Welcome to Storytelling @ the Speed of Now

Welcome to Storytelling @ the Speed of Now

Ultimately, those of us in the public
relations profession are storytellers.
Whether were promoting a brand or
protecting a corporate reputation,
its our job to find better and faster
ways to tell our clients stories and
to ensure those stories are heard at
the right time, by the right audience.
Today, that
requires new
skills and a different mindset: weve replaced
Weve created this ebook
messaging with storytelling, embraced paid media as
so the stories we heard
a way to amplify earned coverage and learned how to
at the summit and the
adapt to an always-on environment where real-time
lessons they held are kept
is the only deadline that matters.
Thats why we chose Storytelling @ the Speed of
Now as the theme of this years Academic Summit,
which took place in Chicago June 25-27 at DePaul
University. In addition to DePaul, Edelmans co-hosts
were PR Week and the University of Notre Dame.

alive for both educators

and students.
Throughout, weve let the
voices of our presenters and
panelists shine through,
sharing their experiences,
wisdom and results. These
stories go beyond once
upon a time. They speak to
our time and how we live
and work now.

This biannual event a three-day educational

immersion gives college deans and professors an
opportunity to learn marketing and communications
best practices from nearly three dozen Edelman
clients and digital and media innovators, as well
as our own senior managers. Professors who teach
marketing, media, public relations, digital
communication and journalism at more than 80
universities from nine countries participated,
hearing blue chip case studies and gaining practical
knowledge they could immediately incorporate into university curricula.
Above all, the professors learned firsthand what students need to know
now to pursue a successful communications career in the future.

Why does Edelman invest in an event like this? By teaching the teachers,
our aim is to invest in the next generation of communications professionals
those students who will ultimately join and lead our industry. Ideally,
many of them will choose to do so at Edelman.

Table of
Contents
Introduction / page 6
Keynote Remarks from Richard
Edelman, CEO / page 9
Aligning Cultural Moments / page 14
When Character Counts / page 24
Activating Employee Engagement / page 28
Whats Working Now In... / page 34
Becoming Brand Storytellers / page 48
Creating News in a New Way / page 54
Data Driven Storytelling / page 64
Telling Stories that Make Both the Brand
and the World Better / page 66
Freshman Class at Edelman / page 76
Index to Presenters and
Panel Participants / page 80

Nancy Ruscheinski
Vice Chair, Client Engagement for Edelman in the U.S.
Director of the Academic Summit
Photo: Nancy Ruscheinski with Tyler Gray, Editorial Director, Edelman NY

Introduction

This years sixth Academic Summit at DePaul University in

Chicago included over 80 professors of communications,
marketing and public relations. Many Edelman clients, including
HP, GE, Starbucks, SC Johnson, Samsung, Darden, Gap, CVS
Caremark, DMI, ConAgra and Mars, participated, as well. We
also had a very broad spectrum of media, including the Chicago
Tribune, Forbes, Quartz, Wall Street Journal, The New York
Times, The Huffington Post and LinkedIn. Finally, we offered
experts in content marketing and amplification via paid media
including Outbrain, Percolate, SimpleReach and Sharethrough.
I was honored to give the opening remarks, in which I noted
that while the idea of brands and corporations telling their stories is not new, the velocity and the proliferation of
channels is new. The pace of change is explosive, and I spoke with the summit attendees about the evolution of the
media, of client-side roles and of the PR agency itself. I asked the academics to begin to think about how we can
continue our partnership as we evolve from marketing communications to communications marketing. And I
urged them to encourage new kinds of talent to enter the PR profession; equip the next breed of PR pros to be at
least conversational, if not fluent, in related disciplines; and embrace new ideas, including (and perhaps especially)
ideas that challenge conventional wisdom.

Some of the important findings from the week included:

1. Authenticity, not Authority. Great content is now table stakes; you have to create experiences around that
content. You need an environment of active thinking and a system for collaboration with the community. If you
are a brand, you now must curate content that presents you as a thought leader (an example is GEs Idea
Exchange). It is now cost effective to drive people to your content through paid media you spend money for
wider reach.
2. The Value of the Long Tail is Nearly Zero. Ed Kim of SimpleReach said that 10 percent of your content drives
90 percent of your traffic. BuzzFeed creates 300 pieces of content per day and only five to 10 of them take off
virally. Content is a game of winners.
3. The Central Role of Employees. For Starbucks.com, the editor Linda Thomas finds hero stories. We need our
people to do emotional storytelling. An example is our relief efforts after a landslide in rural Washington State,
where our employees just spontaneously brought coffee to relief workers. Or a recent portrait of Timothy Jones,
who picks the music for our stores. For AMD, the corporate reputation campaign began with employees selected
to be on the Imagine Team, the tagline was crowd-sourced within the company and the result was a 33 percent
increase in employee confidence within a year. For HPs Stacey MacNeil, The best stories are the ones we tell
ourselves, on the HP News Now site, the source for HP news on any platform.

4. New Requirements of Graduates. The media panel was clear; there are no more general purpose reporters
because deep knowledge of subject is critical. We need graduates who can write and code, who can use tools
that provide graphical proof. They must have an appreciation of aesthetics and understand the user experience.
They must write in a concise fashion, then embrace the social web to maximize their readership.
5. CCO Role at Inflection Point. Gary Sheffer, who is chief communications officer at GE and the chair of the
Arthur W. Page Society, said that the CCO role is being mashed up with the chief marketing officer role. There is
a real sense of urgency on defining the future job of the CCO. Business has been much too quiet on important
issues. The CCO should push his or her company to educate the public on energy, food safety, technology, as the
inside game does not work anymore. He quoted his boss, Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, as saying, We live in a
complicated world. Companies do not exist in isolation. It is an important lesson for leadership on how GE fits
into this world.
6. Future of Agencies. Salman Amin, who runs the North American business of SC Johnson, was eloquent in his
critique of agencies. Agencies are fragmenting and asking CMOs to be brand curators. This will lead to ever
more transactional and less relationship oriented business. We want value creation and it can come from
anywhere. We need multi-disciplinary executives on our business who can go beyond the day to day, to focus on
strategy and innovation. Joanne Lovato of Samsung Mobile added, We want our agencies to get out of their
traditional swim lanes, but also to cooperate on the execution of great ideas. Our goal is marketing ideas you
have never seen before (such as the Jay-Z album launch to Galaxy owners on an exclusive basis the album
went platinum before mass market release).
7. The Broader Mandate of Public Relations. Justin Sikora of Darden noted that the primary function of his social
media group is to respond to customers who are complaining about service. We are an engagement tool. We are
using our community as input for decisions on keeping or removing products from the menu, or testing new
ones. Stephanie Moritz of ConAgra told the story of the pop-top on Chef Boyardee packaging, where the
disappearance from the shelves caused a mini-protest by passionate consumers. So we did a re-launch of the
Easy Open can, with Second City actors who focused on people who were angry that pop tops were being
reintroduced; a bit of tongue in cheek was important. She also identified the most loyal fans of the can and
sent them notes, coupons and the Second City video link.
I am so proud of the Edelman team who took on this labor of love for the academics, most notably Nancy
Ruscheinski, vice chair, client engagement, for Edelman in the U.S. and director of the Academic Summit, whose
infectious enthusiasm for the project made it a great success.

Richard Edelman
CEO, Edelman

Photo: Richard Edelman, lower right in blue suit, with 2014 Academic Summit attendees

Keynote Remarks from Richard

Edelman, CEO / June 26, 2014
Storytelling @ The Speed of Now

Our clients are embracing an always-on and an alwaysready approach to communications. So is Edelman.
Storytelling at the speed of now the theme of this
years Summit is deeply embedded in the DNA of PR.
While the idea of a brand or a corporation telling its
own story, in its own voice, in real-time, may seem
new, its not. In fact, it is simply an evolution of what
we have been practicing in PR for years. What is
different, of course, is the velocity and the proliferation
of channels.
Today, ideas and content must flow furiously at a pulse
rate that the digital landscape demands. But that
quickening doesnt obviate some basic truths. We must
never lose sight of the importance that quality
storytelling and a journalistic mindset have in an
ecosystem where there is simply too much content and
not enough time.

This, among many other reasons, is why I am convinced

that PR is now poised to become a more prominent
discipline in marketing services. More on this in a bit.
First, lets start off with a look at whats now the key
trends we see emerging.
Then I will talk about the future and the role that
you and your students will play in a world where
companies like ours now must seamlessly blend
earned, owned and paid content strategies. (And yes,
I will assign homework.)

Whats Now
Lets begin with an update on whats now. When we
last convened at Stanford University in 2012 I urged
you to equip your students to:
1. Embrace a more visual approach to both show
and tell
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2. Create stories in two styles one thats rational and

built for consumption and another thats more
emotional and therefore more shareable and social
by design
3. Form ideas based on data and insights rather than
relying on instincts alone
The good news is that the more things change, the
more they stay the same. Just as Chicagos own Barack
Obama is still our president and the Cubs remain mired
in mediocrity, these three behaviors still remain
essential to the future of our profession. And, as you
will hear, your graduates are definitely embracing
these behaviors.
We applaud you for your help in making this happen.

While the paywall appears to be working gradually 11

percent of Americans have paid for news and another
11 percent say they would pay, according to Reuters
its not enough to offset these declines. This is
prompting more media owners to diversify their revenue
streams through conferences and, notably, sponsored
content a reimagining of advertorials, product
placement and custom publishing.
So to sum up, editorial is starting to be delivered in
ways that borrow what marketers do well, while
advertising is starting to embody some of what
journalists do well. Yet, the so-called church-state line
between the two thankfully remains in place.
Thats blurred lines.

Still, not all the news is good. Despite our progress,

as an agency and an industry, we have a lot more
work to do. The pace of change is explosive. And we
are impatient.

1. The evolution of media

2. The evolution of client-side roles
3. The evolution of the PR agency

When Leslie Berland, once the social media lead within

PR at American Express, noted with their research
team that card members were highly engaged in using
social media to inform purchase decisions, it inspired a
partnership with Foursquare. This collaboration allowed
AMEX card members to redeem offers whenever they
checked in at participating merchants.

Lets start with the evolution of media. There have been

some notable changes in both editorial and advertising
since we last convened.
First, the press is rapidly moving to an entirely new
approach to editorial that directly reflects the outsized
role that social media plays in the discovery of content.

Notably, the recent and widespread adoption of

automated media buying technologies is putting
tremendous downward pressure on ad prices. In
some cases, digital ad rates have declined by as much
as 75 percent. (TV remains strong though because the
supply of inventory is far smaller and it remains
powerful for scale.)

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All of these examples illustrate an increased focus on

establishing trust with customers by doing the right
thing, demonstrating leadership and putting
engagement and integrity ahead of making money.
Shared value is the new normal. However, this also
creates complexity in how CMOs and CCOs divide
their roles.

Heres an example of how roles are changing.

The Evolution of Media

Second, digital disruption isnt just upending editorial.

Its also dramatically reshaping medias core sources
of revenue.

Consider, for example, the rapid decision by 13 brands

to discontinue their relationship with the Los Angeles
Clippers in the wake of the revelations about owner
Donald Sterlings comments. Or CVS Caremarks
decision to stop selling tobacco and Gaps decision to
raise the minimum wage for its workers.

A second factor is technology. Consumers, for

example, no longer differentiate an engagement with
a corporations call center from a similar interaction
on Twitter. This can cause ambiguity over roles,
organizational structure, skills, partners and budgets.
And it comes just as CEOs are asking both their
CCOs and CMOs to be smarter, leaner, faster and
more measurable.

Specifically, there are three trends that we are

watching closely. The commonality across all three are:
blurred lines.

With information now increasingly finding us through

the lens of our friends, articles are increasingly being
repackaged into far more mobile and shareable formats
like lists, quizzes, slideshows and explainers. This isnt
just a trend at the born-digital publishers, but also at
the larger traditional players, too.

create strong financial returns for shareholders. More

companies now believe that doing good is not just a
nice-to-do but essential for a vibrant business.

The Evolution of Client-side Roles

The program, which was met with widespread praise,

was later replicated on several other social platforms.
And today Leslie Berland is [AMEXs] SVP of digital
partnerships and development, directing eight-figure
marketing budgets.

Its not just the borderline between editorial and

advertising thats blurred. So too are the boundaries
between traditional, client-side marketing and
communications roles.

If tomorrows PR professionals embrace the complexity,

empathize with and satisfy CCOs, but also connect with
and inspire CMOs, they will be in a position to have the
same kind of clout that Leslie Berland does at AMEX.

Across dozens of industries, the typical responsibilities

of the chief communications officer (the CCO) and the
chief marketing officer (the CMO) are increasingly
colliding and overlapping.

The Evolution of the PR Agency

There are two notable factors that are contributing

to this.
First, the public now demands that brands and
corporations both address key societal needs, yet also

The third trend that I want to cover is a dramatic shift

that is taking place in the marketing services
landscape. This is even more profound than whats
happening in the media or on the client side. So I will
spend a bit of time here in addressing these changes
and then the opportunities it creates for your students.

Again, the overarching theme: blurred lines.

Not long ago, in the Mad Men era, agency roles were
very clearly defined. Creative agencies, media buying
firms and PR agencies all had distinct swim lanes
that rarely overlapped. Thats no longer the case.
Today CMOs are increasingly telling us that great ideas
can come from anywhere. They dont put their agency
partners in boxes any more. This blurring of boundaries
between agencies is a tremendous opportunity to
be provocative.
So what then is the future of the PR agency? There are
several ways to look at this.
First, lets examine it from a pure financial perspective.
According to Ad Age, the top 10 PR agencies last year
amassed $4.5 billion in revenues, or four percent of
the marketing services landscape. This is dwarfed,
however, by digital agencies ($10.1 billion), media
buying agencies ($9.2 billion) and advertising agencies
($13.6 billion).
Of these four categories only advertising agencies are
seeing their revenues decline. Why?
That leads into my more philosophical view of
the marketplace.
I am convinced that this is because the era of
marketing communications where classic,
orchestrated advertising leads is now in winter. It is
giving way to an era of communications marketing
where spontaneous storytelling at the speed of now
(everything we are covering this week) is in full bloom.
Lets deconstruct this.
It all starts with a realization that the traditional
meaning of marketing no longer works. In 1959 Philip
Kotler defined marketing as Creating, delivering and
communicating value to customers and managing
customer relationships in ways that also benefit the
organization and its shareholders.
Instead, in this new construct, we see the word
communications becoming more prominent. Guy
Kawasaki, a best-selling author, co-founder of
Alltop.com, former chief evangelist at Apple, wisely
defined communications as follows The goal of
communications is to provide information that moves
people to action.
The market is beginning to share our view that
marketing communications is backwards. It
stresses advertising, selling and image. It rewards
coordinating and pushing messages in one direction
and, all too often, is only about the short-term.

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Thats a broken model.

Communications marketing vs. "marketing
communications, as we see it, marks a return to
more substantive storytelling. And it favors holistic
thinkers who have a PR mindset, an approach thats
social by design and an intense focus on measurable
business impact.
This approach communications marketing is more
than semantics. It stresses relevant, substantive
storytelling, stakeholder engagement, trust and, above
all, shared value for customers, organizations and
shareholders. It does not favor classic advertising or
media buying.
Now, when you combine the quantitative/financial view
of the marketplace and my more qualitative/
philosophical view, I hope you will see the huge
opportunity for PR agencies like Edelman. By carefully
expanding into the suburbs, if you will, by picking our
spots, we will not only expand the remit of PR but also
create new career options for your students.
So what does communications marketing look like in
action? At its core it is about becoming what we call a
living brand. This requires that brands/corporations
be purposeful in how they act, be attuned to multiple
voices and stakeholders and be participatory and social
by design rather than as an afterthought.
A great example is Starbucks, our client. They have
a clear brand platform/purpose, a continuous
connection with key customers/stakeholders, an
emphasis on powerful storytelling at the core and a
belief in personal, human, trusted communications
thats social by design. They neatly stitch all of
these activities together and think, act and then
communicate accordingly.
The recent move by Starbucks to subsidize their
baristas college tuition costs is just the latest example
of this ethos at work. It starts with the CEO but is
pulled through the domain of the CMO and the CCO.
So, given this, what is the role of the PR agency? In
my mind, its simple. We lead with communications
to evolve, promote and protect both brands and
reputations. This is the natural evolution of the PR
agency and its the framework for everything
were doing as a company, and arguably, as an
industry today.
Heres what I mean by that:
Evolve: We help position and transform companies
like GE, Starbucks, eBay, Pepsi, Unilever and
their brands.

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Promote: We help launch products for Samsung,

Kelloggs, SC Johnson and Activision. We create
demand, spark conversations, generate visibility, drive
retail traffic and trigger purchase.
Protect: Finally, we engage in the intellectually
challenging work required to manage crises in real
time, as we did with Penn State and more recently in
Malaysia with MH370. We help to repair sentiment as
weve done for PayPal and HP, and we help clients
navigate reputational attacks like those facing
Chevron and Walmart.
To be sure, media relations and community
engagement remain core capabilities our clients want.
However, in this era of blurred lines between
marketing and communications, between CCO and
CMO, between paid and earned we arent standing
still. We are folding it under a more holistic view as we
expand into the burbs.
Thats an update on whats now themes that
emerged since we last convened.

Whats Next
Now lets turn our attention to more of whats next. I
promised earlier I would assign homework. Here we go.
As you listen and participate in the sessions here at the
Academic Summit, Id like you to begin thinking about
three ways we can continue our partnership as we
evolve from marketing communications to
communications marketing. We need you to:
Encourage new kinds of talent to enter the
PR profession
In the last year, Edelman added over 1,700
people worldwide. Many of these certainly are
classically trained PR professionals who are deep
experts in industry sectors, practices and various
geographic markets.
However, we also added lots of people who have
never worked in PR some of whom youll meet
this week.
They include people like Adam Hirsch, who is an
expert in emerging technology and was once the
COO of Mashable; our new global head of paid
media, Chris Paul, who joined from Publicis Vivaki;
Tyler Gray, who came from Fast Company to run our
creative newsroom in New York, and our new head
of global strategy, Glenn Engler, who was president
at Digitas, the largest global digital agency.
Within Edelman, theres now a growing sense of
urgency to onboard all kinds of specialists who are

not from the classic PR mold. They come to us not

versed in how to write a press release or develop a
media strategy, but instead in specialized crafts
like interface design, ad-tech, analytics, Photoshop
or audience planning.
We want people like developers, analysts, and
planners who, when paired with those who have
journalistic skills and creativity, become a truly
powerful combination.
I encourage you to identify rising stars in your
student body who are experts in these and other
relevant areas. They most likely wont be majoring
in PR, marketing or journalism, but they may be
minoring in these subjects or perhaps they have
crossed your radar in other ways.
Equip the next breed of PR pros to be at least
conversational, if not fluent, in related disciplines
More directly within your control, we need you to
equip your students to be highly fluent in related
disciplines that are intersecting with PR. This is
critical as the era of marketing communications
comes to a close in favor of a new day grounded in
communications marketing.
We need PR graduates to enter our organization
and our industry with at least a base level of
fluency in SEO, social media community
management, digital advertising, content strategy,
photography/videography, design and analytics.
And we need them to join us with a results
orientation. They need to be able to connect
traditional marketing and engagement metrics like
the number of tweets to its impact on business
metrics like purchase intent, lead generation
and sales.

year, not just this week. Be especially on the

lookout for people and ideas that challenge
conventional wisdom.
Encourage your students to test ideas and
prototype efforts to try them out. Fail, fall down and
get back up. Experiment. Look at things in a
different way and get other kinds of people with
different backgrounds (like engineers) to kick the
tires on their ideas.
This is the ethos that allows companies like ours to
urge clients like Walmart to offer affordable fruit
and vegetables in lower-income neighborhoods to
combat obesity or GE to employ Afghanistan and
Iraq war veterans in higher skilled jobs.
We recognize that academia doesnt necessarily
move at the same pace as the corporate world.
But big ideas cannot wait and the CMOs say they
can come from anywhere. Do what you can to
accelerate new ideas, and create an environment
in which big, bold ideas can flourish.
With this in mind, I want to close this morning with a
quote from my father, Dan Edelman, a PR industry
pioneer who, as many of you know, passed away in
January 2013 at age 92. We also last year lost my
mom, Ruth Edelman, another force in our company,
who passed away in October 2013 at age 84.
It is great to be the biggest firm. We must always
strive to be the best firm.
Thank you again for joining us. We greatly value
our friendship with the 80 universities represented
here this week and we look forward to partnering with
you to equip and empower the next generation of
great communicators.

This may sound like a tall order. And it is. But

we dont need them to demonstrate deep expertise
in these areas. We just need them to be curious
about and conversant in these topics so that
they can bridge their emerging expertise in PR to
the other kinds of capabilities and expertise
were developing.
PR generalists will continue to be in demand,
but theyll need to quickly become skilled in
partnering with a different breed of specialist.
Embrace new ideas, including (and
perhaps especially) ideas that challenge
conventional wisdom
Lastly, Id encourage you to be regularly open
to new ideas and perspectives throughout the
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Aligning Cultural
Moments
Storyful: How Storyful Finds and Verifies
Stories Worth Telling:
Mark Little, Founder and CEO, Storyful

Samsung: Real-Time, All The Time: Aligning

Cultural Moments with Brand Moments:
Joanne Lovato, Senior Director, Integrated Brand Marketing,
Samsung Telecommunications America; Nicole Fagin, Marketing Manager,
Social Media, Samsung Telecommunications America

Starbucks: Espresso Yourself: Calling the Shots

on Your Companys Storytelling:
Linda Thomas, Managing Editor for Online News
and Content Strategy, Starbucks

Activision: The Power of Collaborative

Storytelling: Leveraging Online Communities to
Fuel Your Marketing Narrative:
Jonathan Anastas, VP Global Brand Marketing,
Head of Digital and Social Media, Activision

14

15

Aligning Cultural Moments

How Storyful Finds and Verifies

Stories Worth Telling
Storyful is the first news agency thats purposefully built for the social media
age. The companys mantra: Discover. Verify. Deliver. I decided to see what
would happen if I created a news agency from scratch, says founder and
CEO Mark Little. The result is Storyful, the fastest and safest way to separate
valuable content from social noise.

So we use technology and basic forensic analysis, and

start looking at the imagery in the background of the
videos and see a water tower that corresponds in the
video with the images we know are coming out from
established sources of that town. Google is sweeping
across the globe every single day and even with
destruction of this town they can help us locate exactly
where the attacks happened, so we can give context.
We turn this content into a story through old-style
forensic journalism, technological savvy and a gut
instinct about whats right and whats wrong.

Verification, that instinctual knowledge that theres

something not quite right, is in your gut, not in
your algorithm.

The first principle we operate on is discover, that in

this age of social media, influencers create online
communities related to every news event. So we use
technology to find that tiny proportion of the hundreds
of millions of people who actually have something
to say of universal value; theyre the people who
have the information that creates action among the
wider community.
Next, journalists source and verify the most valuable
content. Technology is important here, but its not
enough. Instinct still matters.
For example, Associated Press released a tweet in April
2013 that said the White House was attacked and
Barak Obama had been injured. We thought, this cant
be AP. They dont use that language. We immediately
phoned people at the White House and they said

16

Then we deliver. Last year we saw firsthand imagery

from a Go-Pro camera sitting on top of a tank in a city
in Syria; in front of us another Syrian tank has just
been blown up by a missile. A few minutes later we see
imagery taken by the rebels who fired the missile that
destroyed the tank. For the first time I can remember in
the history of war reporting, we had real-time,
instantaneous storytelling in the power of now from
two angles. But its of no use unless I can turn around
and say that piece of content has some meaning
and context.

1. Its a golden age of storytelling, because

todays great flow of information requires the
skills of expert storytellers. This is a great
time to be alive.
2. There is an eternal value to the concepts
in stories and the truth within them
not just that stories feel true, but that they
are true. And who determines that?
Professional storytellers.

Condensed highlights from Mark Littles presentation

nothing had happened 40 seconds after the tweet we
able to debunk it and tell our partners and clients that
it was false. AP hadnt released that tweet, it was a
hoax tweet, a hack. In our office we believe that you
should always assume everything is wrong before you
think anything else.

4 Insights from Mark Little That

Will Change Your Perspective on
Storytelling

3. You cant just adapt to the changes created

by social media and mobile devices. You have
to think from scratch and start again.

Lesson Learned
What people want most of all is authenticity, says
Mark Little. They want to know that whatever story you
are telling them that its true, that theres something in
it, that it doesnt just feel true, that you as a
professional storyteller are taking the care to show
people that they have in you a partner whos going to
give them authenticity. Theyre not listening to you
because youre a correspondent for a traditional news
outlet; in the social age theyre listening to you because
youre more authentic, because you can give them the
authentic stories within this morass of noise. Theyre
looking for someone like themselves, just smarter.

4. We think we are going through a technological

revolution. Were wrong. This is a cultural
revolution, one in which the values and
instincts that we as storytellers have always
believed in are so much more relevant now.
We just have to adjust those instincts.

The Final Word

In Worstward Ho, notes Mark Little, Samuel Beckett
wrote Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail
again. Fail better. For me, as an innovator, this is the
key, he says. You will not learn lessons from perfectly
structured campaigns that go out there and have a
modicum of success. You are going to learn lessons by
taking small experiments and nine out of 10 will fail.
You learn your lessons from the nine that failed. Unless
we think in term of starting from scratch in what we
teach and what we do, we are not going to match the
revolution thats going on in storytelling, and we will not
sustain this golden age.

This is a condensed version of the

full-length presentation

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Aligning Cultural Moments

In Conversation with Samsung:

Real Time, All the Time

Joanne Lovato

Nicole Fagin

Senior Director,
Marketing,
Samsung

Marketing
Manager, Social
Media, Samsung

Just a couple of years ago Samsungs Galaxy brand was

practically in its infancy. By 2013 it was no. 8 on leading brand
consultancy Interbrands list of strongest brands, and
Advertising Age listed it as the most-viral brand of 2013. Now
Samsung is among the top 5 brands on Twitter and a top-20 on
Facebook. Moderator Andrew Foote, Edelmans general
manager, NY Digital, asked the Samsung marketing and social
media leads what they learned along the way.

Condensed highlights from the conversation

We call it real-time organic
marketing. Joanne Lovato
In July 2013, Samsung
partnered with Jay-Z to offer
a million Galaxy owners his
new Magna Carta CD,
instantly creating a
platinum album and an
exclusive engagement
between the music star, the
brand and Galaxy owners.
Joanne Lovato: This was a completely new
way of approaching an album release we broke
the rules.
Nicole Fagin: Our North Star: How do we make
something better for Galaxy owners. There's no
other way you can make an album better than to
give it to them first and exclusively.
Nicole Fagin: We gave our owners something
that we know that they love. There arent a lot of
brands that can say theyve done that.

18

We relentlessly innovate and get products out there, so we have to work

incredibly fast. Very real time. But thats an advantage because it forces us
to stay relevant, be part of the current conversation. Joanne Lovato
At the 2014 Academy
Awards, host Ellen
DeGeneres, along with
Meryl Streep, Brad Pitt,
Jennifer Lawrence and
other A-list celebrities,
used Samsung
Galaxy Note 3 to take
what became the
most tweeted selfie ever, said by Publicis CEO
Maurice Levy to be worth $1 billion in exposure
for the brand.

Joanne Lovato: The next morning we already had

planned an integration on Ellen. A giveaway. But
then we thought, what else can we do to spread this
moment of joy? Is there a chance for what we call
Galaxy good? My boss said, lets do this. So for
every retweet we donated $1 to Ellens favorite
charities, St. Judes and the Humane Society.

Andrew Foote: Arguably, this has become one of

the most well-known marketing and brand and
media integration moments in history.

Nicole Fagin: Real-time means in the moment and all

the time, 24/7. Thats our life and our DNA and its the
way were set up internally and with our partners.
Whats critical for social is to work with the other
comms teams so we dont do something thats off a
communication strategy or off brand. Working together
internally, externally with agencies is what makes the
magic happen.

Nicole Fagin: We approach things with the idea of

them being social at the core. That doesnt necessarily
mean Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We ask, is this
something that people are going to want to share,
something people are going to talk about?
Joanne Lovato: We are always asking ourselves whats
never been done before? How can we continue to
surprise and wow our consumers?
Joanne Lovato: We put the customer at the core and
provide them with ideas that are surprising and
exciting. Staying authentic is paramount.

Joanne Lovato: In the past two and a half years we

launched about nine flagship mobile products first to
market, first in the industry, category-defining
products. Our marketing had to keep up with that.
Working so quickly and in real-time helps us stay
relevant and able to connect with our consumers in a
more emotional way. We understand who they are, their
pain points, how to make their lives better, how to solve
for those problems, whats happening in culture and
we ride that wave for our brand.
We always put our customer at the core and provide
them with things that are exciting and surprising. To
keep our customers loyal, our goal is to launch unique
initiatives, things they havent seen with other brands.

Nicole Fagin: Those moments dont present

themselves very often. How you react to them
speaks to how well youve trained a team, as well as
how willing you are to take a risk.

4 Things the Samsung Team

Looks for in New Hires
Chemistry with the Team
Ongoing Curiosity
I tell new grads, dont stop reading the
minute you get out of school, says Fagin.
Joanne Lovato: What you dont see is there is
always a fully integrated campaign with digital, social
and experiential behind what we do.

Passion
Resourcefulness

19

Aligning Cultural Moments

Espresso Yourself: Calling the Shots

on Your Companys Storytelling
When Linda Thomas transitioned from award-winning journalist to Starbuckss
one-woman in-house newsroom its first managing editor of online news and
content strategy she not only brought 25 years of tell-it-like-it-is experience to
the job, but the insight to know that while cups of java may be the coffee giants
product, its baristas, growers and customers who caffeinate the brand story.

Condensed highlights from Linda Thomass presentation

She Said What?
The journalism world is shrinking. The number
of new organizations that cover companies like
Starbucks is getting smaller, but yet the number
of people who would be interested in our
company is pretty huge, so thats the audience
Im going for.

The key with any web tool is how are you going to use it,
and Im using news.starbucks.com in a different way
than what was intended.

at the massive mudslide in Oso, Washington, because he

thought it might be perceived as bragging (thats not
our DNA), I recalled what our CEO Howard Schultz had
said as long as a story would make our employees
proud, it was a story worth telling.
I published the story. And the next day? The world was
still spinning. Even better, our social media teams, who
run communities with millions of followers, picked it up
and put it on Google Plus and tweeted it. So obviously,
there were some people who thought, yes, this is the way
that we need to tell stories. Everybody at Starbucks has
a story.
Im creating most of the content for our website right
now, so my life in that respect hasnt changed much
from when I was a journalist. Its all about finding
people, doing the interviews, and trying to craft a great
story built around some emotion.
Its really about serving our community and our
community of customers. There are Starbucks
customers, and I want to write stories that are
interesting to them.

Originally for journalist looking for information about

Starbucks, when I joined the company the site featured
pictures of coffee cups, which I always thought looked a
little lonely. We werent telling our stories in a personforward dimension, and part of that is because it wasnt
a journalist doing the telling. Truth is, journalists see the
world differently.

In making that shift, it does make a lot of my

colleagues uncomfortable that, wait a minute, I
thought you were just writing for the press. Its
like, well yeah, but the press likes interesting
stories. I mean, the idea that the press is
different from the consumer? Not really.

Lesson Learned

Storytelling is about emotion, thats it. And I needed to

find out whether or not I was going to be able to tell the
stories of this company. So when a subject-matter
expert at Starbucks nixed my story about Starbucks
employees who provided free coffee to the rescue teams
20

Stories move hearts and minds and the media. Linda

Thomas believes the needs of the press are no different
than those of customers or SBUX employees. Theyre all
craving good stories. And she would know; stories shes
broken on News.Starbucks.com have been covered by
The Daily Beast and Time. In other words, owning your
brands story might be your most effective media pitch
of all.

The Final Word

The intention of News.Starbucks.com is to still provide
media with information about the company, but equally

Linda Thomas wants the media to see these stories:

Theyll either do their own story based on them or
theyll simply publish them as is, and that happens a lot.
As a journalist, you dont want somebody to steal your
story, but now I think, please, somebody, steal my story.

4 Ways Linda Thomas Went from

Journalist to Brand Storyteller
1. I get asked if I still think of myself as a
journalist. I do, because journalism is a way
you view the world, and that has not changed.
Granted, the parameters have changed, but
what I do telling peoples stories, bringing
out that emotion, telling a story that the
reader will connect with because they identify
with that person that hasnt changed.
2. Part of the difference between PR and
journalism is that Im always thinking a little
bit differently, and its not that its better or
worse, dark or light side. Its just different,
and I wanted to use this tool as I did to tell a
couple of different stories.
3. Ive done more with analytics and strategy
in the last six months than I did in 25
years as a journalist. Journalists are not
necessarily driven by analytics. I know that
at a certain level of any organization, any
news organization, they know what stories are
working, what people are working and what
people are not working in terms of their Q
factor, but its good for journalists to care and
know how their stories are performing as
well. Thats something in that world I didnt
know about.
4. We think we are going through a technological
revolution. Were wrong. This is a cultural
revolution, one in which the values and
instincts that we as storytellers have always
believed in are so much more relevant now. We
just have to adjust those instincts.

This is a condensed version

of the full-length presentation

21

Aligning Cultural Moments

1. We partnered with YouTube influencers, each of
whom updated their YouTube channel with a
background wallpaper that said, The Ghosts Are
Real. This sent a shockwave through the Call of
Duty community. All our fans were talking about it
and asking, What does this mean? With the
community captivated, we then gave them a way to
get all the answers to their questions.

Activision

When Jonathan Anastas, head of digital and social media at Activision, was
preparing to launch the newest installment of the Call of Duty series, one of the
biggest franchises in video game history, he knew a new game demanded a
new marketing approach. In a few short years, the Call of Duty series had grown
from a game marketed to gamers into a worldwide phenomenon. Rather than
force Call of Duty fans to wait for the big reveal, Jonathan and his team asked
them to pull back the curtain themselves.

Condensed highlights from Jonathan Anastass presentation

Opening Up a Two-lane Marketing Highway
At Activision, we work on some of the biggest
franchises in gaming. Our fans arent just passionate
about games; theyre crazy about them. Yet,
traditionally, our advertising focus was very one way:
big reveal
big trailer
big TV spot

Before, we researched reporters and had lists of

journalists that we invited to events.
Now, those reporters might be teenagers, online
celebrities or a dad filming YouTube videos with his
son and daughter. Its like theyre the new
professional press.

22

You cant buy that kind of passion. Those millions of

social interactions and video viewers werent the result
of a big TV advertising buy or sponsored content on
YouTube. It was all organic.

When youre a marketing perfectionist living in

this world, its really scary to think about giving
the keys to your brand to somebody else and
wondering, What are they going to do?

Rethinking the Media List

Empowering your community goes beyond reaching out

to them for big announcements. Its a complete change
in terms of how you think of media.

Results were huge. The campaign generated 12 million

impressions from 36,000 people that engaged with us
in less than 12 hours. By the time we unveiled our key
asset the reveal trailer on YouTube our entire
community was on edge and ready to engage.

He Said What?

Weve shifted to a two-way communications marketing

strategy. We have an engaged social community of
about 30 million people. It was time to give them a
larger voice. So, when it came time to unveil Call of
Duty: Ghosts, we let our fans lead the reveal. The
results were beyond anything we imagined.

Until recently, we wouldve paid for most of the

promotion when unveiling a new video game like Call of
Duty: Ghosts, but theres a shift now where you
prioritize empowering your community and your
biggest fans. Every individual is a media company in
their own right. Its a shift from a paid model to an
earned model. If we provide our fans the right content
and a big platform, theyll amplify it exponentially.

2. We created a giant mosaic on the front page of

CallofDuty.com. It was entirely blank at the start,
and we asked our community to help fill it in. Piece
by piece, fans added their profile picture to the
mosaic with a unique hashtag. When it was
completed, the mosaic revealed a key piece of art
for Call of Duty: Ghosts and confirmed the next
game in the franchise.

The Lines Blurred to Reveal

a Bigger Opportunity

Unlock the Passion of Your Fans

and Stand Back
What does empowering your community mean? When
unveiling Call of Duty: Ghosts, we built buzz by first
reaching out to our most influential fans. Then we
invited the entire community to join in. Heres how we
did it:

The advertising, public relations and marketing worlds

are coming together. With Call of Duty: Ghosts, we had
a very high production asset: our reveal trailer. That
trailer was created by a traditional advertising agency
with a high level of expertise in telling linear stories.
Then, we amplified that key asset using digital, social,
earned and paid media to get as many people to watch
that trailer as possible.

Dealing with Growing Pains

With the explosion of content marketing and social
channels, you constantly need more content, which

means your community of loyal fans is more valuable

than ever before. You have to increasingly count on your
audience to make content for you.
However, then the question becomes, how much do you
support the organic content creators vs. your
professionally developed content? For example, if you
never break your own news, people will eventually stop
visiting your website and social channels. You need to
strike a balance when relying on your community since
even your biggest fans could disappear. You cant
control what brand they might someday work for or
what game they could write about.
You still have to prioritize your platforms and provide
your audience a compelling reason to engage with
you directly.

The Final Word

High-quality advertising assets arent going away, but
now you also must have earned media, social media
and paid media driving them. Thats the model right
now. You have to do all of it.

The Takeaway: Why Activision

Embraced the Power of
Collaborative Storytelling
1. Building a story with your audience is
increasingly important to capture their
attention in todays crowded, noisy
environment.
2. Tapping into your communitys passion greatly
amplifies marketing efforts with the ripple
effect of earned media.
3. Empowering your fans lends brands
authenticity, credibility and added reach, but it
also means they have to realize theyre no
longer the gatekeepers of their story.
4. Encouraging your audience to create
content can help you satisfy your followers
insatiable demand for it.

This is a condensed version

of the full-length presentation

23

When Character
Counts
Telling the Story of Corporate Character: How Companies
Tell the Story of Their Beliefs, Values, Purpose and
Actions in a Changed Communications Environment:
Gary Sheffer, Vice President, Communications and Public Affairs, GE

24

25

When Character Counts

Telling the Story

of Corporate Character
For Gary Sheffer, GEs vice president, communications and public affairs,
corporate character isnt a tagline or an ad campaign, but an integral part of an
organizations past, present and future. GEs story and ability to tell that story
doesnt exists apart from its corporate character, he says, it exists because of
its corporate character.

Condensed highlights from Gary Sheffers presentation

Its important to note that were not communicating
character in a vacuum. To be effective we must
understand the external context in which were
communicating, which we do through a series of
research and measurement tools and efforts. This helps
us understand not only how people are feeling, but
whether they trust us and know us.

Why Corporate Character Matters Not Only

to GE, But to You
External forces have changed both what it means to
communicate and the worlds expectations of
enterprises, particularly big companies like GE.

How GE Defines Corporate Culture

Corporate character isnt a phrase that we dreamed up
at GE, but a carefully calibrated response to the
question of what is needed in corporate
communications today. Corporate character is a
companys beliefs, values, purpose, action. What does
an enterprise exist to do in the world? What are the
values and principles that guide the daily decisions and
behaviors of everyone associated with it? Corporate
character is what makes you different from your
competitors and from everyone else.

26

The social media revolution means that everyone is

now a publisher, broadcaster, and networker, and it has,
in turn, shifted influence from the hands of a relative
few to the fingertips of many. This shift of influence
means that much greater transparency is expected
from business. Companies cant remain hidden
behind brands.

You must assume that all messages will reach all

audiences. So corporate character is the framework for
guiding communications and ultimately managing
reputation in this changed and complex environment.

Why Authenticity Must be at the Heart of

Corporate Character
To define our corporate character our communications
team spent a year talking and listening to our
employees the people who build the jet engines, the
gas turbines, the diagnostic equipment, to understand
how people viewed their role and GEs role in the world.
These are people who have a passion for aviation, or for
finding a cure for cancer, or for finding the cleanest,
most efficient ways to generate power.
And heres where we landed: Building, powering,
moving and curing the world. Those are the four things
people told us they do. Its a statement that cuts across
every business unit within our company that uniquely
defines us in the marketplace, that connects us with
our customers, our shareholders, and our communities.

He Said What?
When I started at GE my job was to keep three
people happy; The Financial Times reporter, The
Wall Street Journal reporter, and The New York
Times reporter. And if I did that, it was a good
day. Today that consumes about one-tenth of
my energy.

How Storytelling Drives Corporate

Character and Vice Versa
To engage audiences through their shared belief in an
organizations unique character and mission, spur them
to act on those beliefs by buying products or liking your
content, and then encourage them to advocate on your
behalf, you need to communicate great stories about
who you are and what you do, but always through the
lens of your companys corporate character.

The Takeaway: 4 Benefits of a

Strong Corporate Character
1. Consistency in messaging.
2. Credible and believable communications
because it comes from a place of authenticity.
3. Increased engagement among our employees
because we and they are telling their story.
4. Stronger bonds with stakeholders based on
their shared belief and support for our values
and purpose, which moves them to action
supporting policy, taking a job, investing in
the stock, purchasing our products, or simply
becoming advocates online.

Today as a communications professional I

spend more time on culture supporting,
understanding, creating, curating than I do on
public relations. Increasingly, this is the need
from CEOs: Help me articulate, uphold and
communicate our values and create a strong
culture around it.
Fifteen years ago when I came to GE, if I
told the head of HR that I wanted to work on
culture, define it and roll it out, I would have
been told to go back to my computer and start
writing some press releases. The fundamental
difference is that today thats exactly what
leaders of your businesses and your companies
want from communicators.

27

Activating
Employee
Engagement
Why Emotion Matters in B2B Storytelling:
Colette LaForce, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, AMD

Storytelling from the Inside Out:

Stacey MacNeil, VP Employee Engagement, HP

28

29

Activating Employee Engagement

Why Emotion Matters in

B2B Storytelling
When Colette LaForce, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at
semiconductor maker AMD, conducted the largest brand survey in the
companys history, the results were startling and challenging. Respondents
were confused about what the brands stood for, they wanted more emotion
infused into the brand and they felt the brand wasnt aspiring to be all it could
be. Heres how she used storytelling to help turn the brand around.

Condensed highlights from Colette LaForces presentation

She Said What?
For a company thats a semiconductor company
that has about 70 percent of its employees in
the engineering organization were a very
data-driven, very technology-oriented company
it was a big shock to the system to learn that
our buyers wanted us to reach them on a more
human level.
Today, we have 10,000 phenomenal storytellers
at AMD.

win in the future. We came back and said we need to

become a purpose-based brand.
AMD had never thought about that. We had not
historically talked to our employees or our customers in
these terms. So we created a framework that started
with purpose, that aligned to our corporate values, and
then we created a mission. We were aspirational, saying
AMD is going to help people push the boundaries of
what is possible.

About a year and a half after embarking on this journey

to infuse emotion in our story, this is a transformed
AMD. This is a company that is successfully meeting
the commitments in terms of our transformation and
the strategy weve put in place. We have the highest
employee engagement weve had in five years and were
a unified brand now. Our customers tell us they see it
every day. Our people feel it. Today we have 10,000
phenomenal storytellers at AMD.

We created a video as part of our all-staff global

webcast, with 10,000 people tuning in. At AMD we
design, we integrate, and we innovate. We do this every
day. We make it happen, the voiceover said. We are
AMD. Enabling today. Inspiring tomorrow. We always
have a Q&A at the end of these webcasts, and the first
question we got was when can I show that to my
customers or my mom or my sister or my family? The
next question was from Beijing, who asked when we it
would be translated into Chinese. And it spiraled from
there. We realized our own employees were starving
for this.

The Takeaway: 4 Things

AMD Did to Immerse its Brand
in Storytelling
1. Change Up the AMD Narrative: We had to
create a new story.

Introduce a Dynamic New Brand Look

and Feel

In my experience when faced with the challenge of

redefining the brand, most CMOs gather the brightest
marketers, a couple great agencies, a few consultants
have secret meetings present back to the CEO. I
decided to do something different.

30

The Final Word

Produce a Compelling Global

Webcast Video

That is a level of emotion we had never put into the

story at AMD. It was our new brand framework, the
springboard from which all of our news, storytelling
models, our look and feel, everything, would come. This
is where the all-employee Imagine Team took us.

Imagining a New Way to Create a Brand

Storytelling Framework

I created the Imagine Team one person each from HR,

operations, sales, strategy and finance; two from
marketing; two engineers. We went away for two days.
The idea was to have our employees infuse emotion
about the brand into the discussion so our partner
agency could better understand from the teams
perspective what it meant to be at AMD and what it
meant for us relative to the competition and how wed

So we crowd sourced our tagline internally. It was a

$5,000 cash prize to the winner. I was terrified,
thinking that we werent going to get anything out of it
or that I was going to get in a ton of trouble with legal,
but it worked and we did it the right way. We had 1,600
entries. The winner who came up with what is today our
tagline, Enabling Today, Inspiring Tomorrow, was an
engineering intern in our Toronto office, which gave
such a boost to the engineering team, to think that
one of their own had really captured the essence of
our story.

Engaging Employees to Believe in and

Bring Alive the New Brand Story
Crowdsource a Brand Tagline: Our CEO, Rory Read,
asked if we were going to have a new corporate tagline.

We came up with gaming as a way to bring our brand

alive externally, because our products are in the worlds
top-selling game consoles. So we partnered with the
top game developers in the world to create a series of
ads that we call If It Can Game. Its premise is that if
our products can do something for your favorite gaming
character, imagine what they can do for you. Because
the same technology that enables the experience you
have with your games is the technology that you can
now have in your laptop or PC. Very simple. No talk of
speeds and feeds. No technical text.

2. Refresh the Companys Look and Feel: It was

becoming dated. It was fragmented. It was
confusing.
3. Infuse Emotion into the AMD Story: We
needed to add emotion without losing the value
propositions and the DNA of what AMD had
become.
4. Galvanize Employees: How could we involve
them in a way that they would embrace the
notion of AMD as a purpose-driven brand,
a brand that was rooted in outcomes and
aspirations?

31

Activating Employee Engagement

Storytelling from the Inside Out

them no guidelines about what to say. It was a big risk

because we were still in the thick of the crisis and we
didnt know if anyone would believe there was a great
future for HP.

At the time our marketing department had come out

with Make it Matter. We thought, who makes it matter
at HP? Our employees, thats who. We Make it Matter.

We also realized that we spend all this money on events

but we never send employees to them so theres no
word of mouth, no buzz. So we designed a contest and
asked employees to write in 250 words how they would
make it matter by going to HP Discover. We told the
10 winners they couldnt just come to the event. It
wasnt a vacation. So we made them reporters,
blogging and taking pictures and explaining very
complex things like the hybrid cloud and the converged
infrastructure and storage systems. It too was a risk
since these people werent professional reporters. But
we got the most wonderful stories.

So when [CEO] with Meg Whitman would go around the

world visiting employee locations, talking about the HP
strategy, we created walls where employees could
physically write their commitment, their feelings, their
thoughts, their story, how they want to make it matter
at HP. The employees in Singapore were so proud of
their wall that they moved it to the lobby and had their
pictures taken with it.

The Takeaway: 5 Things Stacey

MacNeil says is Transforming HP
Employees from Passive Observers
to Active Contributers

On the first day responses were received I asked my

director of news and information if wed gotten any
submissions. She said weve got a few. A few hours
later we had 50, then 75, then 150, then 250. And they
are wonderful, beautiful, passionate, videos.

Buffeted by changing strategies, questionable acquisitions, six CEOs in six years

and a plummeting stock price, HPs employees were not invested in the
companys future. It was up to HPs VP of global employee communications,
Stacey MacNeil, not only to help turn around the company, but to use
storytelling to turn its 330,000 employees into brand ambassadors.

Condensed highlights from Stacey McNeils presentation

We were talking to customers, to partners, to the
media, to industry analysts, to financial analysts, to
shareholders. But not to employees. We had a
corporate communications team but it was putting
out fires. It wasnt focused on employees.
I told my team: Think like a strategic marketing engine,
execute like a newsroom.
We developed HP News Now as a groundbreaking
internal news source. We:
Produce hard copy and video
Tag all of our stories so related stories pop up
Give employees the ability to comment on, rate and
share stories
Organize news by latest and most popular
Include personal news streams and external news so
whenever HP or a competitor is mentioned in the
media we let employees know it.
Promote events, breaking news and quarterly earnings
One of our top videos was [CEO] Meg Whitman
talking about the best career advice shed ever gotten.
I was amazed that people started writing their own
stories about the best advice they ever got. So its
just incredible because its really unlimited to what
can happen.
We also do the tough stories, with a series called
Teachable Moment where we tell stories of things gone
wrong at HP deals that weve lost and how we messed

32

up. We talk about what we should have done better and

about the lessons learned.
During its first year, HP News Now generated than
7.54 million page views and 22,000 comments from
employees in more than 140 countries.

She Said What?

I was excited because as someone with a news
background creating a functioning newsroom
was a passion of mine. I had a big a-ha moment
one day when one of my staff came and said we
dont know what a newsroom is, youre terrifying
us. I said, oh, okay. Let me help you understand
it. So I turned the whole team upside down and
said youve all got new jobs. We wrote new role
descriptions, new job functions. Now we have
managing editors, reporters, project managers,
publishers, production services and more.

Create an internal rallying cry.

Engage people in interesting ways.

One of the mistakes we made in the past was whatever
we did for the media a five-page press release, a
10-page FAQ, a spec sheet we just give that to
employees and thought theyd just assimilate what they
needed from it. It doesnt happen that way.
So now we do infographics. We do interactive maps. We
do contests to incent and engage employees.
Weve even done video tutorials, the success of which
blew my mind. For instance, we did an event and we
explained a complex subject and it really caught on
the who, what, when and why. The financial team got all
excited about it and said we want to do video tutorials
about finances. Im said okay, lets try that. They made
video tutorials on how to read a balance sheet and
whats free cash mean and why isnt important to this
company. It got 28,000 views. It was amazing.
Dont let any stories go to waste.

Make sure our employees know we care what

they think.
We asked employees to submit a 10-second video
starting with I believe HP has a great future because.
I told my boss that it was going to be like gorilla
communications not beautiful, but authentic.

Olympics. We use our news portal and say heres whats

going on. We bring the external event inside.

We spend an enormous amount of money on events for

our customers, for our partners, for our shareholders,
talking about HP products, about solutions, about
value, about competitive advantage. But we never spent
a dime talking to employees about those things.
Now we cover HP Discover, our premier technology
event for business and IT professionals, as if its the

1. To accompany its internal newsroom, HP

created a new measurement tool: the HP News
Now Engagement Index, which uses a weighted
formula that takes into account whether a
piece of content was visited, rated, commented
upon and shared. Average engagement level
in FY 2013 was around 19; by January 2014,
it soared to almost 40, proving employees are
becoming more knowledgeable, engaged and
invested in the companys turnaround effort.
2. After all that employees had been through there
still was energy, passion, commitment to the
company and resiliency. It was a huge learning
e to never underestimate the power of the
everyday person.
3. Give employees a reason to care and theyll
begin to feel passionate about the culture they
want to revitalize within the company.
4. Use formats that will be relevant to employees
and they will engage with it.
5. There is tremendous power in employees
themselves being a part of HP experiences and
going back and telling their colleagues.

It was the first time we gave employees a platform to

share their voice and their opinion unfiltered. We gave
33

Whats Working
Now In...
Content Marketing:
Kiva Kolstein, Head of Business Development, Percolate / Sam Decker,
CEO, MassRelevance / Shane Snow, Chief Creative Officer, Contently / Paul
Berry, Founder and CEO, RebelMouse

Storytelling in a Regulated Market:

Dirk van Eeden, Senior Director, Abbvie / Simon Goldberg, Global
Marketing Director Abbott / Debbie Robertson, Social Media Director,
Digital & Mobile, Cancer Treatment Centers of America

Paid:
Eddie Kim, Founder and CEO, SimpleReach / Jon Tauber, Head of Sales,
Central Region, Outbrain / Nate Goslin, Head of Strategy, Sharethrough

Sponsored:
Sebastian Tomich, VP, Advertising, The New York Times / Baomy Wehrle,
Account Director, Brand Strategist, Huffington Post / Robin Riddle, Global
Publisher, WSJ Custom Content Studios, WSJ

Traditional:
Bill Adee, VP, Digital Stuff, Chicago Tribune / Lewis Dvorkin, Chief Product
Officer, Forbes Media / Jay Lauf, President & Publisher, Quartz

34

35

Whats Working Now In...

management, community management, the agency. So
how do you create efficiencies in that process? Thats
what were doing.

Content Marketing

Is Content Marketing a buzzword? Will anyone have the same definition? With
millions of pieces of content being produced every minute, it is becoming more
and more critical to stay on top of the latest changes and strategies on content
marketing. Adam Hirsch, Panel Moderator; Executive Vice President, Global Digital Practice, Edelman

Sam Decker: The drive behind Mass Relevance was that

there was a lot of creating content into social networks,
into Facebook, into Twitter, etc. Those are screens that
your customers, your audience, might see, but yet
where was the social in all the other screens? So we
built a software platform to aggregate, curate, filter
and visualize real-time social content and experiences
into TV shows, into websites, into apps anywhere
you want.

advertisements. Its building

relationships instead of
interrupting people.
Paul Berry: Content marketing is
brands acting as real publishers.

Kiva Kolstein

Sam Decker

Shane Snow

Paul Berry

Head of
Business
Development,
Percolate

CEO, Mass
Relevance

Chief Creative
Officer,
Contently

Founder
and CEO,
RebelMouse

3 Questions, 4 Visionaries, Lots

to Think About
What is Content Marketing?
Kiva Kolstein: Content marketing is aimed at an
audience, matched to a platform, triggered by an event,
aligned with a business objective and created in the
voice of the brand.
Sam Decker: In principle, content marketing is the
practice of an editorial bridge between the passions of
an audience and the objectives of the brand and being
able to create something that is engaging to the tasks
and topics that audiences care about before they care
about the brand or the product.
Shane Snow: Content marketing is marketing through
giving rather than asking. Its stories, not
36

Kiva Kolstein: Percolate built tools

around content calendaring, so that
all of the content you plan to
publish over the next six, 12 or 18 months can live in
one place. Tools around creating efficiencies for how
that content is created if you think about all the
people that get involved in the content creation process,
youve got design, editorial, and legal and brand

The Takeaway: Whats the Next

Big Thing?
Kiva Kolstein: There will be more than 6 billion
users on the Internet by the end of this year, the
middle class will grow from 2 billion today to 5
billion by 2030, GM is already selling more cars in
China than it is in the US. Taking advantage of
economic transformation is where its at.
Sam Decker: The problem isnt technology; the
problem is process, workflow, and organizational
structure. Companies are built up as functional
silos and the biggest challenge of making this all
work is integrating social into the fabric of every
function of the company: the ad people, the
website people, the event people, etc. Invest in
things that help that, from a technology
perspective.

Condensed highlights from the conversation

How Does Your Company

Reflect Content
Marketing Today?

its going to come down. If you know that flow, then you
begin immediately learning and pretty good at placing
it. So at RebelMouse we make it really easy for
companies to replace their ads with their content.

Shane Snow: At Contently, weve been thinking about

how to measure the results of content marketing.
Basically we decided that most brand publishers are
measuring very stupid things like vanity metrics, shares
and page views and things that dont actually tell you if
a person cares more about your brand or if theyre
more likely to be your advocate.
So we built a tool called Insights, which tracks how
much people engage with your content. The timer stops
if they go, get up and make a sandwich, and it starts
again when they come back and read more. We track
what they do and how they engage with your brand over
repeat interactions.
Then, because most brands dont get much value out
of a dump of data or charts, we tell brands: here are
the factors that went into the content that engaged your
audience the most, that built better relationships and
heres what you should make next.
Paul Berry: Publish a flow, a stream of your content
and find what works. Tune in to it constantly and accept
that your hit, which will give you, like Im a traffic
junkie, so its like a drug when youre on your way up.
And you just have to accept, that like any crack addict,

Shane Snow: The future, which is storytelling, is

actually the thing that has mattered consistently
throughout, no matter what was going on in
business or advertising.
Paul Berry: Used to be all you had to do was be
good at content and you could create a massive
and successful business. Where we are now is that
youre finding from your social networks, like,
maybe I have 1,000 friends on Facebook, but who
are the 50 who also care about, say, the plight of
animals? Thats an affinity network and the way
the web is structured right now, the audiences are
waiting. So if you pick your topic and you own it
and you wake up every day and you have a team
who are about that, youre going to create this
affinity network of people who believe thats their
identity, thats who they are. Thats the really
exciting time we live in now.

This is a condensed version of the

full-length presentation

37

Whats Working Now In...

Regulated Environments

Given the highly regulated nature of the healthcare industry, its engagement online
presents unique challenges. In fact, with the emergence of social media guidelines,
The Affordable Care Act and the continued oversight and scrutiny of the FDA, the
issues are getting even more complex, notes Sean Conley, VP, Edelman, Health, who
moderated our panel on regulated environments. Heres how some industry leaders
are responding to todays barriers and tomorrows opportunities.

way, sort of levity, but you are actually allowed to use

an abbreviation for the chemical the indication and
risk information. Then you also have to provide a link
to additional risk information at which point the
marketing guys and the finance guys have no room to
add anything. The regulatory guys have taken up all
the space.

He Said What?
Dirk Van Eeden, Senior Director, Public Affairs,
AbbVie, on some of the folks whose concerns
he has to address: Legal, compliance, IT and a
risk-adverse C suite I call them the four
horsemen of the social apocalypse.

Condensed highlights from the conversation

information that reaches the public is accurate and
actually in their interest; and thats where we see a
challenge because theres an inherent conflict between
giving freedom to pharmaceutical companies as a
group that has a financial interest in making the public
aware of their products in the disease areas at the
same time that it wants to make sure that people get
critical information they can trust.

Dirk
van Eeden

Simon
Goldberg

Debbie
Robertson

Senior Director,
Public Affairs,
AbbVie

Global Marketing
Director, Digital
& Mobile,
Abbott

Social Media
Director, Cancer
Treatment
Centers
of America

On the Value Health Care Companies Bring

to the Conversation
Simon Goldberg: The inherent value for working social
is the data that you can learn from being on the
platforms. One of the things that weve learned after
about two and a half years of being on Twitter is that
the engagement we get is never higher than when we
tell people, for example, if you do these five things,
then your risk for heart disease will decrease. Thats
what people are looking for from us.
Dirk van Eeden: The value is to make sure that people
know about their diseases, to make sure they know
about their treatment options

Dirk van Eeden: There are three challenges. First, the

mission from the FDA is to make sure that the

38

Finally, in June 2014 the FDA actually issued guidance

on how to use Twitter as meaningful education. Very
loose guidance. 140 characters is all you have, but you
have to include the brand name of the product, the
chemical or generic name of the product oh, by the

I have no business talking about how great CTCA is. No

one wants to hear that from me. They want to hear it
from somebody who has actually experienced it, and
gone through it, and had cancer, and what their journey
has been. Its very powerful. It has been very effective
for us. Cancer is a very personal story and patients
want to share that story and theyre doing it in droves
across all social media. So people are coming and they
are sharing a personal story, and whether theyre a
patient of ours or not, we still interact with them
because it really is important. Weve seen that
exponentially grow for us.
My teams job has been to show the power of what
these stories really can mean and we have used
insights from the stories within social channels to bring
them to a more mass audience. Weve gotten much
better about how we integrate with other channels, too.

She Said What?

Senior leaders know social is important, says
the CTCAs Debbie Robertson. They just dont
know to effectively use it. So I was asked would
you like more budget to go toward paid? And I
said no. I want my money going toward content
and content development that engages our
patients so they can unlock the insights and the
value, and then we can amplify that with paid
media if we need to.

On Using Social to Go Directly to

the Consumer

Second, while we live in an era where information is

everywhere, the result of all of [the rules and
regulations] is that very often the people who know
most about the drug the people who actually develop
the drug are not in a position to communicate
about it.

On the Challenges to Going Social Faced

by the Health Care Industry:

that program has grown to thousands and thousands

of patients. And when we started our social program
we knew that was a big part of what we needed to be
able to tap into because nobody else can tell your story
better than your own [customers].

Simon Goldberg: For us, its a process:

First, build a global framework.

On Using Social to Build Brand Advocates

Debbie Robertson: When our founder started the
company back in the 1990s we had patients say we
really want to be out there advocating for your brand.
So we had a group of patients who started that. Now

We need to think about the channels; the most efficient

channels are the digital ones because they reach the
most people with the least amount of resource put to
them. So when I think about those channels I think
about dot coms and social. Mobile is actually in the
background. Mobile happens when you build good
digital channels. We need to make sure that theres an

39

Whats Working Now In...

internal operation that can support all of that. The last
piece from a globalizing perspective and thinking about
internal operations is that we cant bite off more than
we can chew. So if you think about the fact that two or
three years ago we didnt have a single social channel.
If were suddenly going to have 15 of them, thats
really not going to work. Thats going to be enormous
risk to our brand, to our company, to our people, to
everything that we stand for.

Finally, drive advocacy.

Advocacy is that last piece. To have advocates is cash
in the bank. Those are the people that will support you
when you hit troubling times.

Supercharged PR: Using Paid to

Amplify Earned & Owned Media

Then localize that global framework so it works in the

geographies into which were going.

For many years the currency of PR was only earned impressions, usually
estimated based on an overnight TV rating or a publications circulation
numbers. What is it about the current communications landscape that makes
paid content syndication of owned or earned content an essential piece of the
puzzle today? Chris Paul, panel moderator; Global Director, Paid Media, Edelman New York

So its easy to think about English-speaking countries

and the solutions to that. Twitter is important,
Facebook, Instagram, dot coms, and it goes on.
Maybe You Tube if we have enough money to fulfill
that channel.
When you go to Brazil, though, you absolutely need to
have You Tube. Thats the biggest channel that gets
used there. Then when you go to China its all about
Weibo and Renren, and that may change at any
moment because the government. And so just thinking
about that localization is incredibly difficult.

He Said What?
Simon Goldberg, Global Marketing Director,
Digital Mobile & Social, Abbott, on the result of
the unique challenges health care communicators
face in social: Were three to four years behind
non-regulated industries.

You know, we have a legal team on the ground in the

U.S. that says, if you think about Weibo we need to
have a Chinese lawyer, we need to understand that
people do banking on Weibo. There are all sorts of
interesting applications that people use in other
countries such as banking. And so we need to be very
clear about what were going to do, what were not
going to do, and the channels for an application.
Next, find engaging stories.
So storytelling: its not about creating advertisements.
Its about creating a story that stakeholders will engage
with. Is storytelling the same globally as it is locally?
No, absolutely not. Engagement, you can define as
people embracing your story, people wanting to be part
of your story, which builds up to advocacy.

40

Condensed highlights from the conversation

The Takeaway: 3 Things

Todays Students Need to Know
About Communicating in
a Regulated Environment
1. Forget about the technology: Technology is
just a tool; its the plumbing in the walls. Think
about what it is that you want to achieve and
ultimately who is your audience, how do you
serve their interests? Then the audience will
come.

Eddie Kim

Jon Tauber

Founder
and CEO,
SimpleReach

Head of Sales,
Central Region,
Outbrain

Nate
Gosselin
Head of
Strategy,
Sharethrough

2. Listen up! Writing is always going to be key

to effectively communications, being able to
have a conversation in a business setting and,
importantly, listening the art of listening.
3. Understand the integrated marketing model.
Social doesnt happen in a silo. Digital doesnt
happen in a silo. Everything works more
effectively together when its an integrated plan
and you understand how it affects regulatory,
how it affects advertising, how it affects digital
and social, and how they all work together.

Taking Advantage of Todays Opportunities

Eddie Kim: One of the things about social is that it
created a unique opportunity for the first time in
history, in which you could reach your customer without
anyone interfering or anybody going and collecting rent.

What Eddie Kim means when

says that the idea that content
publishers, creators, or marketers
shouldnt invest to distribute their
own content is really an analog
way of thinking.
In the analog world all content was bundled into
the newspaper or magazine. You couldnt market
a particular story even if you wanted to. And when
that translated over into the digital world, all of a
sudden stories became unbundled from the paper
itself, so that you had that ability. Thats
something completely new. But the values a lot of
the publishers and content creators still hold onto
are from the analog world. The nature of digital
has changed all that. You have to go and play by
the new rules, and if you dont you cant succeed.
Distribution and paid distribution is fundamental
to that.

Think about that: in any other medium, whether it was

television, radio, print, even a billboard or handing out
a flier, you could get your messaging out, but someone
was going to charge you in some way for it. Today,
Starbucks can push out a message to millions of
people and not a single person collects anything.

41

A Couple of Watch Outs

Is Church and State Passe?

John Tauber: If youre reading an article or watching a video and click on a recommendation at the bottom
and you feel like what you were sent to was an ad or you feel like youve been duped, thats a bad user
experience. Ultimately thats the sniff test. If you feel like you are reading an ad, you probably are.
Chris Paul: This is a complex space to play in. Its very different taking the time to co-create or produce
something on your own that you feel meets the standard of something people want to consume something
that doesnt feel like an ad yet at the same time there is this impetus, and anytime youre getting into
something of that level of investment, resources and complexity, to throw in all your product attributes, as a
brand, to get a really high ROI out of that. But you need to take a cue from companies like Pepsi, Red Bull and
Starbucks and say Im creating content that simply furthers the understanding of my brand essence.

What that means, however, is you now have to go and

earn and retain your own audience. You had to go and
create the equivalent amount of value that Im going to
get if I choose to follow a friend of mine on Twitter,
another company or publication. You have to compete
at that level. To take advantage of the fact that you have
this incredible free distribution channel, you have to
create value, whether its through content that
entertains, educates or inspires. So its not that content
has changed, its that this opportunity this free
distribution channel came and to succeed in it you
have to create content.

new world that they need to start monetizing. So this

has become a way for publishers to monetize with
quality content. And for a brand, its an opportunity for
them to take this new content they are starting to
create, whether its branded editorial or video or even
social content like Instagram and Vine, which I think
you are seeing a lot of brands embrace, and to put that
into the overall feed.

John Tauber: I dont know that I buy off that

those lines have always been clear cut historically.
I think as new technologies come forward you are
going to have to figure out how that principle
applies to that space.
Eddie Kim: We are adamant that church and state
needs to exist and it is largely to protect the
publishers because at the end of the day what
they are selling now is their brand equity and
anything they do to compromise that is a losing
business model.

selling than they pay us on a cost-per-click basis. So

thats the value proposition an instant opportunity for
both the publishers who have installed us on their site
to monetize Outbrain and for the publishers who buy
traffic from us to make money.
Nate Goslin: Sharethrough looks at the in-feed content
space as something that has evolved from the use of
the mobile phone. If you look at your phone and go to
any publisher or social app youll notice you are quickly
in a feed environment, meaning you are swiping
through headlines, thumbnails, etc. As mobile use
increases, youve seen publishers starting to switch to a
feed-based model.

You have to go and play by the new rules, and if you

dont you cant succeed. Distribution and paid
distribution is fundamental to that.

Measuring Success

Nate Goslin: We built this in-feed placement, so when

you scroll down you see three to four placements
through the feed but also see a sponsored piece of
content. Publishers are seeing that theres this whole

42

John Tauber: When youre reading an article and you

get to the bottom and you see those content
recommendations, where it says as seen on CNN, or
wherever, thats actually Outbrain. Part of why the
timing is right for a company like ours is that we
seamlessly blend into a publishers environment and
other publishers buy traffic from us on a cost-per-click
basis. So you have Time or The New York Times buying
traffic from us because they realize they [make more
money] based on the [number of] people they get to
sign up for their paid services or the advertising theyre

Eddie Kim: When you are talking about the

measurement side, we dont think of measuring
content as any different than measuring anything else.
At the end of the day, your business is going to have a
goal of a KPI, key performance indicator. There is
going to be some sort of objective around which you
are doing all this marketing. So whatever that KPI is
you have to figure out the things that are indicators on
how to get there. It doesnt matter how you do it,
its just the metrics that matter the most are not
content metrics.
After all, you are not creating content to become a
content creator. You are not creating content to become
a media company. You are creating content because it
is a marketing channel. So if you start measuring
content as if you are a content creator then you are

doing it wrong because thats not why you should be

doing it in the first place.
Chris Paul: Its not just about raw reach, its about the
right reach, its about using data-driven targeting and
modeling to put the message in front of the right
people in the right context. The old means of
measuring the effectiveness of our earned strategies,
where we got hundreds of millions of earned
impressions, is giving way to saying we got the right
hundred thousand views that led to a significant
increase in those people sharing this piece of content
with their trusted networks.

The Takeaway: What Students

Need to Know Today
Nate Goslin: The old model of just advertising,
especially distribution, whether TV, radio or print,
is a pretty expensive proposition to get into, not
something a student can really get their hands
dirty on. But as you start to look at biddable
models, like Twitter, Outbrain and ShareThrough,
its pretty easy to plug in a couple hundred bucks,
play around with it and learn something about
content distribution. Students should be aware of
how easy it is for them to quickly gain some
experience in the technologies that are on the web.
John Tauber: The one area I keep coming back to
is economics because what made it so
unattractive as a degree when I was in school is
what makes it attractive to me now and thats
understanding financial markets, understanding
systems, understanding how to run a regression
analysis and get a causality. Economics helps
students understand the importance of the
marketplace, whats needed and where to focus.
Eddie Kim: Teaching technology is a losing battle
because of how quickly it gets outdated. More
than anything, I would say students have to learn to
ask the right questions.

This is a condensed version of the

full-length presentation

43

Whats Working Now In...

Sponsored Content

Quick Hits
The opportunity for publishers:
Its a new revenue stream, a stream that would
probably go to social and ad tech if we werent
playing in this space. (Tomich)

Publishers, faced with increased revenue pressure from programmatic or real-time

media buying technologies, have begun to embrace a format that resembles
advertorial and product placements. This has allowed marketers to pay publishers to
distribute their content alongside journalistic editorial, which calls for a delicate
balance between the two forms of content. So we asked those leading the charge how
they make sure the scale doesnt tip in the wrong direction. Steve Rubel, Chief Content
Strategist, New York Office, Edelman

Condensed highlights from the conversation

product placement and sponsorships where paid
distribution of content that were creating for
our clients sits nearby, and often next to, earned
editorial coverage.

Robin Riddle
Global Publisher,
Custom Studios,
The Wall Street
Journal

Sebastian
Tomich

Baomy
Wehrle

Vice President of
Advertising, The
New York Times

Director, Brand
Strategy, The
Huffington Post

Robin Riddle: That this is a sort of a reinvention of the

advertorial may be part of the story, but actually the
space were working in is what I would describe more
as content marketing.

Is Sponsored Content Just Another Way

of Saying Advertorial?
Steve Rubel: [Sponsored content] is a reinvention in
some ways of the advertorial, and a reimagining of
44

Robin Riddle, The Wall Street Journal: Custom Studios

is our in-house agency, set up to help clients with
storytelling for their brands.
Sebastian Tomich, The New York Times: We created a
native ad platform on the New York Times site where
brands can now publish with the help of our team.
Baomy Wehrle, The Huffington Post: We help brands
define their brand purpose beyond just advertising.

6 Suggestions from the

Huffington Post About Creating
Sponsored Content

They Said What?

1. Stand out: Use surprising stats and interesting
facts to bolster your argument.

What are We Talking About Here?

Robin Riddle: People are using social media to
research products, asking friends, going to Amazon and
reading product reviews. So now theres an extended
evaluation period where consumers are out there
looking for content about brands. This means that when
youre thinking from a brands point of view you have to
engage people around not just your products, but why
your brand exists. What is it that somebody is buying
into when they buy your brand? What will this say about
them as an individual?

How Three Powerhouses of Journalism

Approach Sponsored Content in 23 Words
or Less

Sebastian Tomich: We went into this saying our

bar for brand storytelling isnt going to be other
brands content. Its going to be comparable to
The New York Times content.
Baomy Wehrle: Our audience is pretty young. We
say they want the candy and the vegetables they
make come to us for Kardashians but theyll stay
for Obama.
Robin Riddle: Recent research asked people if
they understood what the term sponsored content
meant. The majority said no. And then they asked
them whether they cared and even more of them
said no, they didnt care.

2. Inform: Break down complicated issues and

provide solutions readers havent thought of.

The opportunity for brands:

Theyre just at the beginning of brands realizing
how much power they have with this. If you can tap
into whats going on in culture and match it to some
sort of brand objective, you have a massive
opportunity. (Tomich)
Why working with PR agencies works:
PR and creative agencies understand the earned
space and how to drive distribution. As Jonathan
Perelman at BuzzFeed has said, Content is king but
distribution is queen and the queen wears the
pants. (Wehrle)
Why disclosure matters:
Brands have just as much skin in the game as
we do. (Tomich)
The future of advertising.
Theres a stronger case than ever for good, effective
brand advertising. You still start with creating a
brand through advertising, but then underneath that
you have to tell really good stories through engaging,
original, informative content. (Riddle)
What makes todays students marketable:
Theyre digital natives. They understand how they
consume media and now they are starting to think
about the ways they push out content. (Wehrle)

The Takeaway: How Brand Content

Gets Created

3. Dont oversell: Dont force-fit product mentions

into a piece. They should be organic.

1. Brands submit a piece of content

theyve created.

4. Be timely: Evergreen content is good;

real-time content in sync with the news cycle
is better.

2. Brands collaborate with the publisher on a

piece of content.

5. Humanize: Human interest stories that tie a

face and a name to a cause are more likely to
motivate readers to take action.
6. Disclosure is key!

3. Brands just ride along with the themes that

the publisher suggests will help them reach
their brand objectives.

This is a condensed version of the

full-length presentation

45

Whats Working Now In...

Digital Innovators: Reinventing

Traditional Media

Bill Adee: The thing that I have to remind the

newsrooms I talk to is to look at content they create on
a phone. Doesnt work on my phone, so why are we
doing it when half of our traffics coming from mobile?
So I think thats what I carry away from the mobile, you
know, is to get people in that mindset.

Theres a huge wave of innovation today within even the oldest of publishers,
which is presenting challenges to both veteran journalists and newcomers to
the field. Steve Rubel, Chief Content Strategist, New York Office, Edelman

The Takeaway: What Do the

Future Woodwards & Bernsteins
Need to Know?

Condensed highlights from the conversation

Does Good Writing Still Matter?

Bill Adee
VP, Tribune
Digital, Chicago
Tribune

Lewis
Dvorkin
Chief Product
Officer, Forbes
Media

Jay Lauf
President,
Publisher,
Quartz

Jay Lauf: Weve been focusing more deeply on

writing recently. Were doing better at higherquality journalism, and part of that is writing
really well. I think its a lost art.

Lewis Dvorkin: We do cover stories in the print version

of Forbes magazine that do well online, but what about
on a smartphone? It isnt necessarily 3,000 words nor
is it necessarily a few screens and a photo. I dont have
an answer for it, but were thinking about that what
does it mean to have a cover story on a smartphone?

Jay Lauf: Were looking for is people who can

operate across disciplines. [We want] fearless kids
who can write and code. For example, our
journalists, the actual writers themselves, created
a tool for creating charts and graphs on the fly.
They can take data very quickly from those charts
and graphs for their own pieces without having to
go to the graphics department, then another data
editor, etc. Thats a big get for us. So when we see
people whove got skills in addition to the ability
to write, thats really important to us how what
your write, what you do, fits into the whole user
experience.

Lewis Dvorkin: On the web whats way more

important than great writing is great information;
you need to know how to write a sentence, but
structure is somewhat less important on the web
than great information.
story one month and an energy story the next month
and a story about commodity trading the next month.
Thats finished.

On Bringing Journalism into the

Digital Age

Is Traditional Journalism Dead?

Lewis Dvorkin: The days of the general assignment
reporter are over for good. You need to have a niche, a
vertical, a subject, and you need to nail it, understand
it, and live and breathe it. This is vastly different from
Forbes of 15 years ago where you could write a banking

46

Jay Lauf: What we learned and have done is strip all the
barriers away, the friction to discovering and sharing
content. Theres no pay wall. Theres no app to
download. The goal was to build a responsive site that
has app-like behavior. We also brought in a team that
understands that the future of news will be written in
code. They are building high-quality content that is
made for the social web.w If you do that, if you strip
down barriers, you create content that people want
to share.

Lewis Dvorkin: I look for journalists who can also

consider themselves marketers, publishers,
promoters, data analysts and entrepreneurs. If
theyre coming to the game as I am a journalist
and thats my identity, thats not going to work.

Jay Lauf: If you look at the Quartz staff, its not a

bunch of interns or refugees from BuzzFeed or
whatever; its people from the Economist, the Wall Street
Journal, The New York Times, Reuters, Time, New York
Magazine. Classically trained journalists, who were
feeling suffocated by the institutional muscle memory
of a lot of the places that they were working, and
theyve come over and have learned some of
these skills.
Bill Adee: Well be looking for more in video at the
Tribune, thats an area that we need to address more
and more.

Bill Adee: The need for coders who know

journalism and vice versa will get more
intertwined and it wont be looked at as somebody
wearing multiple hats. It will just be thats what
they are.

This is a condensed version of the

full-length presentation

47

Becoming Brand
Storytellers
Food, Fans & Followers: Brand Storytelling
@ ConAgra and Darden:
Stephanie Moritz, Senior Director, Social Media,
PR & Experiential Marketing, ConAgra / Justin Sikora, Director,
Media Communications, Darden

48

49

Becoming Brand Storytellers

Food, Fans & Followers: Brand

Storytellers @ ConAgra and Darden

Justin Sikora

Stephanie Moritz

Director, Media &

Communications,
Darden

Senior Director,
Social Media, PR
& Experiential
Marketing, ConAgra

Even successful, well-established food brands are being

challenged to rethink how they communicate with their
customers and the media, combining storytelling with
digital for a new generation of consumers hungry for more.

Case Study in Point: ConAgra Tops Out

When ConAgras Chef
Boyardee brand
discontinued its
popular easy-open
pop-top, its
passionate consumers
took to social media
to show the brand
their displeasure. As a
result, says Stephanie
Moritz, we worked with senior management and
were a key part of the decision to bring back the
pop tops and, importantly, we were also the key
driver of the marketing strategy for the relaunch.

Heres Just a Little of What Her Team Did:

After actually contacting some of those vocal
fans, Moritzs team learned that while internally
the technology was called easy-o (for easyopen), real people didnt talk like that. So as
part of their relaunch story, the language changed
to match peoples expectations.
Moritzs team identified the loyal fans who missed
the [pop-top] most. We sent them notes. We
sent them coupons. We reached out to them
personally. Were creating videos to let them know
that the pop tops are back because they wanted
them back, she says. So its through true
engagement that this product is coming back and
what they said. We heard them.

Condensed highlights from this presentation

When Opportunity Knocks

Stephanie Moritz: Were producing content and telling
stories about the food you love through a variety of
different channels: social media, digital, public
relations to reporters and consumers, throughout the
globe. Its been an exciting opportunity and challenge,
and its really grown.

Making Consumers the Star

Stephanie Moritz: When we initially started, we
determined we wanted a consumer-facing community
manager to really engage with the audience. It worked

50

extraordinarily well at the beginning, but soon we

wanted to split that model on its head and make the
content more about the consumer, and put the
consumer at the center.

that youve had all along, and thats the importance

of engagement.

Justin Sikora: We shifted from thinking of how can

social benefit us to how can we use social to benefit our
guests. For example, our social team was online and
active from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. Guess what?
When the restaurants are busy, at night, you see a
sharp spike in social engagement. Now we have a
seven-day-a-week team whose hours are from noon to 8
and later throughout the week, so we can be there,
listen and engage with our guests.

Justin Sikora: Olive Garden is a national brand, but we

use social to tell local stories. Its about how can we
empower our team members to be advocates for us? A
health issue breaks out, say theres a rumor its at one
of our restaurants. We can put out a corporate
statement, but its much more impactful when someone
at the restaurant itself says, no, actually this didnt
happen in our restaurant. I work there. Or when people
say you guys microwave your soups in the back, and

So what started as a way to do social better from a

marketing and communications standpoint has helped

Capturing Relevant Moments

through the amazing support of the guest relations

team evolve guest relations at Darden. So guest
relations at Darden, now its focus is social.

Create the Right Environment to Encourage

Real-time Storytelling
Stephanie Moritz: You need to have the right process,
the right team. I dont necessarily have legal on speed
dial, but weve worked through the right processes to
enable swift action.
Justin Sikora: Its imperative that we have the right
relationships in the building with our total quality team,
with our suppliers, with our legal team. When it goes
onto social, thats when the relationships matter. Thats
when youre going to get the payoff for the engagement
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we can say, no, actually, we make our soups fresh every

day. Well, when someone says my names Johnny, and
actually I worked for three hours this morning in the
kitchen and I made soup, it makes a big impact. So
getting our team members to advocate for us. Thats
the next frontier.
Stephanie Moritz: The content has really changed, so
being less just about Slim Jim all the time to what are
those relevant moments that really ensure this is
something thats going to be highly shareable. So we
have seen the business results and have been able to
back up that strategy. Slim Jim is what we call one of
our high-priority brands, and weve been able to see the
social media dollars grow behind it and the business
group is there to substantiate it.
Justin Sikora: Were pushing out stuff all the time.
Come in for a never-ending pasta bowl. Check out
these beautiful bread sticks. Our fans love it. So thats
great. But if youre not responding to people who say
hey, I came in yesterday and your server treated me
like crap youre not building a community. So the flip
that we made was going back to the core of what social
media is. Its an engagement tool.
Justin Sikora: Social gives us amazing opportunities to
engage in fun ways with guests who are in a restaurant,
checking in on Foursquare, for example, and we call the
restaurant and have the manager send over a dessert.
But it only works if you have the structure, the tools
and the people in place.

The Takeaway: 2 Ways

to Use Social Media
Stephanie Moritz: Part of our jobs today is to tell
stories about the people behind the food as well
as to talk about the ingredients behind the food.
This is where I think our really big opportunity is
now. Lets demystify, lets decode, lets get out
there.
Justin Sikora: Our mantra now is moving from
transactional to emotional. Thats a push for all
of Darden, all of the brands, and social media
is an example of moving from transactional to
making it something emotive that gives people a
tangible experience.

52

Case Study in Point: Darden Uses

Its Noodle
You always have to be
listening and in a
position to react,
says Justin Sikora.
So when Dardens
Olive Garden brand
learned that the NCAA
fined former offensive
lineman Gabe Ikard
and a teammate $3.83 for eating too much pasta
at a team buffet, says Sikora, we quickly had an
I [heart] pasta t-shirt made, took a picture of it
and tweeted it out with an offer to sell him the
shirt for $3.83. That one tweet garnered 25
million impressions for us. Sports Illustrated,
ESPN and ABC Sports picked it up.
Olive Garden also gave the guys a hearty
pasta meal at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis. In
response, another coo for Olive Garden:
#PastaGate has its advantages, Ikard Tweeted.
Shout out to @olivegarden for hooking us up with
4 full bags of food!

This is a condensed version

of the full-length presentation

53

Creating News
in a New Way
Welcome to the DMI Creative Newsroom:
Nadine Sudnick, Executive Vice President, Communications,
Dairy Management, Inc.

From Private to Public: Telling the Story

of Hilton Worldwides IPO:
Kathryn Beiser, EVP, Corporate Communications, Hilton

How WBEZs Curious City is Flipping

Journalism Upside Down:
Jennifer Brandel, WBEZ

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55

Creating News in a New Way

the media wants to talk to. So we needed to find a way
to connect their stories on a very emotional level to
what consumers want to hear about so that consumers
can make informed decisions about dairy. We also
needed to correct misinformation. We can no longer let
activists define who we are.

Welcome to the DMI

Creative Newsroom
With 49,000 dairy farmers in the U.S. and other groups, organizations and people
communicating about the benefits of and issues related to dairy, its no wonder that
Nadine Sudnick, DMIs executive vice president of communications, felt DMI, which
oversees the American Dairy Association and the National Dairy Council, needed to
break out of the siloes that muddied the message and create a single digital creative
newsroom hub that brought them all together.

Condensed highlights from Nadine Sudnicks presentation

She Said What?
Were moving away from solely writing press
releases and spitting out communication
strategies. Now we have a seat at the table with
our CEO and with other leaders helping them
shape strategy.

Were a very big industry that acts small. What does

that mean? It means that when you look at the dairy
value chain, from farm to fork, there is a wide variety of
layers and partners: processors, branded companies
QSRs, consumers and more. We took a look at that and
asked ourselves how we could harness all of those
people who have consumer influence and have a
unified message.
Today, only 2 percent of Americas population is
connected to agriculture. Twenty or 30 years ago, either
you were involved in farming somehow or you knew
someone who was. Thats not true anymore,. So we

56

1. Integrating our internal communication team

members: They were the first people that we needed
to get to. We were spread across two floors with
communicators sitting in eight corners, so we
literally broke down the walls. We said we need to
get together as a communication function and
figure out how to integrate The newsroom is the
physical space but I also define it as all the
communication people sitting in that area. No
longer do we have to figure out whos doing what
because we melted down the walls and put
everyone in one open area. We now have that
collaboration and that integration real-time, which
makes our jobs easier.
2. Understanding our needs: We started with
benchmarking. And then because we knew we
didnt have the right skillset with those
communicators right at the onset, we paired them
with Edelman coaches who had the experience...
They worked side by side.

Interns and folks coming in from universities,

journalism students, communication students,
may come in with a certain craft or a certain
focus but its only good as far as getting in the
door. Once youre in you have to be so much
more multifaceted than what you came in with.

Heres what led us to do what were doing.

The number one challenge is alignment, making

sure that youre getting the right people aligned with
what youre doing so that they understand what their
role is.

Clientelligence at Work

needed to make a better connection between

agriculture and consumers. And we needed to meet
consumers in relevant places, places where they were
actually talking about dairy.
The farmers are the rock stars.
The dairy farmers have great stories many
multigenerational stories. Many farm families have
been in the business of milking cows for hundreds
of years.
When we walk into an interview with The New York Times
or Wall Street Journal or any other big media company,
the farmers are the rock stars. Theyre the people that

A lot of our information is regulated by USDA so

previously wed be wary of putting something out
there in social media We decided to bring USDA
into the newsroom so that they could understand
what the issues were, and how we needed to be
real-time conversationalist in todays social
media environment. So we sat down with them
and said, look, weve got a communication plan.
Why dont you approve it up front and then lets
just see how it goes. So youve got to be able
to bring the right people in the room and align
with them respectfully.

3. Getting the business folks involved: Typically they

would say heres the plan. You can execute it, rather
than having the communicator being in the drivers
seat. Using this model we could put the
communications team in the drivers seat because
they were now responsible for looking at all the
different ways that we can communicate, meaning
the clover leaf.
4. Working with our stakeholders: We have 18 states and
regions that have local farm boards that are located
across the country. Those folks are the boots on the
ground. We needed them to understand their role
in all of this.
5. Bringing the industry along: We have 32 companies
involved in the innovation center, from Deans to
Land OLakes, all of which sell dairy; processors;
manufacturers, etc., so they would understand why
we needed this integrated model and their role in it
and why its important to have a unified message.
It was always part of our plan to launch Dairy
Hub for bringing stakeholders together so they
could collaborate.
The important thing that we learned early on is that we
wanted to do this in baby steps. So we brought a group
of people in, tested it, and changed and adapted. And
then we kept improving the Dairy Hub. All of the
farmers that are in there and our industry folks, as well
as staff, are in it because they want to engage with
someone in a certain area.

57

They also set up their own private groups whether

theyre GMO related, training related or whatever and
used that information to go back out and engage in
consumer conversations about those subjects.
We bring people into the newsroom, whether its
farmers or business partners, and give them tours.
They see the news feed, they see HootSuite, etc. Thats
important because for most of our dairy farmers and
industry folks, this is all new information for them. We
have actually trained over 3,000 people, including
farmers, staff, industry, etc., so they could understand
the value of how to operate in a real-time
communication environment.
And even if they personally didnt want to get involved
theyd say, I really need to go work on my farm and
milk my cows and not be on social media we said
then what about your family members or what about
your operations manager? Weve gotten overwhelming,
positive feedback as far as their involvement. Again, if
you get them involved in the process, it really makes a
big difference.

The Hub Happenings

The Takeaway: 3 Behind-theScenes Actions that Contributed to

the Success of DMIs Newsroom
1. We brought the industry in early, when
we originally start talking about what an
integration model looks like and why we needed
to have a newsroom and needed real-time
conversation with consumers. Whether they
were part of a brainstorm or in on conference
calls, however we did it, we did it with them and
our dairy farmers right at the onset. We had
farmers and industry at the table creating all of
it with us. We didnt do this just with Edelman
or any other partner in isolation. It was done in
collaboration with the entire industry so they
felt ownership of it.
2. We aligned our teams around what we
were doing.

Sharing ideas, gathering insights and joining

collaborative discussions

3. Early on we brought in a group of people,

tested, and changed and adapted as we
moved ahead.

Accessing relevant multimedia and documents

Viewing the latest information about industryrelated events
Igniting dialogue on industry news and insights

58

This is a condensed version

of the full-length presentation

59

Creating News in a New Way

From Private to Public: Telling the

Story of Hilton Worldwides IPO

We really had to talk about our performance and our

leadership view because this was the first time that a
lot of people were getting a look at our financials,
Hilton having been bought by Blackstone.

When planning communications around Hiltons December 2013 IPO, Kathryn

Beiser, then the companys EVP of corporate communications, was faced with a lot
of challenges, including how (and whether) to engage more than 300,000 employees
in more than 4,000 owned, managed and franchised hotels across 90 countries, how
to balance Hiltons legendary history with its future as a public enterprise, and even
what do if its CEO is asked whether he knows Paris Hilton, the great-granddaughter
of company founder Conrad Hilton.

Condensed highlights from Kathryn Beisers presentation

Nothing had prepared me to do an IPO for a brand
like Hilton.
The reality is we were a new-old company. Were 95
years old. That presents some challenges. We brought
together different companies to create Hilton
Worldwide. So we had a big transformation, a huge
focus when CEO Christopher Nassetta came on board,
to get an aligned culture. Hugely important for us to tell

She Said What?

You have to help your employees understand
that the IPO is not the destination, it is just part
of a journey. It wasnt going to be that whoo-hoo,
were all public, now we can stop all of that
cost-cutting, all of that focus, all of that
attention to detail, everything. So helping
employees understand that, yet celebrate
because everybody had to work so hard, how do
you get to that?
I wanted to make darn sure that nothing that did
or did not happen in my department had an
effect on whether we could go public or not.
Blackstone had to have a clear runway for doing
whatever it wanted to do. We knew this was going
to be the largest hospitality IPO in history. Thats
a lot of pressure.

60

that story. And we moved our headquarters from

Beverly Hills to McLean, VA, because we needed a
cultural shift. We have a strong vision from our founder
Conrad Hilton: to fill the earth with the light and
warmth of hospitality.
The quiet period is not a silent period.
Once you know youre going to be going public, you
have whats called a quiet period. You have to look
back 30 days prior to when you knew and then start
thinking about what you can and cannot say. What were
we going to do to tell the Hilton Worldwide story when
we couldnt talk? It was really challenging.
We had to generate internal excitement and alignment.
When you have 11 brands, many of which are staffed
with employees more engaged with their brand or
franchise, its complicated. Like our housekeepers, for
example; they identify not with Hilton Worldwide but
with Hampton. How do you get them excited and, for
example, at what point do you decide how much they
need to be engaged in this event?

We settled on three core strategies.

It was really key for us to run everything through
these strategies.
1. Legend and service: We started with this idea not
related to our history per se, but to being a
legendary brand. So this idea of legendary service
and what that actually means.
2. Global reach: We really wanted to make sure people
understood this Hilton is not a U.S. company. This is
a global company and the future of our companys
growth is ex-U.S., with nearly 60 percent of the
companys pipeline and more than 70 percent of its
100,000 rooms under construction outside the U.S.
3. Brand portfolio: Everything had to be about the
portfolio. We have to tell the portfolio story.
We had a high-class problem.
We were doing so well [a heavy demand already
reflected in the order books] that we realized that we
were actually going to go public a day earlier than we
had planned not on the 13th but on the 12th. But
because another company going public was already
scheduled to activate at the New York Stock Exchange
on the 12th, we couldnt until the 13th.
So how do you keep the story going for two days? The
two days was all about activating for the media. We not
only doubled our media relations, I would say we
quadrupled it.
Day 1, Thurs., December 12: Hilton goes public (a day
earlier than originally planned) and attracts enormous
coverage. We activated on all channels we were

Tweeting throughout the day. We were on Facebook,

You Tube, Twitter
Day 2, Fri., December 13: We activated the IPO at the
New York Stock exchange (as originally planned).
Earlier, I had challenged my team to find the money
shot. What will be the shot that gets picked up over
and over and over again? One of the most junior
people in our team said hotel bathrobes. I mean,
come on, what says hospitality more than our hotel
bathrobe? We turned the New York Stock Exchange
into a hotel. It was a hotel of all our brands. We had
decided if we were going to brand the NYSE to go all
the way. Not do it half way. We used our own people,
our own resources. There were doormen at every
single door into the exchange. Everybody was
served food.
We took an integrated approach with our
team members.
Corporate: We recognized that the housekeeper or the
doorman at a franchised property is not going to
necessarily care or need to care about an IPO. So we
decided this was mostly going to be a corporate
celebration for the company.
Hotel staffs worldwide: We created the standard party
in the box. At the moment that we went public we had
parties going on around the world. Some were evening
parties, some were breakfast parties, but they were all
going on and people were able to share in that.

The Takeaway: 3 Things Kathryn

Beiser says were Hiltons Key IPO
Communications Objectives
1. Drive awareness of the companys vision,
strategy, performance and leadership team
2. Generate internal excitement and
strategic alignment
3. Convey public company benefits to property
owners and thank them for their business

This is a condensed version

of the full-length presentation

61

Creating News in a New Way

How WBEZs Curious City is Flipping

Journalism Upside Down

Asked and Answered: Heres Just a Tiny Selection of Some

of Curious Citys Investigations
What would Chicago look like without the
[1871] fire?

For media companies and brands looking for new ways to engage audiences,
Chicagos public radio station, WBEZ, may have the answer. Its top-rated show,
Curious City, collaborates with listeners to bring them the news and stories they
want to experience. Were people-powered journalism, says Jennifer Brandel, the
shows senior producer, not to be confused with user-generated content. Curious
to know more? We certainly were.

Condensed highlights from Jennifer Brandels presentation

Taking the New out of News

We want to maintain the authoritative stance on

whatever the answer is, with the publics help.

How it Works
News is whats new, right? Not necessarily. WBEZs
Curious City is redefining news and winning
over audiences. Everything is a human interest
story, but is it interesting? asked Jennifer
Brandel, the shows senior producer. So she
listens to what her listeners find interesting, such
as an old Chicago insane asylum ancient
history in the newsroom, but apparently top of
mind for her audience. Were focusing on
narrative thats not necessarily tied to news, she
says. For Curious City, that means its top story
mightve broken decades ago, but audiences
today are listening in anyhow.

People-powered Stories
vs. User-generated Content
We get pitches from the public about what stories they
want to know, what questions they have about Chicago,
the region, or its people that theyd like us to answer in
journalistic form.
Thats led us to thousands of story ideas we never
would have done had they not brought it to bear. People
are the engine behind all the stories, but we generate
the content ourselves. We want to make sure were
not just a Yahoo Answers or a place where people can
go and see lots of different opinions, but no
authoritative opinion.
62

On our website, people ask a question about

something theyre curious about.
We have three tabs: Up for Voting, Answered &
Investigated, and New & Unanswered.
Questions go live. Anyone can see and comment on
them. Frequently the community will have answers to
questions or have great leads for us, or oh, youve got
to talk to my neighbor about this, hes great, which
helps. We get sources right away before weve even
started a story.
We curate these voting rounds and try to reflect the
curiosity of the city. Every couple weeks a new
question wins and then we start that investigation
and report.

The Sniff Test?

We bypass the editorial sniff test because in
traditional newsrooms people always ask if something

onelegal tattoo parlor. How did this happen to be

the case?

Where were the POW camps located in the Chicago

area during World War II?

Why isnt there a terminal 4 at OHare? They have

terminals 1, 2, 3, and 5.

How did the Chicago accent and vernacular come to

be and what percentage of Chicago still speaks it?

Chicago-area two-flats straddle the line between

apartments and homes. Who were they originally
designed to serve? Has that changed?

Why does the state of Illinois have a huge deficit,

while next door Indiana has a surplus?
Strange as this may now seem, from the mid-1960s
through the early 1970s Chicago had onejust

is timely; why should anyone care? We say the public

cares. Theyre the ones who asked it. They voted for it.
Were thinking about things in multiple dimensions, not
just audio. We dont just do radio. We think about the
best way to tell the story and sometimes radio isnt the
best way. Were constantly trying to use new digital
tools and experiment in the newsroom to go beyond
audio, because we know that the convergence has
happened and its continuing to happen. We need to
stay fluent in the different ways to tell stories.
We did a story about the sort of hawks that live in
Chicago. So instead of just talking about hawks, we
had an artist who works with the Field Museum paint
a beautiful hawk picture, and if youre online you can
see its interactive. Theres audio of the hawk screams
and additional information.
We created an animated gif that shows how Chicago
grew and how it gobbled up all of its neighbors as
it went.
We made a safe guide for fishing, for eating fish from
Lake Michigan. How much can you eat? How
much should you eat? That was a pocket guide you
can print out.

Setting the pedigree of the windy city nickname

aside... is Chicago windier than the U.S. average?

Is Anyone Out There?

My favorite metric is that we have the most handwritten
thank you cards at our desks.

The Takeaway: Knocking Down

Walls, Engaging People
The person whose question wins the most votes
gets to come along as we report the story, says
Brandel. Our editors were scared from the get-go,
asking, what if someone comes along whos
unhinged and compromises our source? Knock
on wood, weve had incredible people.
As reporters, we like to think that we know very
fundamental questions about stories, but a
member of the public will ask a great question
that will undermine our entire thinking about a
subject and lead us down a path that we wouldnt
otherwise have found. When youre interviewing
someone whos very media savvy, and someone
kind of moves that off kilter a little bit and asks
them something the reporters wouldnt, it
freshens the situation and creates a new kind
of energy.

This is a condensed version of the

full-length presentation

63

LinkedIn &
Data-Driven
Storytelling
Yumi Wilson,
Manager, Corporate
Communications,
LinkedIn

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65

Telling Stories
that Make Both
the Brand and
the World Better
Taking a Stand When Its Right for Your Brand: Why Gap
Inc. Wants to Do More than Sell Clothes:
Bill Chandler, Senior Vice President of Global Corporate Affairs and
Communications, Gap Inc.

Great Moments in Corporate Storytelling: CVS Caremark

& the Decision to Stop Selling Tobacco:
Carolyn Castel, Vice President, Corporate Communications, CVS Caremark

Can Telling a Story Save a Life?:

Caryl Stern, President & CEO, U.S. Fund, UNICEF

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Telling Stories that Make Both the Brand and the World Better
Ben Boyd: You had a little bit of help in telling the free
world when President Obama tweeted about it.

Taking a Stand When Its Right

for Your Brand: Why Gap Inc. Wants
to Do More than Sell Clothes

Bill Chandler

Ben Boyd

SVP of Global
President of
Corporate Affairs
Practices, Sectors &
& Communications, Offerings, Edelman
Gap Inc.

When Ben Boyd, president of practices, sectors and offerings at

Edelman, sat down with Bill Chandler, senior vice president of
global corporate affairs and communications, at Gap Inc. to talk
about Gaps Do More campaign, they zeroed in on the companys
announcement about its new employee minimum wage. How did
Gap get maximum mileage out of it? Read on.

Condensed highlights from their conversation

Ben Boyd: What went on behind the scenes to make the
announcement interview with Gap CEO Glenn Murphy
and Gayle King happen? (Ed. note: Murphy announced
his retirement from Gap, Inc. in October 2014.)
Bill Chandler: It had to be with the right person.
It had to be the right dynamic. It had to be the right
platform. It was great to work with the CBS people.
It was a six-minute piece and it was almost 100
percent positive.

It impacts 65,000 employees in all 50 states. Theres a

lot to unpack. What do you think were the most
important elements of that from just a behavioral
standpoint for Gap Inc., in terms of the connection to
the mantra of do more than sell clothes?

Bill Chandler: Ten years ago, we would have had to do

a Rose Garden press conference if you wanted
something like that. For us, though, the decision was
based on our business priorities, the merging of the
physical stores and the digital experience. This wasnt a
political decision for us. So it wasnt something where
we did it because we thought the President would or
would not support it.

there 10 years otherwise. I know many people who are

in the 10-year or 10-year-plus club. Were very
passionate about the company because we take care
of one another. So this was a public demonstration of
our values.

However, we knew from his public statements it was

likely that he would. So this is one of those situations
where we did what was right for us. The call went out to
the White House. So there was a respectful heads up,
just given how much he had said on the subject. Not
only did he tweet, but then he stopped by a Gap store.
The fact that his visit was organic he was in New York,
had some time and then a store associate went on
the Ryan Seacrest show.
My 15-year-old told me she heard about the
minimum wage increase. Im like, from where? She
said from Ryan Seacrest.

Ben Boyd: And can you talk a little bit about the change
and shift in storytelling over your 10 years at Gap Inc.?

Ben Boyd: The announcement was launched by the

global affairs team, supported fully by the board of
directors and driven across that entire brand portfolio.

Bill Chandler: [Gap founder] Don Fisher wanted to sell

a lot of clothes, but he wanted to also make sure that
we were giving back to the community. The company
has had a somewhat humble approach to this idea, not
necessarily shouting it from the rooftops. The decision
around minimum wage went above and beyond. Its not
a time to be humble. We wanted to make this
investment consistent with our values. Weve always
done well for our employees. I wouldnt have stayed

68

Bill Chandler: Some companies might struggle

identifying human interest stories, where are their
profiles? Were a company with a lot of different stories.
A story has to be worthy of being told and part of the
do more storytelling platform. To do that, you need a
digital team, a team that thrives in a constantly
changing environment. I have a great team around me.
Its terrific to see them step up and really try something
new, and take some risks and really think much more
digitally, which is more story-driven in terms of visuals,
in terms of video, in terms of infographics.
Its not how perfect the story is its how emotional the
story is. We talk about issues by talking about people.

This is a condensed version

of the full-length presentation

69

Telling Stories that Make Both the Brand and the World Better

Great Moments in Corporate

Storytelling: CVS Caremark & the
Decision to Stop Selling Tobacco
Not only were millions of lives and billions of dollars potentially at stake when CVS
Caremark decided to stop selling tobacco products at its 7,600 stores, but so was the
brands successful transformation from being the worlds largest pharmacist to
becoming one of its largest health care companies. Heres how Carolyn Castel, the
brands vice president of corporate communications, helped make sure those
aspirations didnt go up in smoke before they even caught fire.

Condensed highlights from Carolyn Castels presentation

community and we couldnt do it with the backdrop of
480,000 deaths annually and $300 billion of cost. It
was just not going to happen.

It Doesnt Get Much Better than

This: Obama Cared

The Insight that Drove the Decision

We are indeed a health care company. And we were
reinventing pharmacy. And our purpose of helping
people on their path to better health is something that
is the filter that governs our corporate decisions.
We would find ourselves having to explain why we still
sell cigarettes. And we would say, well, its a legal
product for adults to use. But we knew that it was a
dichotomy with what was happening at our 800 [walk-in
retail] Minute Clinics. It was in conflict with the kind of
counseling we were doing from our pharmacies and
with our pharmacists.
We looked in the mirror and said selling tobacco is not
something thats consistent with the kind of company
that we want to be.
When we were engaging in conversations with health
plans, pharmacy benefit manager clients, and with
health systems, the conversation would turn to tobacco
and all of the energy was sucked out of the room. So
we wanted to embrace our place within the health care
70

People marveled
at how we a
statement from
the White House.
We began to tell
the story in an
embargo fashion
with interviews the
day before the announcement with three of our
senior leaders our CEO, our president of CVS
Pharmacy and our chief medical officer. We also
were reaching out to all of those advocacy
organizations to let them know about the news
and to energize them around it so that they would
help to support the story. Word traveled to the
White House about what we were up to.

The Imperatives that Sped Up the Decision

CVS Caremark is a Fortune 12 company with $126
billion in revenues. So we knew we had a marketmoving event. We also knew that we had competitors

She Said What?

How did we convinced Wall Street that we could
make up the $2 billion [in revenues]? Were still
working on that.
What was the biggest pushback we got? You sell
alcohol in some markets and youre still selling
Doritos, Oreos, and Snickers bars. What do you
say about those things? We said that no amount
of tobacco is a safe, whereas you can enjoy a
glass of wine, a bag of chips or a candy bar
without doing damage to yourself. Some would
argue that a glass of wine is good for you.

who might be chasing us on this type of an

announcement and could get ahead of us.

The Prep that Went into Announcing

the Decision
What was exhilarating about this whole thing was that I
was one of the people at the table. Leadership could
have said Carolyn, we need to tell you something
because we need you to write a press release. That
would have been the worst of outcomes and, in fact,
the story wouldnt have been told in the dramatic way
that it ultimately was. So being part of that inner circle
was helpful.
It was equally intimidating and daunting because we
had a lot to pull off with a very small group of people.
We immediately turned to our audiences. Employees.
Customers. Clients. In this instance, advocacy groups
that we knew were going to be excited about this the
American Lung Association, Campaign for Tobacco-Free
Kids, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart
Association, and on and on. And Wall Street. What were
they going to think? We needed to align the
communications for all of them.
To communicate this enormous public health benefit,
the team laid out a multidimensional approach. It laid
out strategies for engaging the media, influencers and
third-party organizations to achieve widespread
national and local coverage of our action.

The Day of the Decision

A traditional PR play beginning with the interview
on CBS with our CEO and a press release at 7 in
the morning.

Internally, the CEO broke the news via a companywide announcement followed by a voicemail. There
was comprehensive coverage on the company intranet
including multiple videos, generating a record number
of colleagues to post comments of pride about the
companys action.
Informational toolkits were delivered to our 7,600
stores for use by our colleagues who are on the front
lines with customers.
A destination website, cvsquits.com, was a
compilation of videos as well as the press release and
other statistical information around tobacco.
No paid social. No paid amplification of the news.
Could we have? Absolutely. It was in the plan as a
follow-on, but there really wasnt a need to hit that
button. We saved our money.

The Takeaway: 4 Healthcare

Insights Carolyn Castel says
are driving CVS Caremarks
Transformation
1. The Affordable Care Act many more people
having health care coverage fuels demand.
2. Every day 10,000 Baby Boomers turn 65 and
we know that people in that age group use
twice as many prescription medications as
younger adults.
3. A shortage of primary care physicians, so
our Minute clinics with nurse practitioners
are able to provide a lot of services that you
might have had to go to your doctors office for.
Even our pharmacists are doing much more in
terms of vaccinations and counseling around
medications adherence.
4. Americans over the age of 50, on average have
at least one chronic disease that theyre dealing
with diabetes, high blood pressure, high
cholesterol which is feeding the pipeline of
demand for services.

This is a condensed version

of the full-length presentation

71

Telling Stories that Make Both the Brand and the World Better

Can Telling a Story Save a Life?

At the end of Caryl Sterns first year as president and CEO, U.S. Fund for Unicef,
she and her team wrote what she called a pretty audacious strategic plan to
double the income of the organization in five years. It was brilliant. It was
marvelous. We were excited. We were jazzed. We had like rah-rah going in, she
says. About a week later the economy tanked. We werent nearly as excited.
Despite the economy, they reached their goal. How? First, she says, she had a
board that believed in her. Second, she had a great team. Third and most
importantly is what Stern talked about in her presentation: Storytelling.

The following is a condensed version of Caryl Sterns story, told at the 2014
Edelman Academic Summit.
At Unicef we decided to stop talking about statistics
and start telling stories. We were going to take UNICEF
and tell you about a child, not all children. We were
going to tell you about a personal experience, not a
broad experience. And we were going to try to capture
the hearts and minds of people because we all know
children. We can relate to one. We cant relate to all.
So I went in search of stories to tell. And my first stop
was in Mozambique in 2007. This was my first trip to
Africa. I packed enough food to last a year. I had every
medication known to mankind in my bag. I got there
and the first night stayed in this beautiful hotel. Felt like
an idiot.
After that I traveled through the country in a jeep with a
mobile medical unit. My job was to do malnutrition
checks, which means I weighed babies. You basically
have this thing that looks like a fruit scale except youre
hanging it from a tree. And instead of a pan at the
bottom where you put the fruit, its a pair of shorts.
And you kind of drop the kid in. Babies dont love it
very much but it is actually a lot of fun.
What happens at the mobile medical unit is you drive
and you drive and you drive. Youre off-road. Your driver
doesnt speak English. Youre praying most of the time.
You get to some tree that he recognizes and he turns
left. And there in the field could be about a hundred
people waiting to see the doctor who is coming once a
month.
72

On about the fourth day they took me to a maternity

clinic. I walked in. The clinic was divided into two
rooms. One a birthing center and one where you went
after you gave birth. I met this woman Rosa.
She had given birth about an hour before. When I
walked in I asked her what I thought was a pretty
innocuous mom-to-mom question. Is this your first
child? She answered so matter-of-factly that at first I
didnt think Id heard her correctly. She said its the
first one that lived. This was my introduction to what
UNICEF was really about.

I Believe in ZERO became real for me because of a

partnership that we have with Pampers where for every
pack you were buying they were donating a tetanus
vaccine. Tetanus, this disease that all I knew about
when I took this job was step on a nail get a tetanus
shot. Send your kid to college, make sure hes got a
tetanus shot.

Rosa was working in a rice patty when she went into

labor. She walked for four hours in 106 degree heat in
labor to a birthing clinic. She waited on the lawn.
When she was really ready to deliver, she was brought
into the half of the clinic for birthing. Its a semi-sterile
environment with a group of medical professionals with
a sixth-grade education. If Rosas baby had been
breach they wouldnt know what to do. If she needed a
C-section, it was out of the question. There was no
ambulance outside to take Rosa to a hospital. There
was no road outside. There was no hospital within
driving distance to where she was. Had Rosa had a
problem, mom and child would die. That was the way
it was.
I sat in that hospital room and I looked at her and I
thought how could I live to be 50 years old and not
realize that this is what the majority of women in this
world face? I learned that Rosa knew the clinic because
she was HIV positive. She had lost two children already
to complications with HIV. She had been coming to this
clinic for antiretroviral (ARV) drugs making that walk
while pregnant. Now that her baby was born, that baby
would need ARV drugs for the next three weeks.
So for the next three weeks she will make that walk four
hours each way the day after giving birth, the next
day and the next day, with a baby on her back, because
otherwise her child will not survive.
I began to understand that I wasnt in Kansas
anymore. I needed to tell that story.
I learned at that point that 26,000 children were dying
every single day, all under the age of five and all from
causes we really knew how to prevent but just werent.
So not the disease we didnt have a cure for or the
earthquake we cant predict. All from things we could
stop but we just werent doing the job. I was horrified.
We started a campaign called I Believe in ZERO the
only acceptable number was zero. Thousands of kids
dying every day and we need to bring that number
down. To zero.

But I went to Sierra Leone and I got a chance to see

what tetanus looks like. I landed and they took us to the
hospital. There was no latrine of any kind. The children
sleep on mats on the floor. There are no nurses. The
moms stay at the hospital; if they have other kids the
other kids are there with them as well. They cook meals
for their children on a fire outside the hospital. Its an
entirely different world.
And there in the corner was an 18-year-old mom and
her little child who didnt have a name yet because you
dont name a child in Sierra Leone until the eighth day
of life. The baby was six days old. Mom had given birth
at home, which is the custom. And she reached for
whatever was sharp to cut the umbilical cord and
unknowingly infected the baby with tetanus

73

completely preventable if you immunize a woman

during her childbearing years as she will pass that
immunology on to her baby. So even if she does do
this, the baby is saved and protected. But it means we
have to immunize every women of childbearing age.
Not an easy task.
The baby was suffering horribly. Tetanus makes a baby
supersensory. A light would hurt the babies eyes. You
cant touch the baby. You cant sing to the baby. Any of
the kind of natural instinct of mommy things you might
do you couldnt do.
So I sat down next to this weeping mom who spoke no
English. I spoke none of her language. All we could do
was hold hands in the dark and stare at her child. As I
sat there I watched the color drain out of that babys
hand and I knew her child had died.
I felt so horrific to know that the vaccine that would
have saved that child from getting the disease cost
70 cents. $3.40 was the medication that would have
cured it and neither existed in the place that I was and
both were within a hands reach if I were at home in
New York.
If you have to stare into the eyes of a mom who just
lost a child, you understand that one child who dies of
something we could prevent is one child too many. I
came back and said this is the story Im going to tell.
We are going to make people understand that could
have been their child. There but for the grace of
God go I.
So thats what weve been doing. I will tell you that we
will continue to tell stories because it is what propels
people to be part of what were doing.

Family Matters
While my mother told me what happens when
one person cares, my grandfather spent my
lifetime with him telling me what happens when
no one cares.
Caryl Stern

So I come here today to basically tell you that I believe

zero is possible. And that you, as educators, especially,
have access to the people who will get us to that
number. I dont think Ill see it in my lifetime. But you
can help us. You can be part of making that happen.

We did indeed collect a great deal of donations as a

result. We got back on the 747 and the five of us flew
to Kenya. We offloaded the plane. We put it onto little
planes and then we flew the little planes up to the north
of Kenya. We got in jeeps. We had to drive three hours
to where we were going to deliver this food.
So, were in the jeep and the news crew tells me they
need b-roll of the desert. This is the last thing I want to
worry about at that moment. We havent seen anybody
for hours. Were driving through the desert. We pull off
and the camera crew is shooting b-roll. While were
standing there I hear a noise and I turn around and
theres a woman coming over the crest of the mountain
holding the hand of a child.

In my book [I Believe in Zero: Learning from the Worlds

Children], I wrap up with a story about a famine in the
horn of Africa. We needed to get supplies, food to
children. I couldnt get America to just ante up and give
us what we needed to get the food to kids. And I could
not believe in the year 2012 children were dying
because they didnt have something to eat. I could not
fathom that there was a mom saying which child do I
feed because I dont have enough for both.
I had a several-hour interview with a reporter from The
New York Times one of those reporters who ask too
many questions and kept me too long and I was itching
to get out of there. I got annoyed and I asked what
mountaintop do I have to stand on and how loud do I
have to yell to get America to hear that children are
starving to death? And that $1 buys enough water
for 40 days? He wrote his article I got one quote. It
was that.
The next day my secretary said Buckingham Palace is
on the phone. I assumed it was my friend Mark because
hes called as Bruce Springsteen in the past. Anyway,
the Palace called and Prince William and his new bride
Kate made an offer to us that they would help us draw
the worlds attention. Theyd give me a mountaintop
deal. And they would go to our supply house in
Copenhagen and help me pack planes full of supplies
and they would bring the entire royal press corps
with them.
We jumped on a plane, Cynthia McFadden from
Nightline, myself, my board chair. We flew to
Copenhagen. Prince William is as cute as he looks. Kate
is drop-dead gorgeous. We spent the greater part of the
day packing a donated British Airways 747 with

74

supplies and a donated UPS cargo plane with supplies.

And the press corps Tweeted it, social mediaed it, put
it on every news station. It was in every newspaper.

whole lot to us but is the difference between life and

death for somebody else. If youre a poet, write about
it. If youre an artist, paint about it. If youre a teacher,
teach about it.

The Takeaway: 3 Things Caryl

Stern Learned are Universal
Throughout World While Traveling
the Globe Collecting Stories
1. Wherever there are children theyre playing
with a ball. I dont know why. I think its innate.
When I retire this is the research Im doing
because even when there isnt something
made of rubber or leather, there are rags tied
together with a string and there is a kid kicking
it and a kid kicking it back. Its like we just have
to do that.
2. My lap is not my property. If I sit on the ground
long enough anywhere in the world, a child will
sit on you. And they will never ask. They dont
usually speak your language. They just plop
themselves down on top of you. When theyre
done, and Ive never quite figured out how they
know when theyre done, they turn around and
instinctively give you a hug. Nothing in your day
will feel as good as that. Then theyll just kind
of run off until the next one sits down.

I cant tell how old she is. I cant tell how old the child
is. I cant figure out where theyve come from because
we hadnt seen a village for hours. I scared her.
She scared me. We just stood there staring at each
other. I foolishly said hello, though she clearly spoke
no English.
After a moment she just kind of melted a little. She
rubbed her belly. She put out her hand. She was
hungry. No matter how scary I might be to her she was
hungry. I had an apple in my backpack from the night
before on the 747 because there were a lot of apples
since there were only five of us. I tossed it to her. She
caught it. She looked at the apple and she bowed. She
turned around and left.
I tell you that story because we all have apples in our
backpacks. We all have something that may not mean a

3. We all want the same things for our children.

We want them to be healthy. We want them
to be safe. We want them to go to bed with
their bellies full. We want them to sleep under
a warm blanket. We want them to dream big
dreams of success. We might define success
differently. You know, for me its my kid is going
to Harvard Business School. For the mom in
Sierra Leone, its owning a goat. But we both
have a vision of what success is. And we want
our child to have it. And we want to be part of
making sure that they get it. Thats universal.

This is a condensed version of the

full-length presentation

75

Freshman Class
at Edelman
What I Do, and What I Wish Id Learned:
Shawn Jackson, Assistant Account Executive [Edelman/krispr], Chicago;
North Carolina A&T State University, BA, Journalism & Mass
Communications with a Concentration in Public Relations
Hometown: Charlotte, NC
Iman Rahim, Enrichment Assistant Account Executive, Edelman Chicago;
University of Missouri, BA, Journalism and Economics
Hometown: Naperville, IL
Michelle Rivas, Assistant Account Executive, Edelman Health, Chicago;
Arizona State, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, BA, Journalism
and Mass Communications
Hometown: St. Charles, IL
Megan Zagger, Assistant Account Executive, Media Services, Chicago;
University of Notre Dame, BA, English and Spanish
Hometown: Austin, TX

76

77

Freshman Class at Edelman

What I Do, and What I Wish Id Learned

The PR industrys leaders of tomorrow have to start somewhere, and often its at Edelman.
Some start as interns, some join our unique enrichment program, which gives junior
teammates an opportunity to revolve through a variety of practice areas not only to find the
best fit for them, but to learn about the firms deep resources and offerings. The freshman here
may be young, but theyre the senior leaders of tomorrow!

Shawn Jackson, AAE, krispr

What I Wish I Knew
When I Began My Career
When starting off as an intern at
Edelman, I wish I knew the basic PR
Essentials something that is not
taught in the classroom, e.g., media
list building and pitching. In college
youre taught how to build PR plans and draft press
releases; however, when youre starting off at such a
junior level, you often do not have the opportunity to
engage in that level of planning. To advance to the next
stage in your career, you must be a master at
completing the little things that support the larger
picture for instance, becoming a champion at pitching
media and securing placements.

My Advice to Todays Students

College prepares you for half the journey when entering
into the communications field it is up to you complete
the other half through gaining experience by
completing internships, engaging in leadership
opportunities and staying hungry and eager to learn
more about the field. Working in the same capacity as
your ideal position is the key to obtaining that position.
College prepares you for half the journey when
entering into the communications field it is up
to you complete the other half through gaining
experience by completing internships, engaging
in leadership opportunities and staying hungry
and eager to learn more about the field.

78

Iman Rahim, EAAE, Health

What I Wish I Knew
When I Began My Career
Always put in an extra hour of effort
really blowing your project out of the
water. Like at school, you constantly
are being evaluated on the quality of
your work. Your actions feed into
perceptions of your character and reputation. If you
put forth average effort, people will assume you are an
average person. A B effort will not get you ahead.

My Advice to Todays Students

Take a minute before you hit send on your email and
ask yourself What more can I do? What am I missing?
Ive found that asking these questions is an incredibly
effective way of ensuring my work makes my
colleagues lives easier. Managing up is not only a huge
part of developing your career, but also of creating a
collaborative work environment.
If you put forth average effort, people will
assume you are an average person. A B effort
will not get you ahead.

Michelle Rivas, AAE, Health

What I Wish I Knew
When I Began My Career
Embrace the opportunities you have
available to you. Volunteer with your
coworkers, continue to network and
learn as much as you can about other
practices. Its important to network in
and out of the company because you never know when
someone can be a resource for you and your clients
and its enormously beneficial to share best practices
across your network.
Every good idea is grounded in research. Great ideas
are essential when solving client issues, but there has
to be a strong background in research to justify these
ideas. The more creative you are in your approach,
the better.

My Advice to Todays Students

Pursue your passions in and out of work. Playing to
your strengths will not only help you get noticed among
other job applicants, but you will feel more rewarded in
your work when you have a well-rounded portfolio
grounded in something you love to do. For me, health is
a huge component to my work, my graduate program
and my personal life. I am always able to pull from my
experiences in each of these areas to assist the others.
Always continue to learn. Its important to pursue your
education even after you get hired. Attend workshops
and continue to read and explore every interest you
have. You never know when your knowledge base will
come in handy for your team, yourself or your clients.
Create an online portfolio. You have accomplished great
things as a student and now is the time to get noticed.
Display your work creatively and show others how you
can be an asset to their company.
Pursue your passions in and out of work.

Megan Zagger, AAE, Media Services

What I Wish I Knew
When I Began My Career
For me, Ive been faced with a unique
challenge of keeping my liberal arts
degree relevant (English and Spanish
major). A lot of my time in college was
spent learning about things that
happened in the 1800s, and forgetting to focus on how
I could apply the rhetoric I was learning to current
trends in the news, for example. The biggest
adjustment was learning to be always on, always
analyzing trends and thinking of how our clients can
stay relevant. At Edelman were expected to be in the
know of whats next, where is media heading, how can I
stay ahead of the curve, etc. And thats not necessarily
something you can teach in the classroom. But had I
been forced to keep a pulse on the news and do some
trendspotting and make connections between what I
was learning and current affairs, it would have been
less of a transition.
Additionally short-form writing. Pulling together a
research paper or essay is great but fitting everything
into 140 characters takes a different level of finesse
that is required to keep up with everyones shortened
attention spans.

My Advice to Todays Students

Learn not only how to take feedback, but how to give it.
Too often I come across people who are too sensitive to
feedback, and panic when they see their work covered
in red marks, or people who arent helpful when they
provide feedback. There is never a moment in PR where
you write something, on your own, and its done. There
is a ton of collaboration involved, and you have to
prepare for that level of collaboration before you enter
the workforce. Not only does it make you a more
respected and effective worker, but it prepares you to
manage people in the future.
Learn not only how to take feedback, but how
to give it.

79

Index to Presenters
and Panel Participants
AbbVie 38
Abbott 38
Activision 22
AMD 30
Cancer Treatment Centers of America 38
Chicago Tribune 46
ConAgra 50
Contently 36
CVS Caremark 70
Darden 50
DMI 56
Forbes Media 46
Gap 68
GE 26
Hilton 60
HP 32
Huffington Post 44
LinkedIn 64
Mass Relevance 36
The New York Times 44

Many thanks to all those who contributed

to the creation of this book:

Christopher Brooks, Ann Glynn, Josh Lieberthal, Paul McCormack,

Nancy Ruscheinski, Maria Squeri, Jenna Wollemann and, of
course, all the presenters, moderators, attendees and Edelman
team members who made the 2014 Academic Summit a success.

Dan Santow, Editor

Outbrain 41
Percolate 36
Quartz 46
RebelMouse 36
Samsung 18
Sharethrough 41
SimpleReach 41
Starbucks 20
Storyful 16
Unicef 72
WSJ Custom Content Studios 44
WBEZ 62

This book is not for sale and is only intended to be an editorial work for educational purposes. All content contained
within, including but not limited to copy, photos and graphics, is intended to be used under fair use conditions.