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Working with Media in Times of Crisis – Opinion Piece by Denise Turner, Newsworks

Working with media in times of crisis

Insight director Denise Turner writes about how trusted brands should operate in the new media environment. 

Earlier this week I was delighted to take part in a webinar run by the World Media Group, a collective of major global publications.

The webinar, and ten panellists involved, set out to address the question of the role of trusted media in times of crisis.

It goes without saying that we are living in unprecedented times both in the UK and globally. So I was interested to explore the commonalities between the UK and the global stage – and spoiler alert, there are lot of similarities.

For me there are four key themes:

  1. The need for trustworthy content has never been greater. People are turning to published brands, both in the UK and globally, in greater numbers. We’ve seen news brand subscriptions (both print and digital) increase, traffic to news brand websites is up around 50% on average, and people are spending longer with content, and engaging more. We’ve been living in an era of fake news for a while now, but we know from previous Newsworks research, that people are turning more to established published media brands.
  2. This crisis is a timely reminder that we market to people, not machines. All of the brand representatives on the panel talked about the humanity in what we do. This is first and foremost a humanitarian crisis, and as a marketing and publishing community, we need to respond appropriately.
  3. Brands are developing a new language of marketing – that of humility. It’s about getting real, not over-promising and about recognising the role that brands can play, without overdoing it.
  4. This is not the new normal, rather it’s a recalibration, or a reset. Things won’t go back to how they were before, but neither will we in marketing and publishing remain in this short-term situation. As one of the panellists Janet Balis from EY Advisory put it, we need to be already thinking about the future and not get stuck in the now.

Janet’s comment reminded me of something I heard a few years ago. I had the immense privilege of listening to the late Baroness Tessa Jowell speak at a dinner. One thing she said has stuck with me ever since, and I often refer to it, when something is bothering me or I’m facing a particular challenge.

She talked about the importance of a ‘centrifugal moment’. Now I’m not a scientist, but I know that a centrifuge moves very fast and shakes things up somewhat! Baroness Tessa was referring to a particular moment when she almost gave up being an MP, but something happened to turn things around completely.

We are in a centrifugal moment right now. How we react to it, both in the now, but also preparing for the future, will ensure we emerge from this even stronger than before.

Denise Turner, Insight Director, Newsworks 02/04/20

Key Take Outs: Working with Trusted Media in Times of Crisis

Advertising and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Working with Trusted Media in Times of Crisis:

Brand safety is always high on the agenda for advertisers, but what does this mean in the light of COVID-19? That was the question posed to a panel of 11 industry experts yesterday during a webinar hosted by the World Media Group. The panel was chaired by Alex Altman, Global Client President at Wavemaker.

To view the entire webinar please click the link below:

The role of media in a crisis 

Altman’s first question, addressed to Emma Winchurch-Beale, International Sales Director at the Washington Post, was how the newspaper’s editorial team balanced the need to report what’s going on without causing undue anxiety within its audience.

“People are frightened and it’s our job, along with our colleagues in other news organisations, to be the guiding light and help them through this pandemic,” she said, emphasising the newspaper’s role was to offer reassurance by delivering trusted information, as well as practical advice. To that end, they have created a new COVID-19 subsection on the website, and most of the COVID-19 coverage is free, outside of the pay wall.

Denise Turner, Insight Director, Newsworks, the UK body for national newspapers, agreed that people turn to trusted news sources in times of crisis. She said print subscriptions and newspaper home deliveries were on the rise, and traffic to digital outlets was up by 30-50% in the UK. Engagement is also up: “There’s an uplift in not just dwell time, but also comments on articles [and] shares. So people are not just passively absorbing it, they are actively engaging with the content.”

The need for well-researched trust-worthy content

Johanna Mayer-Jones, SVP of Partnerships at The Atlantic, agreed that the significant spikes in traffic and engagement across the board are because “people are hungry and they need information and news that they can trust at the moment.”

Referencing a popular article called ‘How the pandemic will end’ by Ed Yong, she explained the importance of delivering thoughtful, well-researched, scientific-based content exploring the long-term impacts of the virus. “We want to be thinking about conversations that might take place in two or three day’s time or a week’s time and provide a different type of perspective at this moment.”

Altman turned to Damian Douglas, Managing Director EMEA at Time,
to ask how they were adapting to consumer expectation of news brands in light of COVID-19.

“First and foremost, this is a humanitarian crisis,” Douglas said, so publishers will look at it through a more humane lens. The shift in commercial modelling to make COVID-19 coverage free was really important as audiences seek accuracy, truth and insight, he said; media organisations and brands must be seen to be going into the breach and not being overly commercial.

Advice for the C-suite

Altman then turned to Alison Harbert, Head of Client Marketing at Investec
to ask how she was advising clients in the current climate. The silver lining, she said, was that it had made Investec “think about who we are actually trying to help and what are we trying to help them with…what we can do that’s really relevant to them.” She also stressed the importance of moving at the right speed in the ever-changing situation.

When questioned about the legacy changes that will stay with us around homeworking, Harbert said that despite the fact we may run back to the office the moment the doors open, she hopes the time away has proved that this can work. “I think, as a human race, that this is forcing us to do some good stuff that maybe we should have done earlier.”

Altman asked Janet Balis, Global Advisory Leader for Media and Entertainment at EY, what advice she was giving to CMOs navigating the current crisis. Balis emphasised three points. “Strike the right brand voice and tone. And I think it starts with the word empathy… expressing a vulnerability in the face of an invisible force that’s larger than all of us.”

Secondly, she said while we often talk about storytelling, what’s important now is how that manifests itself with customers: “Your brand is only as good as your experience.” Finally, this is the “moment to really lean into very agile messaging and much better teaming collaboration,” she said, enabling brands to successfully change messaging at any given time.

Balis said she was now starting to see companies moving out of the initial triage moment of enterprise resiliency and looking forward – what she described as “the now, the next and beyond.”

Fake news still a threat

Addressing questions from the audience about fake news, Altman asked Stevan Randjelovic, Director of Brand Safety & Digital Risk EMEA, Group M, what he recommended. Randjelovic’s advice was firstly to invest in trusted news outlets. He also recommended human vetting of smaller regional or local publishers; using third party verification companies; and, most importantly, constantly monitoring where campaigns are delivering.

Harriet Kingaby, Co-founder of the Conscious Advertising Network, highlighted the human impact of fake news: “We talk very much about human safety as opposed to brand safety because we see that the decisions that advertisers make actually have impacts in the real world.” She cited a recent Newsworks report showing how advertisers pulling money from hard news outlets in times of crisis can cause real problems and encourage the rise of fake news.

How can brands market responsibly during crisis?

Altman’s next question, for Jack Dyson, Global Head of Content Strategy, SAP Customer Experience, was whether brands can continue to market during this time.

Dyson talked about the importance of going back to your brand values and brand purpose, and examining all of your actions through that lens to ensure you’re dealing with customers in the right way. He stressed the importance of tone, and why ‘It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it’ is absolutely critical now. All advertisers needed to do “a sense check that the right message is coming across to the right people in the right way and to the right audience, but also with the right cadence,” he said.

Time’s Douglas believes we’ll see a permanent change in how brands are looking to engage with audiences. “Pre-COVID, we were talking about a different form of capitalism, which means putting brand values front and centre.” He believes that it is the brands “working with genuine motive,’ and guiding people through the current crisis – such as McLaren developing protective wear or Louis Vuitton creating hand sanitisers – that will be remembered when we come out the other side.

Alex Delamain, President of The World Media Group and SVP Head of Sales & Client Services EMEA, The Economist, wrapped up the webinar with her key takes outs:

  1. It all starts with humanity. As publishers, we have a huge responsibility to be helpful and generous in this time of crisis.
  2. Brands must strike the right tone – empathy and compassion is key.
  3. Brands need to be connected with their customers through partnerships, relationships and ‘companionship’.
  4. Brands need to be much more agile – traditional digital transformation needs to move much faster.
  5. Brand purpose really comes into play now – we have to look at everything through that filter to ensure authenticity.

Closing on a positive note, Delamain reiterated Balis’s point: “We’re in the now, but there’s the next, and beyond. As brands, it’s really important that we start thinking about life after COVID-19 because it will come.”

Belinda Barker
World Media Group Director

Journalism 2020: The Rise of Populism KEY TAKEAWAYS

Fake news surrounds us. To an extent, it always has: propaganda, misinformation and lies are as old as language itself. But the rise of technology, the power and influence wielded by the internet, by social media, has meant that fakery has become more sophisticated, more widespread and more damaging to trust in the media than ever before.

The concept of journalism is founded on truth and impartiality. But when those founding principles have perceivably been brought into disrepute, whether deserved or not, media companies and outlets must act.

The World Media Group kicked off its 2020 events calendar with a session looking at this subject, and asking: what are the implications of fake news, for journalism and advertising, and what can news organisations do to counter the public’s growing disaffection with the media?

The session was chaired by Sarah Thorpe, managing director, Europe at The New York Times, who kicked off proceedings asking panellists to try to define the sometimes nebulous term.

Fake news: nothing new

“Fake news has been in existence as long as news has been in existence, in very varying degrees whether through bias, opinion or downright manipulation of information,” said Phillipa Leighton-Jones, editorial director, innovation at The Wall Street Journal.

“What’s changed is the velocity and sophistication of the tools available, which is in many cases playing into an increasingly polarised political environment. [Fake news] could conceivably mean everything from the most sophisticated deep-fake to someone not being honest about where their information has come from in an otherwise respected newspaper.

For Anne McElvoy, senior editor and head of Economist Radio at The Economist, fake news boils down to motivation. “Fake news has to be about the intention to distort or deceive,” she said. “If that’s not the intention then it’s not fake news. We should also be aware that the media is capable of committing fake news without meaning to. It’s something we have to transparent about. What do we do when we screw up?”

Mary Wilkinson, head of editorial content at BBC Global News, cited a Reuters report from last year that “showed that in the UK alone, trust in news has dropped from 55% in 2015 to just 40% last year”.

“So I think as a reputable broadcaster, we need to do our utmost to ensure truth stands out from the crowd and that people know there are places to go to for accurate and impartial information.”

Hazel Baker, global head of UGC news gathering at Reuters, hates the term ‘fake news’. “It’s so broad, it’s ill-defined and tells you nothing,” she said. “It’s been used by politicians and members of the public. I think categorisation is really important when it comes to actually assessing problems and understanding. The broad categories in fake news are misinformation – the spreading of false information – and disinformation – the deliberate spreading of false information.”

Undermining advertiser trust

As a cultural malaise, fake news has worrying implications for brands and their relationship with media owners.

“The net impact is that often advertisers don’t know where to go,” said Leighton-Jones. “In some cases this has led to instances of ‘blacklisting’, where advertisers won’t place ads against key words such as ‘Trump’. It’s a crude measure.

“Overall, what that loss of confidence among advertisers could mean for media at large is less funding for quality journalism, which costs a lot of money to make.”

Wilkinson concurred. “I think it’s in the interests of advertisers where their ads are going to be,” she said. “Subscriptions are rapidly growing, but good quality journalism is still dependent on advertiser revenue. I would buy direct, you don’t always have to go via the advertising platforms.”

Reining in anti-social media

The degree of power and the influence wielded by social platforms is having a detrimental effect on reporting, according to Alex Wood, Europe editor at Forbes, who argued that journalism needed to retain its historically more considered approach to the gathering and dissemination of information.

“It’s about slowing down,” he said. “We’re becoming obsessed with the clicks – the race to get into Google News is a race to the bottom.”

It’s a point that resonated with all the panelists, the consensus being that greater regulation governing online platforms was of paramount importance.

Wood in particular welcomed this month’s news that Ofcom will be given greater powers over social media, which will force them to act over harmful or overtly erroneous content.

The “idea that they don’t have the same responsibilities as publishers” is a massive concern, he said. “When they have the capacity to change opinion and change the world, they have to abide by the same standards. The game is really up for platforms. This idea that they can pretend they don’t have the same responsibilities as a publisher is wildly dated. When you think of the capacity they have to influence opinion and to change the world, I think they have to behave in the same way, to the same standards.”

In the main, standards among news organisations are as high as they have ever been. But in order to combat public scepticism  – and to reassure advertisers – communicating that fact has become crucial.

Accordingly, the BBC has a public-facing website that “covers everything from misinformation to disinformation, debunking rumours and theories doing the rounds on social media”, Wilkinson said.

The truth will out

Meanwhile, the broadcaster last year convened the Trusted News Summit. “We’re now working with a number of partners because no one publisher can do this on their own,” she said. “It includes the FT, Facebook, Google, Reuters, AFP, where we’re going to try and set up an early warning system because in certain situations, particularly in developing or new democracies, disinformation is actively dangerous.

“We’re trying to establish a framework where one publisher can alert everyone else and the tech platforms and hopefully nip things in the bud before they go completely viral.”

Wilkinson is optimistic about the future.

“On polarising subjects, there’ll always be people who believe what they want to believe. But there will be subjects where they will need to know the facts, and if those publications have a track record of being accurate and impartial, they will turn to those outlets. The antidote to all this is keep on doing very good journalism, explain your methods and when you make mistakes, admit them, and hopefully the truth will out.”

Belinda Barker
World Media Group

Photos: Jane Clipston