communications Archives — Carrington Malin

December 3, 2020
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You may have worked long and hard on your marketing plan, but how well does it support ongoing communication with your internal stakeholders?

The phrase ‘hearts and minds’ was first used by a French general during the French Indochina-Chinese border rebellion in the 19th century. It’s been used as a military strategy ever since, making emotional or intellectual appeals to the other side, in recognition of the fact that military superiority does not always provide the best or the swiftest victory in armed conflict. And, like many other military concepts, the ‘hearts and minds’ strategy was appropriated by marketing and communications strategists long ago!

However, marketing is by no means alone in borrowing from military strategy. Human resources has proved to be another big user of ‘hearts and minds’ and there are good reasons for this: budget and organisational dynamics. HR never receives the budget that it feels it deserves and so is forced to choose its battles carefully. Meanwhile, communications that put forth company ambitions, messages and cultural achievements simply fall flat if they are widely disputed in hushed tones around the water cooler. If internal stakeholders don’t believe and feel emotionally involved in plans, policies and practices, they’re far less likely to unite behind your cause.

And so it is with the internal communications from any department, marketing included.

Much of marketing’s internal communications routinely focuses on approvals and successes – i.e. the milestones at the beginning and at the end of any marketing campaign. Once the big bang of the final presentation is over and approvals are secured, participation of other stakeholders can fade away rapidly. Marketing plans, strategies and budgets are rightly presented as business cases for the careful consideration of decision makers. Far less effort tends to be invested in making sure that plans are easy to understand, highly useable and appeal to the ‘hearts and minds’ of other departments.

‘People just don’t understand marketing’

A common complaint of marketing heads the world over is that their work is so little understood by the rest of the organisation. There is scarce appreciation for all the work that goes into research, product positioning, creative concepts, or running effective campaigns. As a result, marketing successes are not always met with the thunderous applause that the marketing team believes is due! However, if your full year of internal communications consists of approvals and successes, then surely this is to be expected?

Accelerated by digital transformation and the breaking down of information silos, marketing and communications today not only maps to almost every part of the organisation, but also now shares data with it. All the more reason to have key internal stakeholders not only invested in approval and success milestones, but also emotionally and intellectually invested in the strategy and marketing activities themselves.

So then, am I trying to tell you that everyone in your organisation should be constantly referring to your marketing plan? No, but I am saying that your marketing plan should be a thoughtfully crafted communications tool that informs and supports marketing’s internal narrative throughout the year.

It should be something that helps frame marketing leadership’s communications with senior management, department heads, internal stakeholders, business partners and agencies. For this, your plan should be structured in a way that makes it easy-to-use, a valuable reference, useful to abstract from, and relevant to your wider audience of stakeholders.

Review your plan like it’s ‘external’

Ideally, your marketing plan will be pyramidal in structure – or a pyramid of pyramids – that presents key goals, findings and strategies towards the start and cascades more detail afterward. Ideally too, those top-level goals and strategies will be written in a self-explanatory way that is easily understandable by non-marketing professionals. If you strive to make your goals and strategies memorable and to clearly show relevance to the other functions in the organisation, so much the better. Anything that helps promote greater understanding of your goals, challenges and strategies has got to be a good thing, right?

A useful way to review your marketing plan is to imagine that you’ve written it for an external audience. Marketing content for external audiences normally goes through a very different process to internal communications. There tends to be a great deal of scrutiny of key messages and what perceptions will be formed by customers, partners, the media and other key audiences. The form, style, colour and simplicity of external communications are brainstormed, ideated, iterated, tested and optimised. In contrast, internal communications are often deemed as good enough if they are honest, free of typos and don’t over-commit!

Your annual marketing plan is a core document for marketing planning, budgeting and approvals. However, it’s a valuable communications exercise, helping to frame marketing’s internal messaging for the year. The more effectively your plan communicates your goals, plans and strategies, the more key points both marketing and non-marketing stakeholders are going to understand, retain and refer to later. Beyond the simple benefit of ensuring that everyone’s reading from the same manual, you may find that focusing a little more on ‘hearts and minds’ could even turn your internal critics into advocates. And wouldn’t that be something?

This article was first posted on Linkedin.

Also read: Is your marketing plan presentation the best it can be?


August 11, 2020
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Will AI replace human creativity? Or help them take creativity to the next level? It could simply depend on how we choose to use it.

Those that know me well will know that I have become obsessed with how artificial intelligence will impact brands, communications and consumers. Last week, I was inspired by an article by The Drum‘s Brands Editor Jen Faull, which explored the current state of AI in creative work and asks the question “Will artificial intelligence replace human creatives?”

It’s a great question to ask, because no one really knows the answer. Rephrase the question slightly and ask “could artificial intelligence replace human creatives?’ and I’d argue that the answer is, most definitely, yes (obviously, leaving aside the question of “when?”). Is AI destined to take over the creative brief entirely and replace human creatives and creative processes? I’d say that, at the end of the day, this is largely going to be up to us to decide.

The meteoric rise of so called artificial intelligence – which, these days, is used synonymously with the many applications, systems and devices powered by machine learning – is as impressive as it is scary. And, as with most up and coming technologies, it’s often very difficult to differentiate the reality from the hype.

Will AI replace creatives?

By all accounts, AI is by no means ready to fill our creative boots. We can train AI systems to learn things from data sets, analyse trends, make recommendations and actually create outputs of different kinds, including “creative work”. However, AI hasn’t yet been able to even convincingly mimic the complexities of human thought and creativity. Some would argue that it is only a matter of time before that data too is assimilated. Imagine an AI system trained on the experiences, thoughts and dreams of the planet’s top 100 advertising creative professionals? It could happen, just not quite yet.

Today, AI systems have been used to produce original creative advertising work with, at best, moderate success. However, AI is much better at targeting, deploying and optimising advertising assets. There are also an increasingly wide range of tools becoming available to inform, analyse, optimise and fast-track creative projects. As AI voice becomes ubiquitous, using those tools is going to become more intuitive and seamless – and so better to assist creative development.

Inspired by the article on The Drum, I posted some further questions on Linkedin last week – “Will AI fast-track the training and development of creative professionals? Or will AI’s efficiency strangle that essential pipeline of new creative talent that would have traditionally developed up through the ranks?”

‘You can’t box creativity’

A variety of advertising, marketing and technology professionals responded in comments and via messaging. You can read all the comments in full on my post from last week here. Meanwhile, it could be useful to summarise some key points here. Although there was consensus that AI is nowhere near ready to take over human creative work, I was interested to find that there were also some quite divergent opinions.

From some, there was certainty that AI could not and will not replace human creatives. Sherif El Ghamrawy at Photovision Plus believes that “there will always be certain things that remain uniquely human that no machine will ever be able to truly replicate”, citing emotion and imagination as key differentiators. Ramesh Naidu Garikamokkala at PAGO Analytics agrees that AI is not going to replace the role of our emotions.

Ibrahim Lahoud of Brand Lounge also seems to be in agreement with this, sharing that AI could fast-track training and development of creatives, but that’s where he draws the line. “AI can create a logo where human creatives will create a brand. AI can analyze shapes and colors where humans can read emotions.”

Jad Hindy at MRM/McCann noted (via messaging) that you can’t box creativity or confine it within a standard process. He says “ideation can’t be AI-ed, but the creation of assets can.”

Some of the futurists out there, do believe that AI could replace human creativity sometime in the future. Although, as Steven Gare of AI Blockchain Service puts it “defining AI in this context is pure speculation at this time”.

Most professionals agree that AI does promise to both empower and change the creative process, including career development. Lahoud’s take is that “AI will not replace creatives, but will rather be an incredibly powerful assistive tool that will act as an extension to their boiling minds”. Kassem Nasser, American University of Beirut, agrees and says that AI “is a technology that will open new challenges and opportunities to our minds not replace them.”

Meanwhile, Robert McGovern at Horizontal Digital notes that new AI tools could help with brainstorming, idea generation and connecting different concepts together, plus fast-tracking research work.

‘Think of AI as an exoskeleton for brains!’

In my mind, how creative professions – and creative industries as a whole – adapt to the arrival of AI and other new technologies is going to play the deciding role in determining whether we are empowered to create greater things or get used to accepting what AI creates for us. A point well made by Gowri Selka from Volantsys Analytics Inc., “it is critical for humans from all backgrounds of career to gain new skills and leverage these technologies to their benefit.”

For sure, the clock is ticking. AI and related technologies are developing at a pace that we’ve never experienced before. Like it or not, change is absolutely the only constant that we can look forward to. As Jürn-Christian Hocke at Select World urges, “we have to think about the new dealt cards NOW.” And says, creatives must learn what creativity and creative careers will look like in the future.

“Think of AI as an exoskeleton for brains!” is Lahoud’s advice for creatives. And, I think, he’s hit the nail on the head here.

As the capabilities of AI continue to grow, the creative process may look less and less like the process of old. However, whether this process remains human centric, is going to depend on how we frame AI’s future role. If AI is to super-charge human creativity, it’s up to creative professionals to take firm hold of the controls and remain at the very centre of the creative process. Time to suit up!

This story was originally published on Linkedin

Read the Arabic language version here: نظرة على مستقبل الإبداع


March 6, 2020
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Here are six ways to make sure that your communications don’t say all the wrong things to the people that your business cares the most about.

The novel coronavirus now dominates global media coverage, prompts political debate, inspires endless memes on social media and has become a daily topic of office chatter. Over the past couple of weeks, the virus crisis has gained increasing attention, in line with the rise in virus cases reported outside of China and the sharp drop felt by Western stock markets. In many countries, public perceptions of the crisis seem to have shifted from the view that it is ‘something that’s happening over there’ to ‘something that could happen here’!

In the business world, we’ve already seen some big global events cancelled, commercial launches postponed and business travel cut back. The mobile industry’s annual gathering MWC Barcelona was cancelled last month and, a few days ago, the world’s biggest travel trade show ITB Berlin was called off (not to mention Google I/O and Facebook’s F8). We’ve also seen event cancellations in the UAE. Data intelligence company PredictHQ estimates that cancellations have already cost the events industry some $500 million.

So, if there isn’t now an element of uncertainty in your business, then you are either the exception to the rule, or you’re simply in denial. Against the backdrop of economic instability, daily coronavirus news coverage and public fears over safety, many businesses are trying to figure out how the global crisis affects them and what, if anything, they can do about it.

As with the response to any big disruption outside of your company’s control, a rather obvious thing that you can do is to focus on your key stakeholders: your employees, your customers and your business partners.

Another rather obvious thing is that communications is key. So, instead of putting off all communications decisions until ‘tomorrow’ when the situation may be clearer, here are six ways that you can take action to make sure your communications doesn’t say all the wrong things to the people that your business cares most about.

1. Avoid creating a vacuum

As Aristotle once said, nature abhors a vacuum. And so does communications. Don’t assume that by not communicating, your last communications are still kept in mind by your stakeholders. A more likely result is that, if you stop communicating, rumour and speculation will step in to fill the gap. For example, in the absence of good communications, customers may assume that your event will be cancelled, or employees may assume that you’re not paying attention to health risks. You should manage the frequency of your communications carefully so as to avoid big gaps.

2. Take health concerns seriously

Regardless of the actual risks to your employees, customers or business partners, everyone is going to feel slightly different about those risks. Dismissing stakeholder concerns about health, safety or business issues as not valid, risks losing their support. Make writing and updating appropriate policies a priority, even if there are very few new measures that you believe need to be taken. By having a policy and communicating appropriately you will, at least, show your stakeholders that you have their best interests at heart.

3. Be alert to rumours and fake news

Unfortunately, we now live in a world of fake news and, these days, rumours can start when one person tells another about a headline that they misread on Facebook. Keep abreast of coronavirus developments via credible news sources and health authorities and be prepared to dispel rumours. You should also be ready to use internal communications to clarify the impact of announcements in the media on your employees (i.e. don’t let them assume that what they read in the media about another company automatically affects your company, if it clearly doesn’t).

4. Review PR plans and have contingencies

Take some time out to review your forward-looking PR plan and upcoming announcements. What is immovable? What announcements are at risk? And can you fill any big gaps with useful communications, so as to avoid ‘radio-silence’? This is also the time to plan for contingencies (eg. what if we have to cancel our annual event?), issues management (eg. how do we avoid appearing absent from a market that we may not visit as often?) and crisis management (eg. how will we manage communications in case of an unexpected event?). Lastly, review key messages with your stakeholders potential concerns in mind, in case you need to change or adjust them in light of those concerns.

5. Look for new opportunities

We can expect the current global crisis to have an effect on consumer perceptions, behaviour and buying. However, those changes may mean that there are opportunities to communicate and engage with your customers differently. In addition, we can expect some businesses to communicate less, leaving more space for yours! It could be well worth taking a fresh look at your customers’ needs and how you communicate with them, in case there are obvious ways that you can communicate, engage and perhaps even provide more value to them in light of ongoing changes.

6. Be open and honest

You may think that it goes without saying that organisations should avoid lying in order to try to protect their businesses. However, in an environment where public sentiment, business rules and government policy are apt to change, what is an honest company statement one week, could sound disingenuous the next and perhaps even look like a bare-faced lie later on, as circumstances change. Don’t let inaction and lack of attention to your communications put your business in that position. Aim for open, honest communication in the context of the environment at the time and review your messages frequently.

In times like these, when the media and marketing environment is changing faster than the norm, reviewing your company communications more often is a wise thing to do, even if such reviews don’t seem to require much change to existing plans. Keeping your communications consistent and making incremental changes to adapt to the new circumstance is likely to serve you much better than making big changes changes later on, when you may be forced to do so in a hurry.

This story first appeared on SME10x.com


February 19, 2020
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It may be easy to write-off some freelance projects as learning experiments or acceptable ‘fast fails’, but, be honest, did you set direction clearly to begin with?

Whether you’re starting to market your first venture or are helping someone else promote theirs, you’re probably already making use of online talent platforms to help you get things done by freelancers at a cheaper price point.

If you’ve been doing this for a while, then you may also have already found out that remote freelancers are often great for solving short term needs ‘in the moment’, but their work isn’t always that useful for the longer term. You may even write-off disappointing projects as learning experiments or fast fails that help you set direction. Although, the honest truth is that the resources used have probably have not had enough direction to begin with and more time invested at the outset would have helped you achieve a better result.

Process, process, process

When you engage a marketing or communications agency to develop creative work, advertising or PR campaigns, they’re likely to spend quite a lot of time focusing on your brief. This involves asking all the right questions about your goals, expectations and current situation, but it also involves challenging your assumptions and those of your competitors, plus considering all the available options to ensure that creative efforts pay off and campaigns perform. It can be time intensive process and is one of the things that tends to make using traditional agencies more expensive than independent consultants, since agencies leverage an expensive multidisciplinary team to achieve this.

When you contract freelancers, the traditional briefing and planning process can get completely thrown out of the window!

  • A carefully researched and planned brand identity process that takes weeks, becomes a logo delivered at a fraction of the cost in a day or two.
  • A new website can be set up in a matter of days, or even hours, because the design, layout and structure will likely be based on the developer’s past work or available templates first: and your brand’s needs second.
  • Freelancer writers can develop marketing copy fast, but, again, often based on the freelancer’s past work, not your brand’s story, tone of voice or with your other content plans in mind.

Clarity and context is all up to you

However, in defence of remote freelancers around the world, they are simply serving client needs. If you want something fast and cheap, without giving your venture’s needs much thought, someone will sell you a fast and cheap service. If you ask for an image to be edited for your marketing and don’t brief the designer on the creative direction that you want or how this image should be consistent with all your other work, then that’s your own fault. If you ask for a logo for your new business cards, without mentioning that you’d like to use this logo 100 times bigger for your front of house signage next month, don’t blame the designer when the design doesn’t scale and looks completely awful.

As part of a startup team, the likelihood is that you’re focused on outcomes, not on individual tasks. The most important thing is whether your efforts help your startup make progress. Consultants and freelancers, on the other hand, are focused on the task at hand and it is up to you to provide all the context and direction.

In fact, the value of all outsourced marketing and communications work is dependent on the clarity of the brief, answering the right questions and intelligent planning. If you’re trying to get things done by using freelancers and remote workers to reduce expenses, then that puts you in charge of developing your own brief, research and planning to see how each piece of work best supports your goals and where it fits into the bigger picture. This takes time, quality of thought and some effort on your part to articulate company needs clearly in written form.

Skill-up and improve results

Ultimately – if you’re not from a marketing background or not intimately familiar with the type of project – you’ll need to develop a deeper understanding of advertising and communications in order to get the best out of an outsourced service. So, you’ll find that it’s well worth the effort to set aside a few hours a week for online learning, reading marketing books and, perhaps, ‘going back to school’ by taking relevant short courses.

If you don’t already have the experience or skills, then it may save you wasted time, effort and budget to work with a communications and marketing expert that can help you map out current and future needs, define clear marketing projects and focus those freelance resources more effectively.

Some projects are always going to work better than others, just as some freelancers are going to be a better fit than others. However, if you can improve your process, more of those marketing projects will prove to be worthwhile investments that help your venture grow, rather than simply expenses to be minimised.

This story was first published on SME10x.com.


January 6, 2020
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Now that the New Year has arrived, I’m not about to tell you how to develop your 2020 marketing plan. I’m guessing that this is, at least, completed in draft and perhaps already approved and has been used for other 2020 briefing and planning. However, could you improve your marketing plan’s presentation?

Although you may well have worked long and hard on your marketing plan, you may still be in the process of improving it before sharing a final version with your wider internal audience. Perhaps you intended to add a few tweaks over the holidays, or maybe you’re creating a shorter version of your plan in slide format to help communicate your plan internally. Whatever you choose to do, it’s important to have a marketing plan ready that is easy to understand for internal stakeholders across your organisation. We’re all ‘in marketing’ these days, so making the effort to improve your marketing plan presentation is time well spent!

Continue reading this story on Linkedin.


November 2, 2019
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Do brands need AI avatars of themselves? Last week at London’s One Young World Summit, Biz Stone co-founder of Twitter and Lars Buttler, CEO of San Francisco-based The AI Foundation, announced a new concept they called ‘personal media’ and claimed that artificial intelligence is the future of social change. The Foundation is working on new technology that Buttler says will allow anyone to create an AI avatar of themselves, which would look like them, talk like them and act like them. Empowered by AI avatars, people will then be able to, potentially, have billions of conversations at the same time.

So, what does this new kind of AI communications mean for brands?

Continue reading this story on Linkedin


September 25, 2019
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Despite the proclamations of enhanced customer experience, much of the interest and deployment of chatbots today is driven by cost savings. Customer service departments and the CFOs that approve their budgets have an opportunity to significantly reduce HR costs and add a new service that also has the prospect of being a revenue generator.

However, there are good reasons why large companies replacing human customer service with an automated customer service agent should consider chatbot projects as brand and customer experience initiatives first, and not simply a software roll-out.

Continue reading this story on Linkedin.


September 10, 2019
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More than half of employers don’t have a written policy on the ethical use of AI or bots, whilst AI chatbots and how they interact with customers play a growing role in shaping brand perceptions.

If you’ve implemented a new AI chatbot platform, then your brand’s chatbot can be made available to customers 24/7, respond instantly to queries and resolve up to 80 percent of questions without the need to involve a human customer service agent. However, customer service agents are generally bound by contracts, employee codes of conduct and operating procedures. Do the same rules apply for your chatbot?

Continue reading this story on Linkedin


October 23, 2017
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Agencies are used to getting last minute briefs. The urgent email or phone call wanting help with a campaign to start ‘immediately’. The pitch brief with the imminent deadline insisting that the successful agency must be ready to begin within days of a tight deadline (by the way, all agencies have a room full of highly-qualified people kicking back, playing pool and watching TV, just waiting for these occasions!).

Sadly, the growing popularity of digital communications seems to only encourage last minute briefs. Many clients now have some knowledge of digital advertising and marketing tools and have perhaps already have experience of placing social media advertising themselves. Everyone knows that you can upload an advert and start a campaign on Facebook in minutes, so what’s the problem?

Continue reading this story on the Spot On blog.