneath.

Likewise, with technology companies such as Huawei, TikTok and WeChat, Campbell said it seemed unlikely that Biden would rollback Trump’s agenda, which had strong bipartisan support for being cautious around national security.

Moving on to the UK, Bew asked Campbell whether Biden affected the chances of the UK and the US reaching a trade deal. Campbell said that Boris Johnson and the Conservative government were not in a strong position; as an anti-Brexiter with concerns about the Irish border, Biden was unlikely to give Johnson, ‘an easy win’ without some kind of concession.

A peaceful transition of power?

Next, Bew asked the panel if they had concerns about the about the legal challenges to the presidency.

”I’m not particularly worried about the legal challenges,” said Campbell, “but I do think that the next few months might be extremely dangerous times and the impulse to distract and cause a crisis to try and buy some time, or just deflect, or sew some discord might be too tempting.”

Cunningham agreed: “I think that the legal challenges are flimsy at best. Another concern is that he’s going to adopt sort of a scorched earth policy in these last two months at the helm of this country and I’m worried about what that’s going to mean for the American people.”

Alemany referred to a recent news story reporting that the General Services Administration Administrator had refused to sign off a letter that would provide the Biden transition team the office space, equipment and access to documents required to facilitate the transfer of power gracefully and quickly.

“The danger is not that Trump does anything,’ said Thompson. “The danger is that he does nothing. Presidential transitions are really hard; it’s very important that outgoing administrations help incoming administrations deal with ongoing crises. That’s more important than ever at a time when a thousand people are dying in the US every single day of Coronavirus.”

Is this the end of the Trump era?

So will Trump run again in 2024? “Trump has a tremendous following in the United States. I was really surprised that 70 million people voted for him and that the race was as close as it was,” said Cunningham. “But I don’t know how much appetite the public is going to have for Trump going forward, in light of the last six months or so.”

According to Alemany, “Don, Jr. definitely has a political future. He has become the top fundraiser for the party. And Ivanka Trump has seemingly moved to the right.” But there are lots of other people on the Hill preparing for a 2024 run, she said.

Will Biden take on the big tech companies?

Bew’s final question was whether Biden would contemplate breaking up the big tech firms.

Thompson believed the reason that so many liberals were concerned was because of the role they thought Facebook played in electing Trump. With a Biden administration, a growing economy and a vaccine, he felt they wouldn’t care as much about antitrust policy and would start focusing on other things. “I would be surprised if Biden prioritised big tech antitrust policy over some of the sort of meat and potatoes domestic economic policy,” he said.

Campbell agreed: “I just don’t think it’s going to be a priority. There’s so much going on at the moment. These are very powerful companies, and they can make it look like it’s a very bad thing for the economy, even if, in the broader scheme of things, it’s a net positive. In the short term, there may be economic harm. And that’s the last thing Biden needs.”

Final Thoughts

As the discussion came to a close, the World Media Group VP, Damian Douglas, thanked the participants, and presented his own 30 second takeout of the discussion:

“There will be an internal focus first; a return to consistency, stability and predictability – words that businesses like; but we’re not likely to get progressive international policy until Covid is under control.”

 

Key Take Outs: Rebooting your brand/business in the post Covid-19 world

Rebooting your brand / business in the post Covid-19 world

As businesses plan for life after Covid-19, a crisis with no precedent, how do they approach a world challenged by economic recovery? That was the topic posed to a panel of four industry experts today in the World Media Group’s third webinar, hosted by Damian Douglas, Managing Director EMEA, Time.

Douglas framed the conversation by looking at where we are in the news cycle and the financial markets. While both suggest we are in recovery mode, the situation is still fragile. The crises of recent memory (the dot.com bubble 2001, the financial crisis 2008) were economic in origin, and neither led to mortality or unemployment on such a significant scale, which adds another layer of complexity. When previous playbooks and recovery strategies can only be indicative, how can businesses build or rebuild brand equity through a period of huge disruption?

Douglas began by asking Louisa Loran, Vice President at Maersk responsible for the company’s brand communications strategy, how the logistics firm, which is instrumental to the global supply chain, had handled the Covid-19 crisis.

Strong customer focus

Loran explained that when she joined Maersk, her challenge was to understand how an asset-driven company could become more customer focused as part of its digital transformation. The decision to become customer-centric proved its worth, firstly a few years ago when they had a cyber-attack and now during Covid-19. “It’s the ability to understand your customers and put together value propositions and solutions to match their needs that enables you to be successful,” she said. “So Covid has been business management for us, not crisis management.”

Gordana Buccisano, EVP Global Client Transformation, Havas Group, who works directly with Loran on the Maersk business, agreed. She said her role had not changed through the crisis – she was still focussed on both long-term brand positioning objectives and short-term commercial objectives supporting Maersk’s digital transformation. “Covid or not, what matters is having the agile mindset to be able to adjust,” she said.

Authenticity is still key

Douglas then turned to David Wheldon, Vice President at WFA and the former Chief Communications and Marketing Officer for RBS, to ask what we should be looking for in brand behaviours, and how brands could build consumer preference, particularly against challenging economics. The key is authenticity, Wheldon said, and “a brand, knowing what it is and what it does, and doing it in the right way, with the right tone.”

Referencing Wheldon’s time at RBS, Douglas asked what the sentiment around that brand was when he joined in 2015, following the damage to its reputation in the 2008 financial crisis. Wheldon described RBS as the “least trusted brand in the least trusted sector.” His first job was to take an honest look at what RBS was: “A failed attempt at building a global brand.”

He discovered that the Royal Bank of Scotland brand – what customers who banked there called it – wasn’t as damaged. A brand strategy separating out the consumer facing brands, focusing on its customers and telling them the truth led to the bank’s recovery.

Authenticity and value are an important part of Maersk’s new brand strategy. “In the past, Maersk had a perception of being reliable,” Loran said, but they needed a different strategy to grow the brand. “We landed on being trusted, open and brave,” she said. Instead of saying, “We’ll tell you exactly when the vessel will be there,” it allowed them to say, “You can trust us to find the right solution for you.”

Loran believes that being brave is also about being honest and taking responsibility for what you can solve. “There are certain things we do with the strongest belief that they’re the right things, but we also admit our failures when they happen,” she said.

Consumer confidence on the rise

With consumer confidence playing an essential role in how well brands perform, Douglas asked Phillipa Leighton-Jones, Editor At Large – The Trust – The Wall Street Journal | Barron’s Group, to talk about its consumer confidence reports and what they meant for brand behaviour.

Leighton-Jones described The Wall Street Journal | Barron’s Group as a bellwether of what the C-suite is thinking. “These are the decision-makers who will be shaping the economy of the future in many respects,” Leighton-Jones said. “And when you’ve got marketers who are fighting hard for every dollar of discretionary spending, you need to make sure that they know what kind of environment they’re talking in and what kind of conversations they need to be having.”

So what are the decision makers thinking? According to Leighton-Jones more than half of the1000 respondents surveyed across The Wall Street Journal | Barron’s Group expect the economy to get better in the next three months, a 22 percentage point gain from mid-March. They also anticipate an increase in expenditure on personal goods and travel, she said.

Less twaddle, more focus

With that in mind, Douglas asked Wheldon if it was safe for brands to revert back to type and start entertaining us again after months of being circumspect.

“I think people have had enough of ‘we’re all in this together, with you every step of the way’ type communication,” Wheldon said, adding that some of the brands doing it looked “pretty inauthentic” and there was a lot of “twaddle” around. He praised KFC for really understanding their market. While they were closed, the fast food provider encouraged customers to make their own KFC at home and post their attempts on social media, then responded with “relatively insulting” comments about people’s efforts. It went down well because “they understood their audience, got the tone right, and were sensitive to what was happening,” Wheldon said.

Relieving Customer Pain Points

Returning to The Wall Street Journal | Barron’s Group’s Leighton-Jones, Douglas asked how publishers could capitalise on what has been a period of growth, with increased audiences and engagement. “People are looking for brands to talk to them,” she said. “Not necessarily to sell to them, but to demonstrate some value and leadership. It’s always going to be about putting the customer first, and thinking deeply not about what products or services you want to sell them, but how you can solve their pain points.” Demonstrating what she called “edifying utility”, allowed businesses to tell “brave brand stories that are authentic, and that show your leadership,” she said.

How far to plan ahead

Picking up a theme from audience members, Douglas’s final question was how far should brands plan ahead when everything is changing so frequently.

Based on his conversations with CMOs, Wheldon said, “On the whole, it’s a 30 day rolling plan with the 90 day horizon, and financially that kind of works for most people. Because beyond that, how would you know? So zoom in tight on 30 days, and be flexible and pragmatic.”

Loran said Maersk will continue to operate on many levels, optimising on short-term weekly cycles, evaluating their value proposition communications three months out, and planning ahead much further – three to five or even eight years – for their brand architecture and repositioning. What won’t change, she said, is their brand vision “to connect and simplify our customer supply chain,” which is not an overnight turn.

Be bold and brave

Douglas wrapped up the webinar by revealing the results of an audience member poll asking how optimistic they were that the advertising industry would bounce back before the end of 2020. The results, he said, were fairly evenly split (35% optimistic, 42% pessimistic and 23% unsure), reflecting where we are right now with the ever-changing news cycle.

Finishing on a positive note, he pointed out that brands and businesses had “everything to play for” and this was an opportunity to be brave as we navigate clients and businesses through a period that no-one’s experienced before. “As humans we will make mistakes,” he said, “But ultimately, I think we’ll get judged on motive and generosity.”

Should anyone wish to hear more about the Consumer Confidence study Phillipa Leighton-Jones mentioned, please do get in touch with phillipa.jones@wsj.com

3rd webinar: Rebooting your brand/business in the post COVID-19 world

A really fascinating webinar took place today by The World Media Group.  Our highly esteemed panel held a thought-provoking discussion about how you build/rebuild brand equity through a period of significant disruption.

The panel concluded that to survive the post COVID-19 world brands need to be authentic, meaningful and add value.  The customer has to be the key focus.  The quote of the session was:

“Less Twaddle more focus” David Wheldon

“Connect and simplify” Louisa Loran

Trust continues to grow in importance and brands need to recognise you have to earn this – so doing the “right” thing is vital.

Communication is paramount and brands are encouraged to be bold, but must strike a balance using the right tone.

Data is also the gold thread in strategy but the human interpretation is paramount.

Full key takeouts will follow but in the meantime, if you missed the webinar today please click HERE to watch this really insightful panel discussion.

Key Take Outs: Editors’ Perspectives: How global leaders are responding to the COVID-19 crisis

World Media Group Editors’ Perspectives: How Global Leaders are responding to Covid-19 – Key Take Outs

Five months after the first cases of Covid-19 were reported, there is hope that much of Europe, along with Asia, has passed the peak of infections. But with global leaders responding differently to the crisis, there are discrepancies about what’s being measured, whether we can compare countries, and what we should to do next. The World Media Group invited a panel of journalists, reporters and analysts from six leading international news outlets to shed some light based on their own experiences of reporting on Covid-19.

The panel was chaired by Arif Durrani, Executive Editor, EMEA, for Bloomberg Media Studios. In his opening question, Durrani asked how outlets had covered the virus and what they had learnt as a result.

“What we’ve learnt is to expect the unexpected,” said Adrienne Carter, Asia Editor for The New York Times, based in Hong Kong. “Everything we think is true…is always countered by a different narrative. Everything changes from moment to moment.”

The value of imperfect data

For Alan Smith (OBE), Head of Visual and Data Journalism at the Financial Times, it has been the realisation “that imperfect, uncertain data has never been more valuable.” The crisis has elevated the importance of data and analysis to the news agenda, he said, as “it’s almost impossible to make sense of the situation without using data.”

With the deluge of information since the pandemic was declared, Durrani asked how the panel prioritised what to cover, and how they were tracking what was resonating with their audiences.

Aria Bendix, Senior Reporter at Business Insider USA, based in New York City, who was the first BI reporter assigned to cover Covid-19, explained that Business Insider had always relied on data from their community to determine the focus of stories. She said the “unending stream of interest in the virus” over the past three or four months had led to a greater need for service journalism. Readers have “really simple questions that actually don’t have simple answers in this time,” she said. “And I think that our mission is to satisfy that information first and foremost.”

Smith agreed with the need for service journalism. He said the Financial Times had made much of its Coronavirus coverage free to allow people to keep up with a story that was constantly changing.

Durrani turned to Ishaan Tharoor, Today’s Worldview Columnist at The Washington Post, to understand how he decides what to write about. Although he is based in DC, Tharoor explained that his role was to provide “a more global story and craft and, in many ways, try to hold up examples elsewhere in the world to the American conversation.”

That means drawing comparisons, for example, in showing how South Korea can offer certain lessons to the US and also showing how the US could never emulate what South Korea did, he said. It’s about “recognising the political tendencies of certain types of leadership, leadership styles and how the pandemic is triggering non-health risks to democracies and republics elsewhere,” he said. “It’s about trying to stitch together a sense of where we’re going in this incredibly unpredictable, unprecedented time.”

On the ground challenges

Durrani asked about the challenges and developments in specific regions. Laura Bicker is the BBC Seoul news correspondent, based in South Korea, which has now crushed the curve of Covid-19. Bicker found herself running “into the fire” when Daegu became a hotspot. While she took advice from a high-risk safety team, the situation on the ground often played out differently and she found herself having to make difficult decisions for herself and her team about how close to the frontline they could safely get to tell the story that the readers or viewers needed to know.

Mindy Massucci, Head of Global Content, QuickTake by Bloomberg, based in New York, explained how she has tapped into Bloomberg’s network of journalists across 120 countries for on the ground reporting as the world gradually returns to ‘normal’. Whether she’s talking to a reporter in Berlin getting his first haircut in two months or receiving a photo of what social distancing looks like at one of the oldest shopping malls in Chile, these first-hand accounts demonstrate “what it’s like for life to slowly start creeping back,” she said.

How do we measure progress?

As our minds turn towards recovery, what sort of metrics should we be looking at? According to Business Insider’s Bendix, “Our primary responsibility as journalists is to contextualise this current moment for the public. Obviously, we won’t know where we are in history in the moment, but to provide some sort of educated guess about where we are in the trajectory of this pandemic.”

One of the problems, she said, is that when comparing regions or countries, we are not always comparing ‘like for like’, which can lead to false equivalences because there are “so many confounding factors, right now that can influence how an outbreak actually manifests within the population.”

That’s where a tool like the FT’s Coronavirus tracker comes into play. According to Smith, its “under the bonnet assessment” of different types of data sources reveals just how much you can rely on them to make comparisons – or not.

APAC as a barometer

Looking to the future, Durrani asked what lessons we can learn from countries such as Korea.

Echoing Bendix’s concerns, Bicker said that “it’s not ‘like for like’ so it’s very difficult to say that what’s worked here in South Korea will work in the UK or the United States.” That’s partly because Korea was prepared with testing, she said, so there was never a need for lockdown. The success of the strategy has also come at the cost of privacy, which wouldn’t have been deemed acceptable by other nations.

Carter believes there are lessons the US, UK and Italy could learn from South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. She talked about what’s known as ‘everyday life quarantine’ – infrastructure and a social culture that enforces social distancing and hygiene measures – to allow people to ease back into life without a treatment or a vaccine.

Massucci argued that the cultural difference in the US is too extreme for this. Referencing the current protests over mask-wearing, she said, “People, especially, in the United States, are so protective of their rights. They don’t like it when government comes in and tells them they can’t do something.”

Even once we’ve crushed the curve, Bicker believes it will take time to get back to normality. In South Korea, health officials are telling the public a second wave is inevitable, she says, giving an insight into what’s likely to come in the UK, US and Europe.

New levels of engagement reflect hunger for trusted news

Despite polls suggesting that trust in journalism is at an all-time low, engagement appears to be higher than ever. Bicker referenced BBC.com getting 40 million average daily visits in the first couple of weeks of April, and Smith said that the Coronavirus tracker was now the most viewed FT story by “many million page views.” According to Carter, The New York Times has “seen more interest in our journalism than ever before” and the pandemic has “reinforced the importance of on the ground reporting of trusted sources.”

It’s a reminder that in a situation where information can potentially save lives, there is no place for fake or inaccurate news. In the race to break a story, Bloomberg’s Massucci reiterated journalists’ responsibility to double check sources. “One of the things that I say to my team all the time, is I’d rather be late, last and right, than first and wrong.”

Belinda Barker, Director World Media Group

2nd Webinar – Editors’ Perspectives: How different parts of the world are responding to the pandemic and life beyond

A really interesting and thought-provoking webinar took place today by The World Media Group.  Our highly knowledgeable panel held a fascinating discussion about how different parts of the globe are all responding quite differently to the current pandemic climate.

Top quotes from today were “it’s better to be right, than first” and “it’s a crisis but it’s a crisis from which we’ll learn a great deal”.

Full takeouts will follow but in the meantime, if you missed the webinar today please click HERE to watch this really insightful panel discussion.