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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.”

Making Content-Driven Marketing that People care About

Alex Delamain of The Economist and World Media Group explains how partnering with respected journalistic brands can deliver engagement, not just reach.

As SVP, global client partner at The Economist and president of the World Media Group, Alex Delamain’s role sits at the point of convergence between clients with marketing goals and a suite of respected media brands. As a result, she’s used to the balancing act required to create content-driven campaigns that audiences engage with meaningful ideas.
 
To dig into how she views best practice in this area, click on the link below:

Moat Analysis shows Trusted Media continues to deliver increased engagement and viewability for advertisers during Covid-19

New analysis released today by the World Media Group (WMG), a strategic alliance of the world’s premium media brands, confirms that advertising campaigns viewed within a trusted editorial environment are yielding significantly better results for attention and viewability than the industry standard.

Analysis from Moat by Oracle Data Cloud shows that premium digital inventory running across WMG’s brands in Q1 2020 outperformed Moat’s benchmarks for that same period by up to 73%, as further detailed below.

The analysis measured the quality of engagement delivered by WMG brands across Display Desktop, Mobile Web and Video Desktop during 1st January 2020 – 31st March 2020.

Display Desktop: Display ads viewed on desktop across WMG inventory achieved an Active Page Dwell Time of 68 seconds, 35% higher than the industry average according to Moat’s benchmark for Q1 2020. Engagement exceeded Moat’s benchmark for the same period by 73% with an average In-View Time of 50 seconds.

Mobile Display: WMG inventory also performed well on mobile encouraging 10% more interactions (Universal Touch Rate) than Moat’s benchmark. Active Page Dwell Time was 47 seconds, 13% higher than the benchmark for mobile. Engagement exceeded Moat’s benchmarks for the same period by 56%, with an average In-View Time of 26 seconds.

Video Desktop*: Desktop videos viewed across WMG inventory achieved 15% above Moat’s benchmarks for engagement based on In-View Time. Consumer attention to videos was also strong, with Audible and Visible Complete Rates coming in 56% higher than the Moat Q1 2020 benchmarks, and the Human Audible & Fully On-Screen for Half of Duration Rate (with a 15 second cap) 35% higher than the Moat benchmarks for the same period.

“The Moat data covers the first quarter of the year when we were starting to learn more about the global impact of COVID-19,” said Damian Douglas, Managing Director EMEA, Time and Vice President of the World Media Group. “We know that titles in the World Media Group’s portfolio experienced an increase in both user numbers and engagement during this time as consumers looked for content from trusted editorial sources. Moat’s analysis confirms that high levels of engagement were also attained in advertising across WMG titles, demonstrating once again that audiences are more responsive to advertising when it’s presented within a high quality editorial environment.”

The Moat data is based on analysing desktop, mobile and video advertising campaigns running in Q1 2020 across the following WMG brands: The Atlantic, Bloomberg Media Group, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, National Geographic, Reuters, TIME, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

The results from the Moat analysis are as follows:

 

Measure/Benchmark World Media Group Lift compared to Moat Q1 2020 Benchmarks
Display Desktop Active Page Dwell Time (secs) 68s +35%
Display Desktop In-view Time (secs) 50s +73%
Mobile Web Universal Touch Rate 13% +10%
Mobile Web Active Page Dwell Time (secs) 47s +13%
Mobile Web In-View Time (secs) 26s +56%
Video Desktop In-View Time 19s +15%*
Video Desktop Audible and Visible Complete Rate 36% +56%*
Human Audible and Fully On-screen for Half of Duration Rate 37% +35%*


*Desktop video numbers are based on nine WMG publishers that had video inventory monitored by Moat during Q1 2020 and therefore represent a smaller sample than on the other platforms.

About Oracle Data Cloud
Oracle Data Cloud helps marketers use data to capture consumer attention and drive results. Used by 199 of AdAge’s 200 largest advertisers, our Audience, Context and Measurement solutions extend across the top media platforms and a global footprint of more than 100 countries. We give marketers the data and tools needed to help them in every stage of the marketing journey, from audience planning to pre-bid brand safety, contextual relevance, viewability confirmation, fraud protection, and ROI measurement. Oracle Data Cloud combines the leading technologies and talent from Oracle’s acquisitions of AddThis, BlueKai, Crosswise, Datalogix, Grapeshot, and Moat.

About Oracle
The Oracle Cloud offers a complete suite of integrated applications for Sales, Service, Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, plus Highly Automated and Secure Generation 2 Infrastructure featuring the Oracle Autonomous Database. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit us at www.oracle.com.

Trademarks
Moat is a registered trademark of Moat Inc. (an Oracle affiliate). Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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.

 

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

Webinar – Working with Trusted Media in Times of Crisis – Final thoughts from the panel

Here is a wonderful section captured at the end of the WMG webinar when each of the panellists shared their very personal views on what has surprised them the most (in business and human behaviour) about what has happened since the Covid-19 pandemic began.

The overriding feeling was that there has been an amazing sense of community, an underlying positivity which has brought everyone together.  The world has got smaller and become a united force.  That can’t be a bad thing.

Please click on this image for the panellists final thoughts:

Panellists from L-R:

Top: Emma Winchurch-Beale, International Sales Director, Washington Post; Stevan Randjelovic, Director Brand Safety, Group M; Janet Balis, Global Advisory Leader, EY Advisory; Johanna Mayer-Jones, SVP of Partnerships, The Atlantic

Middle: Denise Turner, Insight Director, Newsworks; Alex Altman, Global Client President, Wavemaker; Jack Dyson, Global Head of Content Strategy, SAP Customer Experience; Damian Douglas, Managing Director EMEA, Time

Bottom: Alison Harbert, Head of Client Marketing, Investec; Harriet Kingaby, Co-founder, Conscious Advertising Network; Alex Delamain, SVP Head of Sales & Client Services EMEA, The Economist

To view the entire webinar, please go to: https://wmg.wavecast.io/working-with-trusted-media-in-times-of-crisis/live