 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Chartered Institute of Marketing Financial Services Summit. I'm so pleased to welcome you all here today. We've got more than 680 people registered, so a fantastic audience. Last year, our summit was in person and we only had space for 70, so this year has been a very difficult and challenging year, but there are also opportunities to be found and here we're now able to bring this summit to a much wider audience than last time and going forward, we'll probably have more of a hybrid approach where we have a smaller gathering in person and a larger one where we can invite everyone in the world to share best practices around financial services marketing. We have a fantastic agenda today, and if you'd like to tweet along, you can tweet along at hash-c-i-m-f-s-s. This is a public event and we'll be recording it and each session will be shared afterwards, but please do ask questions. There's a question panel just on the right, so as we go out the whole day, please ask questions of the panel and then each moderator of each panel will pick up those questions and ask the panelists your questions, so we hope to make it as interactive as we can. So coming to the agenda for this morning, I should just briefly introduce myself. I'm Jacob Howard, the chair of the Chartered Institute of Marketing Financial Services Group and also vice president of marketing at Deutsche Bank. We have a fantastic agenda for today. We have a What's Next for Financial News with an interview with Francesco Guerrero. At 9.20, we have a really fascinating panel with the Bank of England and Bino, two partners you might not expect to be together all around financial literacy. And at 9.55, we have digital content marketing in the post-COVID world. Now, if that doesn't appeal to you, you're in the wrong place. Right, so I'm now going to introduce our two moderators for the day. I'd like to ask Amy Peters, group head of marketing comms at Maschre Bank and Christoph Lohrmann, CMO of the corporate bank at Deutsche Bank. Good morning, both. Hi guys, good afternoon from here, but hello. Well, also welcome from us. Amy and I, as you probably know from last year, we can only be in the 2D version with you, but we are really excited about this conference. The good thing is, Jacob just said, it's more than last year's attendee numbers digitally. Let's make sure that we make this as interactive as possible. Clearly, Amy and I are bringing with energy social to you, so let's kick off the day. Yeah, we're really excited. It's great for me to be able to join. I had such a fantastic time with you all last year and now in Dubai. But bringing an international perspective, I hope, and really looking forward to chatting to some fantastic guests, which brings us nicely onto our first guest, I believe. Christoph, would you like to do the introductions? Well, as you just heard, we've got Francesco Guerrera, the head of international parents group, will talk to us about his experience in the current situation. So Francesco, if you're with us, please come on. You are fantastic. So Francesco, you are one of the leading business journalists, and you worked in the UK, in Europe and Asia, and you are leading also an award-winning team of editors. So who's better positioned than you to talk to us a little bit about what's next for financial news? So welcome on stage. Thank you. Thank you for the kind words. Thank you for inviting me, and thank you both. Well, I suspect we should start from the extraordinary year we just had, all of us just had, and certainly in the media we felt it both because of what we were reporting on, but also the challenges that we all faced as every company faced in our news gathering and our reporting. I guess if I were to set the scene for what just happened in the past year, a year that's been traumatic and dramatic for many people, I think three things happened to us in the media, certainly in our organizations, in our publications, but I think across the media landscapes. One, all of a sudden, and without really that much forewarning, we had to go remote, virtually produce the publication that we produce. Many of us produce print publication that creates its own challenges. And in our experience, when we went remote, so when the whole of the Jones decided to close the London office and based in London, we didn't know how long this was going to last, right? So many of us kind of fled as soon as possible, but we didn't know when we would be back in. So I know, for example, a colleague of mine yesterday asked me whether she could go back into the office, which is being closed for months because she had left a lot of shoes in there, right? So if that kind of stuff, she didn't know that naturally that we would be away for so long. In practice, that has affected our job. Although I would say that I was amazed, and I'm sure that's true of all publications, I was amazed at how quickly we were able to adapt and make it work. I mean, if you think about your experience as a reader, as a user of content, there was no interruption, right? There was no moment in which you felt that the media wasn't doing its job because of the pandemic logistical challenges, right? And I'm very proud of that. On behalf of my colleagues in our industry, we were able to actually perform as well as we could even remotely, thanks to technology, thanks also to the work of all our colleagues. Now, the one thing that was affected was our news gathering, right? So imagine how we get our news, we go out and meet people, interview people. It's mostly done face-to-face. We as editors always encourage the reporters to do it face-to-face because you get more out of it, right? Naturally, like any meeting, it's better in person. We encourage lunches and so on. And all of a sudden, they were taken away from us. So the one thing that happened was the logistical challenges, which I think we overcame quite well. And I can talk a little bit more about that, especially with the print products. There was quite a challenge if you imagine that normally when you do a print product, you just go over your colleagues desk and say, change the headline, make the font bigger. I don't like that. Put their photo like that. And now you're batting PDFs back and forth, right? And it's very difficult to see a page on the screen than it is when you see it on a big screen. And so that logistical challenge, the news gathering challenge is interesting. So I oversee a lot of copy, right? I see a lot of the raw copy that my colleagues produce. And all of a sudden, I was noticing all these interviews without any color in it, right? Nothing. What did the person look like? What was their office like? What were they eating? And of course, why was that? Because they were looking at the screen a bit like, ah, so you can only see about 15% of me. And if I'm clever enough, there's nothing behind me. So you can't tell what I read and what I'm like, you know, what my family looks like. So all the stuff that you would gather from an office interview, for example, even an office interview, you wouldn't be able to do that. So that was something that we had to overcome as well. So my suggestion to my colleague was always go get more color, ask them where they are, tell us what they're wearing, you know, how are they coping with lockdown and all things that became the norm. We needed to communicate to our readers, right? Because otherwise we weren't representing the moment. We were just representing some words and that's something that we... And I think if you look at other media, you'll see that that's happened quite regularly, I think. And then two other things happened, right? One was already happening, but I think it was exacerbated by the crisis, by the pandemic. And this is the polarization, vulcanization of news and the spread of misinformation, right? It's about the economy, the markets, politics, the vaccine health. There was a lot of that happening. So that raised the stakes for all the high level professional publications raised the stakes even higher. Our job became even more important than normal. We needed to be accurate. We needed not to so panic. We needed to be very clear about what was happening. In our case, it's mostly the markets and business journalists, but that's very important what was happening. Covering something like a vaccine. So today, the United Kingdom became the first Western country to authorize a vaccine. And this is a big milestone in the history, in recent history. But covering the vaccine stories, which also led to sharp spikes in the shares of the companies that were producing these vaccines, was very something that we had to do in a very balanced, very neutral, unbiased manner, because there was not just obviously the health of millions of people at stake, but also the hopes of millions of people at stake, as well as considerable amount of money and important political considerations. So that raised the stakes in the face of a tide of misinformation that only grew bigger during the pandemic. My theory as to why it grew bigger, by the way, is because people were even more insulated. So the silo, the eco chambers got bigger because you are at home, you have much more control on your media diet and there is an ecosystem that encourages you to stay in a salon and eco chambers. So the serendipity of news that you would find when you commute, talk to other people, share ideas with colleagues, meet contacts or rivals, you didn't have that quite as much. So the, hey, have you heard this, was less prevalent in a moment in which we were all confined to our own bubbles. Just a theory. Jessica, can I pick up on that because I think there's a really interesting point there between trust and the thing that you said earlier about colour. And I just love your opinions on how much you think your readers are really buying into a style and a tone and how that develops trust in and of itself. And if you are in this echo chamber, which is sort of a similar point but slightly different, how do you break through? So as an editorial team, what are you thinking about in terms of breaking through into those horrendous chambers? So we see it in two ways. It's a very good question. One is we have a duty to the readers and subscribers and members who are engaged with us. So they know us. So they had sometimes literally bought into us, so they actually pay for our content. So we have a tremendous amount of duty towards them. And the duty towards them is to make sure that they get the accurate, unbiased, non-misinformed information that they need to get. So that's one thing. So this is our members, right? We call them actually members. Our readers, not subscribers, we call them members. We think of them as members. So we have to give them more than just input. And then we also have a duty to the people who are not our members but come to us and maybe they come to us because of Google search or a Facebook feed or something. We need to make sure that they know that we are accurate, that we know we give them the best possible information. And that's, in a way, more difficult because the members already know us. We need to persuade the other cohort, which is many cohorts, that we are trustworthy enough for them to actually engage with our content. So two different challenges. And in a world where this is all being done digitally, you know, how are you tracking that? What are your tips and tricks, I guess? Yeah, so I think this is actually the good news, right? Technology has enabled us to be a lot, there's a lot of bad, bad press of technology, right? But I'm actually positive on it. I think technology has enabled people in my position to be a lot more informed and therefore make better decisions, right? So I'm old enough to remember when we didn't have technology in journalism and it was like sending a message in a bottle, right? The classic thing was the editors used to say, I really just want to read that, but it was just their opinion. They didn't know for sure. And we also believed them because they were the editors, right? So it was just informed speculation on their part, informed by their experience for sure, but they're not sure. Now we can be sure, right? We can measure it, right? We can see what does well, what doesn't do well, how people engage with it, what do they do afterwards, what else, where they came from. This gives a tremendous amount of the ability to tweak our content and to shape our content. There's of course the extreme example of that, which is that you just follow the data, right? If you just follow the data, you give your readers an unbalanced media diet because you only give them what they want. So you only give them potatoes. You only give them chips because they like chips, comfort food. But what they need is they need the chips and they need the vegetables, right? The vegetables are what we think is important and, you know, we still kind of, that's our job to curate and filter what they think is important. And our job is to present it with a very wholesome and very varied meal, right? And they can pick and choose, of course, but we present them with everything, right? So technology is not, it's a guide. It's not a master, shall we say. Jessica, here's a question from the audience. What could you give as top tips for marketers who are leading editorial teams based on your experience so far? That's another great development in our industry, right? The companies have developed newsrooms and my suggestion is always to run it as close as possible to a real newsroom, right? That means hiring real journalists. And there are many good journalists who are willing to have that experience and to run it with news values, right? Because in the end, the news values don't change, right? I mean, it's some of the things I said before and many others, but I think that's the try and be on the news, try and be as engaging as possible with your audience. Think of your audience, know your audience and give them interesting content, content that they will find interesting. I think, by the way, that your industry does that a lot. I see bad examples where it's just propaganda and I think the audience is smart enough to know that that's propaganda. I mean, we are talking about some of the most sophisticated audiences we will ever face in our professional lives just because they got so much choice, right? So yes, there's a lot of misinformation, but these people are very, very savvy. So they also have so much choice that they can click away in a second. So your job, our job, and the job of the marketing, in-house marketing teams is to keep them engaged with our content. So the closer you are to real news, the better, in my view. I think you made a very big point in terms of engaging content. And that actually leads back to what you said in the opening that, you know, a journalist picks up some other stuff and just the information when seeing somebody face to face. And that usually is a good lead up into a story where you frame where you're coming from and then you go into the topic and usually you close them with this kind of emotional linkage. And it's actually absolutely right what you say for financial marketeers when you talk relevant stories. It's about a story. It's not just about the fact of product or services or future of benefits. Because also there was a question in this audience that's not really directly a question to you, but it's a question that we as moderators can answer is about the fact with the trend of selling financial products online, with this trend compared to face-to-face personal interaction prevail after COVID-19. I would say clearly, yes, it is. We've seen yesterday I was in a discussion with the economist and there was a gentleman there from the automotive industry and said in the past we couldn't have thought that anyone would buy a car online. And now that experience is there and it's here to stay. So it will always be a good mix. And that will lead me back to a question to you because you said, funnily, I love that, that you are in control of your media diet. So tell us, what is the best media diet post and during COVID? Well, it depends who you are. If you're me, my media diet is kind of ginormous buffet Las Vegas style, Las Vegas casino style buffet or media because I need to consume as much as possible because I need to kind of absorb what everybody else is doing. So people in my position are probably over consuming media because that's our job. But I think for a financial market here, my suggestion is always to have your core publications, the ones that you really go to every day or multiple times a day. And then also have something a little like from left field because that's where you're going to get the ideas that perhaps you don't see. Perhaps outside your sector. Personally, I like to look at a lot of magazines and publications that are not in finance as to see if we can steal some ideas. And personally, we've taken ideas that we use in our publication from food magazines, lifestyle magazines, sports magazine. And when I say magazines, I mean digital publications of course. So I think it's important not to be too ring fence in your own industry, even though obviously that's your core. But also think about something left field that perhaps you like and how would you apply, how would it work in your industry. And you're blessed because you're in your industry marketing. There's so much going on in so many industries and fascinating place and so much innovation, perhaps even more so than in the media at the moment. One final thought, maybe we should answer the question. What is next for financial news? If you've got a 30 second, how's it doing? How are you doing? So there's a lot of like, you know, there's a lot of pessimism around, right? And I mean journalists are great at pessimism. They're basically that's a stocking trade. But I think actually I would want to leave on a note of optimism. I think technology is for the first time not an enemy for us in this situation. It's freeing us. We are much better at identifying the business models that work. Now we need to execute the business model that work. We are finding new ways to partner with companies. And we didn't talk about custom content. It's a fantastic area for their readers as well for the for the viewer as well. You know, we we're getting some great results on custom content. So I think financial news has a bright future, which is going to be driven by technology curated by journalists in part. And there's going to be more and more partnership with marketing and companies. That's a great close. Couldn't have done it better. Well, thank you so much, Francesco. You've really engaged our audience here because the good thing is I see on my panel, loads of questions flying in. Let's see whether we can also possibly answer some of the questions offline. So I will ask Jacob to fire them to you and we can then see that we find a way of answering those questions online. So thank you very much, Francesco. Please stay with us here. Let's move on to our next agenda point, ladies and gentlemen. And this is really something that's also close to our hearts here in the financial service industry is the promotion of financial literacy. So we're going to learn here a little bit about the unique partnership between the Bank of England and Bino. And today our high profile guests at our conference are Fiona Hickley, the executive director, brand marketing and strategic partnerships at the Bino. And for those of you who don't know the Bino, I'll tell you in one second. And we've got Andrew Hatton, the head of outreach and education at the Bank of England. So Fiona and Andrew, can I ask you to switch on your cameras and to unmute your line? There we are. Fantastic. It goes like clockwork. So I tell you, look, here's a little cue, folks. If anyone of you don't know the famous Bino comic, which is actually the longest running comic in the United States, sorry, in the United Kingdom. But if you don't know, just look at Fiona, then it gives you a slight hint. There is someone called Dennis the Menace. And I will not tell you all exactly. So with this over the next 35 minutes, we're going to discuss this partnership that we have just mentioned and how both of the organization have modernized their approach to digital marketing and communications. So, but let's first of all introduce our guests. And usually I start with the woman first. I will and you will see why later on I will however start with Andrew. So Andrew, can you please outline the Bank of England's outreach and education strategy for us here when you introduce yourself? Good morning, everyone. I was wondering if Fiona was going to be supporting those colors. We've done an event with Bino before and I think this is a bit of a common theme. So I fittingly got like it looks like I've got a grey top on which is very Bank of England, isn't it? So yeah, thanks very much. Yeah, my role as you say is head about reaching an education at the bank. I sit in the communications directorate. Outreach and education covers quite a broad span of what we do. It's about getting out there and engaging with the public, engaging with all our different stakeholders in fact, as well as running our education program. I just think it's just by way of introduction. I think perhaps a few years ago the idea of the Bank of England having a spot at a conference like this might have seemed quite unlikely. It's not that long ago that the bank's marketing and communications strategy consisted of two elements principally. An annual speech by the governor at Mansion House and the novel instrument, shall we say of the raised eyebrow during a fireside chat in the parlours. Hopefully you've all spotted that we've come a little way since then, but even so the notion of the Bank of England teaming up with the Bino to create resources for primary schools might seem a little far-fetched to many of you. But I just thought I'd just explain a little bit about why this matters to us. We've gone on a journey over the last few years to basically shift from communication strategies very much based around our what you might call traditional core audiences. So there'd be financial markets participants and the journalists who report on the financial markets. And in order to reach them, it's all about developing complex carefully crafted reports and statements to a much broader form of communication with a larger part of the general population. Ultimately our mission statement is all about serving the public of the United Kingdom. So we think it's actually quite important that we talk to them, but that's difficult because the general public do not by instinct sort of check the Bank of England website every day for their news. They don't necessarily follow the Bank of England on Twitter. So how do we engage with the public on what can sometimes be the quite dry stuff that we think is important and is important indeed important to them, but they don't necessarily know that. So about four years ago, we set out a new strategic strategic plan, if I can say it, which is all about changing the way we communicate. It's about simplifying some of the messages, but in doing so we have to be really careful because often our messages are deliberately quite nuanced. We have to be very careful what we say because those technical audiences that follow every word of our communications will attach a significant meaning to them. So we have to be very careful. But essentially at the heart of our strategy are what we call three years. So explanation, engagement and education and obviously come to the education at the end with the Beano story. But the explanation was all about simplifying our messaging. We did this in a number of ways, but probably the most high profile was developing different layers of content. So our key publication, which used to be called Inflation Report, now the Muncher Policy Report where we talk about the forecast for the UK economy. We talk about the interest rate decision. Instead of just having one big sort of 50 page document which goes into a huge level of detail, we develop different layers of communication to sit on top of that so that those key messages could be communicated more widely. Engagement, changing the way we engage has meant doing more on social media. We've still got a long way to go, but we have made progress. Doing direct public engagement and that's a big part of my role is developing new ways of communicating with the public through different forums. So we set up citizens panels across the UK. We run regular events with charities to hear from lesser herd groups. And a variety of other sort of initiatives to have actually direct channels with the public rather than relying necessarily on the traditional media to sort of get the message out there. And then finally education. So that's education of everybody. So we've tried to reach audiences and educate in a subtle way through things like a TV documentary, which we did with the BBC about 18 months ago. You may have seen it inside the Bank of England, which is all about sort of hopefully demystifying what the Bank of England is and sharing the light of the people who work there. We developed Finkle Knowledge Bank, which is where we try to explain economics in layman's terms. And then our education program, which is two, well, there's a number of aspects to it. One of them is going out and doing school talks. We've got 500 bank ambassadors who go out to state schools around the UK to talk about the work of the bank. We developed some secondary school resources called Economy a few years ago, which are all about sharing to 13, 14, 15 year olds why the economy and indeed by connection with the Bank of England is important and relevant to them in the decisions that they make and their lives. And then the Bino. So the partnership with the Bino and Tess as well, who've been a third partner in this is all about primary schools and reaching a different audience. And by using the sort of heft of the institutional sort of reputation of the Bank of England and the sort of fun side of things, the Bino, I'm hoping that we can begin to address some of those massive issues around financial literacy, which I think we're all aware of. As an institution, we also feel we have a kind of public duty to play our part in trying to address. That's a perfect PR for Fiona Andrew. And now you know why I asked you to come first because that built up the good introduction for Fiona. So Fiona, welcome here on stage and also explain to us. So, you know, tell us a little bit about the Bino brand and tell us also about how you invigorated that brand and then later on, you know, how it came to the partnership. So welcome Fiona. Thank you. Thank you. I'm finding myself wondering how on earth I got to be talking to a conference of finance marketing managers alongside the Bank of England. Bino has taken me in very wonderful ways and places that were unexpected. I've had a career in kids marketing entertainment and so I'm a complete duck out of water in your finance world. But I do know about storytelling and we have got a really good story to tell about what we've done with Bino and reinvigorated our brand and our business over the last few years. And the way we primarily do that is through really knowing our audience, which is six to 12 year old children and their families. And we have really detailed insight that informs everything we do. And that's the path that led us to be talking to Andrew and the Bank of England and to be being here today. So to tell you a bit more about Bino, we're an 82 year old British institution. It's a quirky, iconic national treasure. But as you said, Christophe, it's the last surviving weekly comic in the world. And we were primarily a print publication in a declining market and we become a retro brand. So five years ago, DC Thompson, our owners took a really bold, brave step and created Bino Studios, a separate company, effectively as a startup. And in those five years, we've completely revamped the brand and looked at it from what do modern British and international now kids need and how are they consuming their media. And so what we've done is we've created animation. We've created with high quality Pixar animation, which was commissioned by the BBC. The series is called Dennis Unleashed. So we had a 52, our first series was 52 episodes that aired on the BBC, Emmy nominated, and we've sold that to 100 countries around the world. So I'm delighted to tell you that Dennis is now being broadcast globally. We're taking British humour around the world. The second series is now running on BBC and we're selling that around the world too. A big bit of what we did, a very large bit of what we did was create a digital network and platforms centered around Bino.com, which isn't the comic digitally. It's a, in the spirit of the comic, safe, funny, entertaining place for kids to go and be online. And we're just shy of two million users a month on that. So that's going incredibly well. And then after all of that, the printed comic has had a massive resurgence through all this other brand work we've done. In the last three years, we've had double digit growth for circulation each of the last three years. And in lockdown, since lockdown started, we have doubled our subscriber numbers for the comic. Lots and lots of families have discovered the value of having something arrive through your letterbox every Saturday morning, very reliably that the whole family can enjoy. And so that's been a really fantastic success for us. And, you know, and Kent's doing incredibly declining print market. We are very much bucking the trend. When we set up Bino Studios, one of the very first things we did was set up an insight panel of kids from across the UK and across different socio demographic groups. And since then, our insight and research team have talked to those children every single week. We call them our trendspotter panel and our research team are our Bino brain. And Bino brain informs everything that we do. And we talk to those children about what they're interested in, what they're doing, how they're feeling. And this year in particular, and it's always fascinating, but this year you can imagine as being extraordinary to get that kind of insight from this cohort of children. And we now have 40 we speak to most weeks. And Bino brain has now become a healthy revenue stream for our business. We sell those trendspotter reports, our map of hotness, which shows what is going in and out of kids interest. And we also do bespoke research and insight projects for companies because more and more companies know that children and this generation of children are so influential in their families purchasing powers and they're a real activist group of children and generation. And more and more companies and organisations realise that talking to those people is important for their future. And what we can do at Bino is we do that, we get the tone right. We've been talking to children for 82 years, we know how to do it with the right tone, the right humour, not patronising. And that's a really tricky, difficult skill. And in 2018, we set up Bino for schools, which is a website where teachers can download free, very high quality curriculum linked lesson plans. And we've tackled quite challenging subjects quite intentionally. We like doing that at Bino. We have a long history of doing it. So we have done lesson plans on things like SPAC, which teachers and year six pupils hate spelling punctuation and grammar, emotional wellbeing and also comic comprehension. And that work got us noticed and because we were able to do it in a way that engaged audiences and engaged and our audience in this case is both kids and teachers. And that is what got us invited through the heavy security at the Bank of England and into those beautiful corridors. And together we created Money and Me. It's 12 lessons. I think we put them up on the screen now. Some of them you can see. It's a set of 12 lessons for key stage one and key stage two. So that goes right the way up through primary school. And that is the end of my story. Fantastic introduction and many, many points raised here. First of all, I think for the community here of marketeers, one of the big messages that you already sent by explaining to us how you invigorated Bino, that you didn't just succumb to the fate of saying, okay, we're print magazine. Print is no longer that much in fashion. Kids are digital. Let's see how we can get out of here without licking our wounds too much. You just took it, the bulls by its horns. You have reinvigorated the brand. The idea of a sort of brand advisory panel and this with kids and then developing out of this a separate product like a transparent product. That's exactly the message for marketeers to say just think outside the box and also how it links. And that's a question to Andrew because Andrew, like many banks who are seen as sort of up top to bottom. We are here and the world is out there. The Bank of England is seen a bit more like a stuffy institution that then can use this quirky brand to be a bit more modern. And that's not really the point, but certainly a certain part of it is true though. So tell us then how this partnership went off and then explain a little bit what Fiona has done, how it fits in overall. So walk us through the program in reality because it's not a program where me as a parent can just click a few websites is more by a school. So explain to our audience a little bit the program and what you have achieved so far in financial literacy. And did you want to start? Yeah, I can do that. Fiona may well want to come in on the last bit. So I mean, in terms of your very good point about how a partnership like this can begin to challenge some of the perhaps stereotypes about an institution like the Bank of England. I think that's absolutely right. That's absolutely right. It comes back to my sort of original point my opening remarks about the difficulty we have in engaging sort of stakeholders beyond that sort of very small importance but the technical community that we've traditionally talked to. You know, we've got huge, you know, we're very privileged at the Bank of England, I feel very proud of working there but also very honored that, you know, we have a reputation that dates back, you know, all the way to 1694. And, you know, what comes with that in terms of the sort of trust, reliability. And that's very, very valuable you can't build that from scratch so so you know it's about it's about embracing that and honoring that but at the same time also thinking about how we move forward as well and and and broaden our reach and get people to understand that the modern bank is, you know, you know, respects all those traditions but at the same time is very much a modern institution and actually importantly a diverse institution and that's certainly a working progress in terms of getting that message out there to sort of get behind the sort of huge security big walls and in the city and get people to understand that this is a diverse institution that actually looks relatively like the people that it serves. And I think you know this partnership with Beano is a really great example of how partnerships can begin to do that just by by surprising by by bringing together to two different partners who bring different different things to to that partnership. So that's been that's been really exciting and it's you know it's a model will certainly look to sort of do in other ways as we begin to sort of on this continue on this sort of modernization journey in terms of our communications. I mean I don't know if you know if you want to talk through the most specifics around around the actual program itself. I mean the I said that there is an important third partner in this in test who we shouldn't forget because as Fiona rightly says actually the audience for this isn't in many ways not kids it's teachers because teachers are the way you get to the kids and you know that might seem a really obvious point but actually it's kind of critical because you can have the best resources in the world. But if teachers don't know about them and aren't putting them in front of the kids then then it's a waste of time so we've been amazed, you know really pleasantly surprised by the pickup, which is massive testament to the quality of the resources themselves but also the channels that we've used to get to the teachers. You know we had in the first few weeks you know literally over 60,000 downloads of the resources you know within the first month or so which was which was fabulous you know and that's and that spread right across the UK so one of the key things was to make sure that these these materials were aligned with the curriculum and a very key point in in all four of the devolved of the nations of the of the UK. That was really important to us as the central bank for the whole of the UK obviously. And those the materials are downloaded. Either through tears or through the Beano website and there's links to to both from the Bank of England education resources as well. And we've also got a plan to develop these further by creating some sort of home learning resources which are just sort of in train as well but I don't know if you know if you want to pick up on any of that. Yes, I can tell you a little bit more about the lessons and how what our starting point was the bank already did have a primary lesson program that was quite old, and it needed updating so some of it was absolutely fine and so some of the younger lessons were about things like how did currency start and bartering inflation supply and demand those those things didn't change. So those we took, and we updated them and we be notified them which means is that we added this lovely illustrations and we added be no sense of humor to it all. But there are other things that tears who worked with us on the content and us brought brought and thought that should be new so we've got lessons in there about keeping your money safe which a lot of it is about online fraud and checking and being aware of that. There's another program about all the different ways that you can pay for things now. And we've got games about bingo games about choosing and making sure that you're choosing or sense of the choosing which which kind of form of payment you use for different in different situations. There's another program and not in the higher age range about ethical spending and how you can use your money to influence things and make good choices about what you buy that's a good that's a good one and then there was another one I was thinking but it's a really important one about what is debt and obviously in this day and age that's a really important lesson. So those are the new elements. And then what we've also did not not in every lesson but scattered throughout is we've got lots and lots of games. So children and sometimes it's in a small group sometimes it's in a whole class group can play a game of shopkeepers and change you know have a situation where every 10 minutes everyone can change their prices and play with supply and demand. There's another game called spend save and borrow where children can decide whether or not they want to earn interest or pay interest on a loan and where that sort of levels out at the end there's some really fun games that we've brought to the classroom. Fantastic. I mean, look, I think we can go endlessly in this one because it shows how fascinating finance is and if you say if you can be notified put it into entertaining content context then then of course this is engaging. It's also it's also worth saying sorry because it's also worth saying that you don't have to be a teacher to download these if you want to download them as a parent and do them with your children, they're free you can you can do that and we have had lots of feedback from parents. And we as Andrew said we are going to produce a version that is more parent friendly, and that wouldn't have national curriculum links and things like that but as a parent you can totally access the music. 100% and our observation is it's not only just at the level of kids to teach financial literacy you'll be surprised how many students when they leave uni have very little experience and the real financial literacy. And of course they've got a current account and usually I think student debt, but you know, not more than that we we see as a financial service industry there's a, there's a lot to be done also to explain our, our products and services are better and more easily because most of the groups tend to have their own acronyms and that's almost like the, the wall the impermeable wall where people say okay I don't understand it and then I get fine. But, you know, it's very easy, usually once you understand it and that actually brings me back to Andrew, because you now have positive experience with Fiona and she's, as you all experience here bringing with creativity. Would you consider other partnerships based on this experience and how has this journey also affected the, the public perception of the Bank of England do you have already something that points in this direction. Yeah, so so we've, I mean we've, we, we, as part of our sort of communication strategy that we launched a few years ago we actually created a sort of partnerships role which is actually what I used to do, I used to do. And that was all about thinking about different partners we could work with and who could open doors in different ways and help us communicate and and in novel ways. So yeah, absolutely. And we use partnerships in all sorts of, in all sorts of different ways. Sometimes they are like this with a, this is a long standing, you know, you know, detailed, relatively, you know, complex partnership in terms of helping stuff in a scale like this. Some of some of the ones we do are much more informal, and of playing a really important role in some of that wider public engagement stuff that we're doing. So I talked briefly about sort of the citizens panels and the community forums that we run around the country. What we're doing there is we're partnering with local charities in local communities, who can help us to reach different groups of people who again would you know, much the same as most primary school children wouldn't think about sort of looking to the Bank of England for information, you know, there's a huge amount of society that has no idea what the Bank of England does. So these partners are helping us to sort of bridge that understanding gap and access these these these groups. And so we're working in all sorts of different ways with different partners on all sorts of different scales. So certainly keen to do to do more of that kind of thing. I think it's a huge opportunity in terms of measuring impacts. I mean, on one level it's easy. So we know we seek feedback from teachers for the front for who use the materials and you know they can rate it on on these various websites as they do and the feedback is great. So far, as Fiona said, we've had some really positive feedback. Now obviously that's that's one level. I mean, ultimately the success, the long term success of a project like this will be to see what happens to those children that use the resources and to see ultimately how it affects their understanding their choices of what subjects they're going to take at school. I mean, one of the things we're really keen to do is to encourage more kids to take economics, for example, because there's a real diversity challenge in economics and that's another partnership we're involved in called discover economics, which is all about basically getting more girls and kids from a different socioeconomic and more ethnically diverse backgrounds to consider economics because it has a bit of a reputation problem in terms of being seen as, you know, for a certain group of people with a certain type of interest so so we're doing other stuff in that kind of space but ultimately we would love to see the kids who do this program come out of the other end making better financial decisions obviously that's a really long term sort of outcome and it's going to be a tricky thing to measure but it's something we're really keen to think about how we do that. We do obviously run public polling as well which looks at things like levels of understanding in the Bank of England and how we're regarded and how we compare with other institutions like you'd expect us to and you know all of this work is, you know, the challenge for us as ever is the Bank of England reputation will often be shaped by the news and the economy around us and decisions taken by others so it's a really hard thing to measure at that kind of macro scale. We do measure it and I think we're making progress but it's but it's a hard one to sort of impact in the short term and I think it's a long term game in terms of how all this stuff ultimately will work through to those really wider levels of public understanding but but where we do engage directly with people, we do change understanding quite quickly and we do get really positive response. I think you, I mean this program in itself shows that you're making great strides and completely changing the view and the perception of the Bank of England because of course as you say currently Bank of England is in most people's good books because the interest rate is so low and that's usually the factor where everybody is. Not savers, not savers. Absolutely right, you can't win it all but you're turning to the current situation for a second because surely that's like a two-part question. First of all is, have you experienced that due to the pandemic and that the program for schools whilst online learning is of course the call of the day but has this program been impeded by the fact that everything turned digital to online learning that suddenly just to cope with a normal curriculum and teachers couldn't just say okay well let's park this financial literacy topic for a second because I need to go through the curriculum so the first question has the pandemic influence the program and secondly then back to be to itself because you mentioned that luckily the print the desire for a printed magazine has increased. Do you think that post lockdown, post the whole situation, people will say okay that fitted the gap nicely let's go back to digital so you know what are your answers to those two questions? To start with the first one, we launched this program in July so with the idea that when children went back to school and they did go back to school in September because teachers would be able to use it so no it hasn't locked down and schools being closed in to this program. What we saw on our other Bino for schools programs was that take up actually went up because teachers were and parents were desperately trying to find things online to teach at home and so teachers were sending the links out to parents and saying go download it and do this with your children. What that's taught us and this is a conversation we're having with the bank and we're working on with the bank is that we need to present materials that are parent focused as well as teacher focused and so that's a direction that we need to go in and you know it's something none of us would have thought about a year ago. And your other question in terms of the comic and we've had growth in the comic for the last three years and it's done incredibly well for us in lockdown. We lost retail and we lost that retail part of our trade although comics are on sale in supermarkets so we were in essential retail. But our circulation figures are very, very healthy and our website figures were very, very healthy through lockdown. We certainly see a desire with families to enjoy something together and I think that's you know lockdown has emphasised that. And Bino is you know three generations can enjoy the Bino together. They all know it and we all need something to make us laugh at the moment. So, we're very confident that and I'm going to make sure that we keep that growth going up. It's looking very good. That's super, super confident and a very positive uplifting message. So now in closing we've got two more minutes left for this session. Can I both ask you and start with Andrew. So if your final top tip for financial service marketeers because both of you have pushed boundaries, what would be your final tip out of that experience if you were in the place sitting at a large financial institutional insurance company or whatever and you're doing what you're doing but you're trying to find a new angle. Is there anything that based on your experience you can provide as a top tip and then Fiona from you because you have observed the financial service industry from a different angle. What would be your top tip from somebody outside this industry. So Andrew first then Fiona. Oh, I wouldn't cast ourselves as an expert but I would say be brave or be bold. Think outside the box. I mean I guess that's a bit of a cliche for this audience but I'm thinking from our perspective you know if the Bank of England can do stuff like this and you know the sort of different in terms of the thinking around partnerships and communication then you know certainly I'm sure everyone in this audience today can do it. You know you can open doors in all sorts of different ways if you think creatively about the partners that you work with. The Bank of England is a very traditional institution we could have taken a different route with this even you know having made the decision that we should refresh and really push and invest in our education resources. We could have chosen a, I guess a safer option than then then going with someone like like being out because you know it is this kind of quirky and off the wall and you know it was a there was a lot of discussion about it but at the end of the day I remember sort of sitting in the first corner and you know and seeing the sort of fun, the prominent role that fun was going to play and games are going to play in these resources and immediately thinking we need to be working with these guys and so yeah be bold and be brave I would say. Thank you so much Fiona, last word to you. I would say our experience is to know your audience and to know how to talk to them and make it clear. And talk to them, get your tone right talk to them in the in the right way, because if you if you don't you'll just switch them off in the first sentence. Well, thank you so much that was absolutely fascinating I'm really delighted on behalf of everyone on this virtual conference to have had you both here so ladies and gentlemen, a big digital applause for Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you stay with us for a moment. So over to Amy for the next part of the agenda and our next guest. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much I have never had to follow the be know and the Bank of England, I am fangirling over your sweat up there and I love it. And I think it's an absolute honor and really really interesting I know that we have loads of questions there we are seeing your questions and trying to work them in so please keep them coming it's fantastic to hear from everyone. And I'm sure you appreciate that in a forum like this it does feel a little bit like we're talking to ourselves. And so it's great to see your questions it's great to see the numbers flashing around on this wonderful screen, and that the guys have set up so I'm going to introduce my esteemed guests now to talk about digital content marketing. And so guys I'm hoping you're looking in the backgrounds please switch on your screens let me introduce Eric for a while, who is the CCO for 11 f s gonna Stephen who is head of client marketing at SOC Gen and Karen Rogers I'm not seeing yet but I'm hoping is lucky in the background who is marketing director at Target Internet. Thank you guys. Can you hear me 2020 cliche can you hear me is my mic working. Yes, I can same question back to you Amy. Can you hear me. Great. Yeah, yeah, we're all good. So, and I think we should just crack on and hope that there we are. Great. See you. Pressing the right buttons. It is. I think that's just something we should all live by. So we're here to talk about digital content marketing today and I mean, who better to follow than the Bank of England and the be no mashup I mean I thought that was a fantastic session really pushing the boundaries of how we think about content. And building those, you know, as well on Francesco's views on pure news and how we actually think about news gathering. So really today I think we start to think about, you know, how the speed and, you know, complexity of the channels that we have available to us are starting to change some of the techniques that we employ and that we should think about employing. And so I think the first point because like with any good conference we had a pre we had a pre session, and we had some great discussions and so the very first one I'm going to throw to the team here is, has it really changed you know what's where how far have we come from. And I'm going to go together first on that one. And so gonna tell us tell us your views. Yeah, thank you very much pleasure to be here today and share my thoughts just to say my role pertains to the wholesale client market so my comments are to be seen in that context. I'd like to open by quoting Bill Gates, who once said that we overestimate the change that is going to happen in two years and underestimate the change that is happening in 10 years. The reason why I quoted is because I think that's pretty pretty much precisely what's happened. If we think back for a second, you know when big data was a big buzzword in the industry this dates back to about six, seven, eight, nine years. And then what happened, not really much. And I think we only now start seeing the introduction of digital tools to become smarter marketers, smarter content marketers. So it's taking its time. Having said that, I mean a lot of things have changed in the last years. I mean our digital channels we've gone from print advertising to online advertising videos are being produced social media. I think one of the most striking features that I'm seeing is that we are seeing the composition of marketing and comms teams change. We still have the traditional marketing and comm skills, but there are new additions such as for instance data scientists and people who optimize search engines. And so that's a very clear sign to me that we are on the brink of what I would expect to be quite explosive growth in the next one to three years. Great. And Karen, I think you had some thoughts on that as well when we spoke. I just, do you know what, I think people are people, right, that hasn't changed. And let's face it, if we're marketing, that's who we're trying to reach. We're trying to reach people. And I think, you know, and this might come as a bit of a shock, shocking revelation from the host of the digital marketing podcast, but I don't particularly believe in digital. I think it's a false construct in a way. Like, what do I mean by that? I mean, you know, you go back your lives, I think we're all too obsessed with this latest hack on Google or Facebook or, you know, gaming the algorithm, you know, I've spent years of my life studying that. But it all boils down to the fact that as a marketer, you're trying to reach people and you're trying to reach them with a great product, a great offer that's going to help them in some way. Right, and that's not changed. You know, COVID-19 hasn't changed that. I think what has changed is, you know, their attention on different screens, different devices, different objects. But I think as marketers, we rush to all be in the same digital space. I think that's a mistake. I think, you know, how much attention is still being paid to people's door mats. And the last time I checked my door mat was not as busy as my inbox. And yet my inbox is where all the marketers are. Actually, it's not. They're all being screened out into the other stuff you also got sent that you don't care about, right? But this is what we're all like literally obsessed about. And I think actually we need to take a step back from this, like, digital frenzy, this digital craziness, and get back to actually getting a message across to people. And absolutely, digital channels are a great way of doing that, but not necessarily in isolation, if you really want to cut through and you've got a great, great message. Yeah, well, as a direct marketer, you've got my vote, but Eric, let's hear from you. So I agree and I disagree. And I'm trying to think of the best way to kind of voice my perspective and opinion on this. So I think that when we talk about change, there's the theoretical armchair debates around change in the industry more the what do we see, what do we pontificate about when we have conversations as as an industry group or at events like this. And then there's the change that's actually how are you driving the results of your business with the strategy and tactics that you have for your company and your audience. And I think it's much more about, you know, things are always changing, right, fundamentally, innovation or disruption comes from technology, creating new, better, cheaper ways to add value to an audience and that is always happening. I don't think that's really debatable. But what matters much more on the practical level, because I think that's what really what what's going to be more valuable to people is how much are you changing what you do within it. So I agree with Kieran in the sense that, and I think about that stuff all the time. People haven't changed in the 10 years, the fundamental dynamics and psychology of how do you change perception and behavior to deliver business results because that's what marketing is or at least should be at the end of the day that hasn't changed. But the attention and where it is, like Kieran said, definitely has changed. And I think the other dynamic that's super important within that is just because there is attention somewhere doesn't mean that you can reach people effectively in those places and at a price that makes sense for your business. So you need to be thinking about not just where is the attention but also how can you reach it effectively and efficiently and where's that arbitrage of attention where there is people paying attention but maybe other marketers haven't caught up to that yet. So in that perspective, I do think it's important to stay on top of the changes that are happening because, you know, these are, you know, matters of sometimes three, six, nine months where you have an opportunity that other people haven't gotten to yet that can make a fundamental difference. So, a lot of stuff hasn't changed and I love that quote I actually didn't know is from Bill Gates, but I think that we do tend to particularly when we are in our silo of talking to other marketers overestimate things and underestimate things but it comes down to the practicalities of what are the results that you're driving. And I think there is change to take advantage of always. I agree. But one of the things that Francesco said earlier which I wanted to sort of bring back in and you may or may not have had a chance to hear that session was around how ecosystems and echo chambers sorry are getting tighter and smaller. And I think there's an interesting point as we start to think about digital content of thing in how we break through some of those increasingly small bubbles that people are building in this sort of COVID phase. You know, can we necessarily go back to door to door drops if people are disinfecting everything that comes through their front door you know what how do you need to think about things differently. And I think, you know, there's an interesting challenge there for all of us to think about how digital breaks through and an escape to be, you know, the others folder that we that we all have and that we will know about. And I'm not sure that's a question to specifically I think might go back to Eric on that one. And do you think that's something that we need to be thinking about do you think that's something that you know you guys are looking at, you know. Yeah, yeah 100%. I mean, one thing that I think we don't talk about enough as marketers is, you know, I think a primary if not fundamental role of marketing should be to improve the quality of the product or service, because at the end of the day the best marketing is a great product. And so depending on what type of business you're in that takes on a different role. But oftentimes, in these conversations we're talking about kind of the communication or the branding or the advertising component of it but I think that that's if you go back to the four P's. Traditionally that's such a big role of marketing. I think maybe doesn't get enough attention, but I think when it comes down to what are the channels what are the content, how are you actually trying to engage with your audience. I think what I would say to that, you know, not as much debating the specifics of what channel right now in COVID, but you need to have a hypothesis. But then most importantly, you need to be able to adapt quickly to the data that you're seeing and the feedback that you're getting from people. So I think oftentimes we can think, you know, we talk a lot about being customer centric and I think within marketing, we can sometimes be marketing centric. And so we're like, Oh, this channel is the thing right now. But if you don't have the system set up in the way that you're executing to be getting that feedback on whether it's working or whether it's not or how it's impacting people. Then it doesn't matter, you know, I think it's always interesting talking about particularly my background is is in the advertising agency world we spent a lot of time talking about what's good creative what's bad creative if you're on the outside of that business. You have no idea, because good or bad depends on the business results that it's driving. So I think it's, it's that it's having that feedback loop. And when you say whether it's the right thing or the wrong thing, it should be dependent on what are the business results that it's actually driving. Yeah, I think that's great. And one of the things you touched on there, the three P's of marketing, I think came up in our chat earlier and you know, it's really about we've got a very wholesale audience today, I think, primarily. And as I said earlier, you know, there's some differences in views on whether or not wholesale marketing behaves differently. And I think I might go back to you gonna run on the sort of classic principles and how you see those from a wholesale marketing perspective with this lens of digital content. So do you see it as different? Different to retail you mean. Yeah, I think, I mean, in the wholesale marketing space there's always been that debate around, you know, can we learn from retail look at what retail is doing retail is so much more sophisticated than than than than wholesale. And I think that we need to be careful in how we we look at that relationship. There are definitely areas where I think we can learn from retail. But there is also boundaries fundamentally the products in the retail space financial services are much more simplistic if you think about a highly structured derivative and how you sell and market that, you know, just kind of apply the same principles as a retail. But where we do can learn and this is I think an important aspect is we need to think about how we use digital tools. And so, as an example, for instance, in retail sector, let's say again, Christoph talked about automotive earlier I'm going to use the same example. In the automotive sector, products would have not been developed without solid understanding of the ones and the needs and the situation in the consumer base. At least that was the case up to a point in the wholesale space research used to be consisting of consulting the usual suspects Oliver Wyman, Greenwich associates Orion, and the research was about market share wallet share products. But it wasn't so much about understanding clients what is on the minds of our clients what are what is keeping our clients awake at night. And I think this is where digital tools can help inform a really smart content strategy. And that's in my view, where we need to become smarter in using digital channels. Just a quick word on what Eric and Karen said earlier. I think again, thinking about how we use digital channels. It's about combining the new freedom the new possibilities that digital offer with the personas with people at the end of the day. You know, we're still trying to reach reach people. So understanding people in my view is one of the key things going forward and in defining and using digital channels. Great. Karen, I might come to you on the. Yeah, please do I'm biting my bite my time. Gosh, like totally agree with everything gonna and Eric said, I just digital is fantastic for giving you measurement. There are so many digital signals that everybody watching this now is literally sat on. The problem is that we don't necessarily have the time and the resources and the systems to probably use that. And so you end up in a situation where if we take a step back and say what what we're trying to do. Oh, I love a fishing analogy for marketing right what we're trying to try to catch fish. Yeah, just catch fish what sort of fish. Now bring brings me back to what Eric was saying about absolutely you've got the data on who all these digital entities are and what their interests on what they're passionate about. But I don't think you know it's such a big powerful tool that we end up just sort of, you know, spraying and praying and shoving stuff out and pushing up without really having thought about what what who is this product for. You know, and coming back to goodness point that personas are my goodness so neglected, you know, and I've worked in some really big companies where you know that personas work hasn't been done for 1015 years, and it's out of date. And so one one retailer I work with, we're actually working on percent of that was 15 years out of date and it turned out our audience hadn't really changed they just got an older and we hadn't realized. Oh my gosh, you get insights like that. Suddenly your campaigns could be much much more, more more effective and I think, yeah much greater focus on the customer and matching up the customer with the right product, like the customer with the right solution. And then you can have brilliant, brilliant solutions, like really, really great customer experiences, all too often not. I think there's a lot of, you know, the wrong customer just being sold the wrong product for the wrong reasons and they're not happy with it. And then you don't get all the magical stuff happening like I'm telling all their friends and that word of mouth which is so powerful social media feeds on that that power of that word of mouth. That's why social media is so amazing. And yet we're really not capturing the opportunity there. It's about data and capturing. Go Eric, please. I just wanted to build on that because I agree with that entirely and it just sparked a thought for me. The, you know, agree 100%. It needs to work backwards from the audience persona, who they are, the value that the product or services providing to them. What I think is so fascinating is I think sometimes we're not aware of how much the current marketing ecosystem and philosophies are set up by a completely different era, namely one that is very TV centric. And regardless of whether you're in retail or wholesale, a lot of what we talk about and the way that we go through these exercises, particularly if we're working with, you know, ad agencies and people in that space. The idea of having a persona, or even like two or three personas, if you're selling to any type of market of scale in this in this day and age is kind of, it's interesting to me, because there's that idea that the brand needs to stand for one thing to everybody. And I'm just not sure that that's the case anymore. You have the ability to create content and a brand message that is much more bespoke and tailored to different people. And I think that's an opportunity that more challenger brands, if I'm over generalizing challengers and incumbents, more challenger brands take advantage of whereas a lot of incumbent organizations think about marketing more and that it needs to be this type of thing. And when we talk about digital content marketing in the post COVID world, I think that's a tremendous opportunity to take advantage of in that space specifically. And there was, I mean, there was a Gartner report at the back end of last year that talks about personalization, and they actually found that a lot of marketers were predicting that it would drop off. And so I thought this was a bit of an odd headline. So I sort of read beneath it and they said, oh, because they weren't measuring it. If you're not measuring it, then you're not going to get the value. But I think this hyper personalization piece is a really interesting angle and I think it's really sort of pertinent to right now. And but it would sort of challenge back and say, wouldn't that be going further into the tech, sort of dependent world and how important is it then to be monitoring personas and tailoring so that you're not just doing, you know, pop somebody's name in insert generic message here. I think is what's what I've seen a lot of examples of in this sort of hyper personalized space. It's actually it's my name. It's not any more personalized than that. Yep. Yeah, I mean, from my perspective real quick, you know, I think that we're in the very early days of that. And I think that good marketing has always been and will always be a balance between art and science, the human piece and the technological and more, you know, data driven piece. And it does need to be both applied at the right times in the right ways. But I think that historically, again, it's been tremendously art and creative and human driven. And there's so much opportunity on the technological and scientific side. So I think this is the area where probably most people are under invested in right now. One of the things that I'm fascinated by for the next couple of years is the rise of technology and AI and that whole space in the production of personalized creative. Because I think that that is a, you know, maybe it's not a one year thing, maybe I overestimate how much in the next year. But I think you see some of the tests that are coming out on that level, just to displace very expensive, very slow, very subjective and oftentimes in effective creative produced by humans. And so I think finding that balance of those two things put together is going to be really interesting. What do you think the opportunities are there in the wholesale space for people to start thinking about some more personalized creative? What are the things that wholesale marketing should be thinking about? It's an interesting point and we talked about this to some degree in our in our pre-call for this panel. One of the things that actually digital is responsible for is flooding the market with huge amounts of volume to the degree that the target audience do not know, you know, where to look, where's the right piece of information for what I'm looking for. And so personalization, I think is the key thing. We often talk about it from a, you know, the industrialization of personalization. So you got to try and balance both elements where you find ways to package up your content and make it relevant to a broader audience, but still relevant to a specific persona. I think that's still still quite key. Generally speaking, I think it's a good thing that we think about that, you know, in my view, less is more. And we need to stop. I mean, for us, one of the biggest challenges has been a Soggen and not one of the, you know, global bulge bracket banks. How do we get the attention of our clients, you know, just for a few seconds. And that's driven a lot of the marketing that we have defined. So, you know, I think in that context, personalization is key. Less is more. I would like to see that we start using digital in a smarter way, not just to pump out more stuff and more content and flood the market. Great. And I know where there's lots of questions coming through. And there's one that I do want to go to straight away. I was aiming to go to questions at 20 fast, but there's a question here come through on risk, actually, and how lots of people are finding that there's sort of compliance teams and legal teams are becoming increasingly risk averse. And I think the suggestion is it's mostly around the digital communications. And do the panelists have any advice on how to manage this and whether this is a wider trend of increasingly risk averse compliance teams and post COVID so any, any views on that from Kieran, can I start with you on that one or I'm always the legal department's worst nightmare when it comes to pushing stuff out. There's so many ups and things. I guess, I don't know. Yeah, I can't see the problem with it. If you're doing great stuff for your customers, like where's the risk in that? You know, I guess I probably over I'm probably over simplifying it. You know, I, I'm not working in such a tightly restrictive environment. So I'll probably throw that back to either Eric or or going to really but that's that that's the nuts and bolts of it. I think, you know, if you're doing great stuff for the customer. I think where a lot of the legal stuff creeps in when you start doing stuff to your customer. No, that's not okay. That's a violation. And unfortunately with digital tech. It's really easy to do stuff to your customers that, you know, we've all been there. We've all been annoyed by the over aggressive retargeting of a product that we've probably even already bought it, but the tech's not smart enough to know that. And so we're just bombarded with more and more messages. So I think there's a lot that marketers didn't can do from that perspective. I think if you take the view that we're doing great stuff for the customer. You shouldn't go too far wrong with legislation and legal side. Anything to add there. Yeah, I think regulation has become the modern marketers worst nightmare. And, you know, again, if I think back to when I started in this industry to today, I mean, we spend endless amount of hours discussing aligning working with legal with compliance around, you know, standards such as clear, fair, not misleading, considering the GDPR dimension. There's no doubt it's become more challenging. All I can say, I mean, I kind of, it kind of depends as well if you're more at the product marketing end of it, you're probably seeing much more interference from compliance if you want the branding end of it is probably a little bit lighter. We found good ways of doing things. Other tips, you know, work with compliance work with legal work with those functions on board them. We have had the experience of the beginning there is a fundamental position which is no. And then they start understanding and getting involved in the CDs, they see that the word through your eyes, and that becomes a very constructive working relationship. So it is, it is, it is what it is, we have to deal with it, but it can, it can work if you find a good way of working with the relevant colleagues. Yeah, I think that's great. I mean, we've spoken a lot about personas here. I'm probably more than we did on our set up call and that makes me incredibly happy my team. I only joined in July and I think they're very bored of me talking about cohorts and personas and using who are you talking to, how are you talking to them so it's, it's a subject I'm, yeah, a bit over excited about but some of the questions that I want to melt and I'm sorry if I don't do justice to either of you in melting them but I think there's a sort of common theme there and it's a bit about sort of future gazing if you like so is one lovely question about will digital marketing ever replace the pleasures and experience of traditional bricks and mortar marketing and a couple of others about, you know, future gazing can we think about themes or predictions for 2021. I think I'm going to hit you with that one first. Anything that you can think of that's coming through that will be as pleasurable as bricks and mortar marketing. Yeah, I'm not quite sure how to interpret that. Marketeers on this audience, you know, everybody gets lots of pleasure and pride out of their creation. I think what I would say is and Karen was kind of touching on this in the beginning is like, hopefully pretty soon we stop talking about digital marketing and it just becomes marketing. I mean, you know, I think less and less we're seeing digital marketers and we're just seeing marketers who are really good at digital because you need to be good at digital to be a marketer in 2020. I'm over generalizing obviously but you see my point. There used to be TV departments. There used to be TV creatives and TV media buyers. Now, there's not. So I think there's kind of that general evolution. In terms of predictions. The way I like to answer these questions like I could put some stuff out there but what I think is more interesting and helpful is, it's less about predicting the future and it's more about reacting faster to the present. What I think about much more because there's much more opportunity and just being faster and better at taking advantage of right now than there is about being trying to be right about what's coming. Very nice. I like that. Karen coming to you. I do you know what the big danger here is that the digital channels we can measure so much. And bricks and mortar is much harder to measure like there are a few things that you can start to to measure but I think most. I mean certainly retailers that I've worked with have never really moved beyond the footfall counter, which is a really blunt and brutal like stat right. And I've seen this like I've seen how compelling analytics graphs and charts can be right but we mustn't get arrogant and think that we can measure everything because we can't. And what we end up with is too much data on the digital side and not enough everywhere else and so we put all of our eggs in the digital basket. And I've seen whole industries decimated by this I do believe this I've always seen a very strong relationship between people visiting the bricks and mortar stores, and the people buying stuff online, except that my guys online they had tracking pixels on them so I could see what they were doing, but make no bones about it you can't just, you know, slice the two apart, you know between the bricks and mortar experience and the online experience. They are they are joined because guess what, they're the same people doing it the same people doing it and I think we all know showrooming goes on. You know I love to touch and feel and get to know products and actually, we all know that people matter. I love to know faces and people and I think that's very much devoid. Now you look at a you look at an online store or an online site. And if that was your branch what would that look like would be flipping weird branch you wonder in there and they just be blank walls and stuff in boxes. You know it wouldn't be a very natural or human experience and I think we neglect that our peril. We have to stop making this weird distinction between digital and the real world, because they're the same thing like your brand is it exists in both places, and people interact with it. And they feel certain stuff about real stuff that they don't feel about digital and emotion such a powerful thing for marketing. So I think in terms of the question about, you know the future. I think there's some technology that's going to come a close second but I don't think you'll ever beat the whole kind of real light in the world experience we've been playing around. Just with the Oculus Quest two, which is a, for those of you that don't know this is a 300 pound face computer right this is really cheap budget augmented virtual reality. Gosh, it, it comes close, but the technologies like that if you've tried phone VR and things like Google cardboard and stuff forget that this is on a whole different level. And actually you can actually meet in virtual spaces and interact and stuff and I think that's that's very exciting that might be a few years away maybe not in the next year. But I can absolutely see a moment where our current websites look like see facts does to us now. Right, you know, because actually, you know, you've got about 1000 pages and it's basically current websites. I think a high res see facts. We've just got prettier pictures and better graphics in them. And actually when you start to explore what's possible in virtual and augmented reality, like, we've only just begun. Finally, we might realize those dreams presented to us by marketers 20 years ago of surfing this information super highway. It was ridiculous with nothing like that. And it's still not really like that. But actually I can see a day when that's coming close. There are fleets of 20 something is trying to Google see facts right now. Yeah. All about bamboozle bamboozle was where it was out for me. Yeah, we're all down here from that. I like so great thanks for that question future gazing couple of comments. We talk about machines essentially and humans. First of all, on machines. For those of you connected to a browser right now you can Google will robots take my job. You enter marketing manager and you'll find that 1.4% chance there is only 1.4% chance the robot will take a job. Why do I say that I think there's a tremendous opportunity here. What we have to do is to learn how to use digital to digital tools. It's a combination of humans and machines. And I think in the first few years of digital we started to experiment and we've discovered channels and emails and videos and that all resulted in this pumping out that volume. I think we will become smarter. And as we become smarter, the joys of traditional bricks and mortar type marketing amalgamated with digital tools is going to give us opportunities that we've not dream dream about, you know, 10 years ago. It's a fantastic opportunity. We just have to learn how we use the tools. Brilliant. Christoph. Hello, welcome to our session. I would like to first of all congratulate you all that was a super inspiring discussion you see there's so much space for us as market is to cover and that's why I would like to just come in and answer one question from one of our senior and seasoned attendees Katarina Robaba who basically asked us sort of last year we discussed value and not product as the key theme. So what would be the key theme this year being our might take away from your discussion is loud and clear. The key theme is relevance and that sort of buzzword because relevance now in terms of the content but also a balancing that the very fine balance between what gonna what you said the sort of industrial is industrialization of personalization, but then balance this with a fine point of when do you have to come in because you said less is more. And I think my personal experience over this, this, this year was if you have relevant content that really helps people navigating through the current crisis and stuff and you completely dish your product and your service messaging in favor of providing relevant information that sometimes has nothing to do with you as a bank and your products that helps bridging that journey that brings your attention on on the back of it. There is interest so I think it was a fascinating discussion so thank you very much everyone Amy maybe for your final comments before we hand over to Jacob again. I'm just to echo massive thanks that we could have gone on for another 20 minutes there are more questions I should have asked you, but I didn't want to interrupt because I just think that was a great discussion so really appreciate your time. And really appreciate everyone asking questions and massive thanks. See you soon. Thank you. Great. So we are waiting for Jacob to come in there he is Jacob the final word of the first session of today's conference. Yes. Thank you very much Christopher and great moderating Christopher and Amy throughout this morning. And thank you very much Karen. So that was the first morning session the first session of three session to starts at 1255. So just use exactly the same go to webinar link as you're using right now to join us again. And it's a fantastic afternoon that we've got planned for you. We've got editors from some of the world's leading publications we have Faisal Islam from the BBC. Jason Crayon from the New York Times. James King from the FT and Julie Santorelli Turell from Bloomberg. That's going to be an absolutely fascinating head to head discussion at 140 we have what a financial services market is looking in their external partnerships. Alison Harbert from Investec Helen Gera Bakova from CME and Dr Winfrey Dawn from UBS. So again an incredible panel so don't miss that one. And at two o'clock we we end the session two with Lerina Hilton from Deutsche Bank Josh Divins from BlackRock and David Weld and former CMO of RBS. That is a fantastic lineup so I hope I see you all at 1255. And a shout out to Andrew Carrier who is doing our kind of Twitter today. So if you follow hashtag CIM FSS you'll see he's been tweeting all the takeaways from this morning is fantastic so get on Twitter. You now have a kind of a lunch break so unfortunately I can't provide the lunch but enjoy your lunch. Catch up with the content on Twitter share your thoughts with the audience. And then we'll get to all the questions it's been fantastic you've been sharing questions all the way along. But for now I will say see you soon at 1255. Thank you. So the first session that we're going to start with this afternoon will be the editor's view we've got a fantastic panel about to join us. On the panel I'd just like to ask Alex Dermain the the president of World Media Group and the main person at the Economist to join join me here on stage just to say a few words about the world media group. Alex I don't know if you're able to turn on your your video camera. Can you hear. I couldn't unmute myself. Thank you for that introduction Jacob and good afternoon to everyone so as you said I'm Alex Dermain I'm the world media group president and global client partner at the Economist. Many of you know who we are and what we do but for those that don't I just want to take a few moments to bring to life our mission and purpose if I may. The world media group is an industry body which promotes the values of quality and trusted journalism to the marketing and advertising community. 2020 has been a challenging and unusual year to put it mildly and our member brands have played a vital role in helping us all make sense of the uncertainty informing us on key global issues such as the US elections the pandemic of course and the ongoing Brexit discussions. Information is right on social platforms as we know and through less trusted new sources so our voice and filter on world affairs has never been more vital. Our member brands have helped influence opinions, challenged the status quo and informed the world with rigor and accuracy, building a unique bond of trust with the world's most highly engaged and influential audiences a world without this. So I'm really excited about this next session as we'll have the privilege of hearing directly from four of our leading financial editors. It will be a rich discussion read by Francesco Guerrera head of international at Barron's group who you heard from earlier today in conversation with Christoph and Amy so without further ado I thank you again for joining us Francesco and and pass over to you. Thanks so much, Alex and Jacob. It is my privilege to share this panel and I would like to ask the panelists to join me on stage I'll introduce them briefly, you really, really, they need no introduction but it's, we have a puzzle Islam who is the economics editor at BBC news. Jason Carrion editor of the book at the New York Times. James King global channel editor the Financial Times and editor tech scroll Asia newsletter. And Julie Santorello Carrell senior analyst the Bloomberg intelligence covering the fintechs and payment sectors as welcome. Over the next 40 minutes will discuss a lot of topics but a reminder that the audience can ask questions. If you just type them in I'll see them and I'll be able to relay them to the panel. And hopefully jury will join us soon as well. Let's start just to start with the news right because the biggest news arguably today is the fact that the UK became the first Western country to approve a COVID vaccine and I would love to hear from Pfizer who has been covering this up until now. His perspective on this what he thinks this is going to do to the economy both in the UK and globally in the short and medium term and how quickly we will see some changes. Sure, thanks Francesco. Yes, I hope everyone can hear me. It was some humility as an economist rather than epidemiologist I do note that the Bank of England, the IMF have been employing epidemiologists try to predict where the economy is going so we've all had to follow them. And in my defense, I come from a very medical family have given me sharp insight into what it's like on the front line with all the efforts going into fight this in clearly the economics as you all know was finance directors totally conditioned by the epidemiology of this. And I think it's just worth standing back, standing back a little bit on the announcement of the approval this morning for use and roll out the vaccine in the UK. We have never had an approved human vaccine, not just for COVID but for any coronavirus ever right. What happened far more quickly than we would have expected a great scientific achievement, many for developers, but also the regulators in past tracking. And, and secondly, we have never had a vaccine emerge in the middle of a pandemic before. So the potential economic impact based on any precedent is, you know, would be pretty large. So that it that it would occur in the middle of the pandemic within a year of pandemic and be effective. It is potentially absolutely stratospheric the sort of impact you could have from a vaccine in particular as you all know, because the impact comes through the twin track here you have the impact of the direct. There's three ways of course the economy's been impacted by the pandemic, the direct health impact, sort of directly taking people out, either through illness or through fatality, you have the impact of mandatory lockdowns decided by government which is also very very important. And then you have this really important part of the piece which is the voluntary social distancing, which in some economies has been bigger in economic impact than what's been mandated. So that that third part of the puzzle is really important. The way I've just written a blog on this a BBC website, the way I don't need to tell any of the audience this, but the way this could filter into the economy through the expectations of finance directors currently sitting down to set their budgets for fiscal 2021-22 facing extreme caution. Now some of you out there have got not take a punt but can actually think well, things aren't going to go back to normal but it's more likely to be more normal than abnormal in the end of next year, and do we want to be positioned for that. I think that's transformative for the economy stops a very negative spiral of expecting things to be worse, and therefore planning for them to be worse, and therefore having fewer jobs and fewer investments and that becoming some degree self fulfilling. It inoculates us to some degree against that. It means though two areas of caution, I think that that you could go both ways over the next three months. I think that there's a logic to where the UK government have been suggesting which is, if we have light at the end of the tunnel. Therefore you would be more cautious than you otherwise would be over the next three months, and that also applies to sort of voluntary distancing to people might be a little bit closer to the next three months but obviously I'm going to tell you some good news. We are now subject to any scientific bad news, which would hit the downside especially to asset values house prices and stock markets, but good news, good scientific news and kind of revelatory in terms of its historic medical precedent. If we go around the world for a second, I'd like to come to James now because I wonder whether the impacts are similar. You foresee the impacts of this is being similar in China in particular and in Asia in general, and hi Julie welcome. And, and whether you think that there are implications for the geopolitical tensions that we've been seeing between particularly China and the US. Thanks very much Francesco it's great to be here. I think I'm sitting here in Hong Kong, and obviously I think everybody knows that China has made great strides since the virus originated there in really kind of locking down the country and keeping the virus, you know, pretty much at bay. So what we've seen here and I think this goes to the geopolitical question that you are asked is that the Chinese economy is roaring back. It is recovering first. I mean, of course there are economies like Taiwan that have also done an incredible job in preventing the virus is spread and they haven't been hit. We've seen the whole even throughout the whole course of this, but in terms of major economies we're seeing the Chinese economy roaring back now it looks as if GDP growth may be getting back up to, you know, six seven percent towards the end of the year, and people will continue to do that next year may even go higher than that. So what we're what we're seeing geopolitically is that China was blamed very strongly at the beginning of this by the US and by European countries and lost a lot of in terms of its international image, and particularly because of the way that it then fought back. There was the so called wolf warrior diplomat phenomenon where Chinese diplomats had a very robust response to the rest of the world and that didn't win the many friends either. But now we're in a pot potentially a new phase as vaccines come out. And don't forget there are four vaccine companies in China and hundreds of thousands of Chinese have already taken these vaccines, even though they're still in phase three testing. And so far I spoke to the to senior executive in one of these companies. And I asked, you know, have there been any adverse effects from the vaccines that you've been administering. And I was told that the whole board of this company had taken the vaccine, and none of them had died yet. This was I suppose black humor in a sense. So it's not only Pfizer that's coming up with a vaccine. I fully expect these Chinese vaccines to be. Well, I mean they already are being rolled out very quickly in China and possibly elsewhere. Indonesia has already signed on to get Chinese vaccines. So it's an interesting situation. I think we're geopolitically we're moving into phase two of this whole thing, which is potentially that China may be able to win back some of the the Kudos it lost during the early phase. We can follow up on that before I will go to the other side. So do you expect or are you already seeing a more consiliatory approach by China, given what you just said to the to the West. It's, it's not rhetorically conciliatory. And you will have seen Francesco, the very harsh criticism of Australia that China is currently engaging in. I think this has an impact far beyond the countries that China targets. You know, I think a lot of countries look at the way China is criticizing Australia, spreading all kinds of, you know, incriminating statements about Australia and other countries around the world think wow, that could be meet that could be us next. So I don't think rhetorically China is being more conciliatory, but in terms of delivering vaccines in terms of helping with the debt problems of countries in Africa and other countries along the Belt and Road initiative. China can take some steps that I think can can help to kind of ameliorate the huge hemorrhage it suffered in terms of its international image. So thank you, James. Jason, by all means talk about a vaccine and probably if you want, but I was going to ask you a little more about the other big piece of news that we've had in the last few weeks, which is the election and how this affects business and policy. And how do you see it now that the new administration is filling in some of the key roles? What's your perspective on that? Right. Thanks a lot for having me and just to key off of what James just said there, I think interestingly, Joe Biden did an interview with the New York Times, one of my colleagues yesterday and, you know, he said that the tariffs on China will not come off immediately. He used kind of a variation of America First, which is obviously Donald Trump's sort of signature policy branding, but for Biden it means more investment in R&D into things like AI, clean energy, possibly an actual infrastructure bill at some point. And so that's kind of interesting. And so that's something that we've been trying to get our heads around at the moment, like what, let's say America First means for a Biden administration and it's clearly not exactly the same as Trump, but there are traces of it. There are undertones of that with a kind of an anti-globalization-ish stance with Biden. And then more broadly, as far as business goes, I think what will mark the entire Biden era, however long it lasts, is this push and pull between, I mean, capitalism and socialism if we want to go very, very broad on it. He's being pulled from the left wing of his party to not nominate any important people that have any sorts of Wall Street or corporate ties. And he's also being pilloried by the right and conservatives for socialist takeover. And that's a pretty tricky balance to strike at the moment. He seems to be more or less trying to roll out kind of an Obama-Clinton 2.0 type administration. And like Janet Yellen seems quite well-liked on all sides and other figures like that. But more and more with his economic team, I think we'll see more, let's say, contentious nominees who could potentially not find confirmation if the Republicans keep the Senate, or from within the Democratic Party might not be seen as progressive enough if you want to put it that way. And that's the tricky balance that Biden is trying to strike now. What's not at all clear, and we're reporting it out, is like who in a Biden administration businesses can call on? What's the way in? He seems unlikely to tap full Wall Street types for official roles, especially the highest ones. And so there's a bit of a scramble at the moment to figure out how a big bank or a big company can lobby this incoming administration and who they talk to. It's also a much differently run group, which you can already see, in terms of messaging discipline, I think will get a lot fewer leaks than under the Trump administration, but maybe a bit more coherence in the message, let's say, in terms of everyone going in the same direction. And that also in some ways makes it easier for businesses to get their head around the new administration and other ways might make it harder to sort of find people that can bend their ear. Yeah, it's a good topic, actually. I would like to devote some part of this conversation to your craft and how it's changing. So I want to ask you, Jason, about how this is going to change under the new administration, because you had an interesting time as journalists during the previous administration. Julie, welcome. And you have the, I guess, the privilege of covering one of the hottest sectors in financial markets at the moment, which, if anything, got even hotter during the pandemic. So fintech digital payments, everybody's forgotten about cash. So what do you expect for 2021 in light of recent events? And where do you see kind of the winners and losers among companies? Yeah, so, so one of the sort of themes that we're that we're looking at for 2021 is around this battle for banking. You know, it seems that so many different kinds of non banks, right, are beginning to offer, continuing to offer banking services and adding more and more types of services, mainly to their apps. And so we think that it's the competition is going to heat up. We'll see a lot more of it, a lot more kinds of banking services rolling out from non banks. And then we'll see what the additional banks are going to do to respond. So since the pandemic, we have seen some important changes that really are showing a shift to banking to into non traditional sectors. The increase in debit is one of those. When you think about the wallet providers, the challenger banks, they're all offering debit cards, right? It's no coincidence that the increase in debit is happening as people are looking at more and more ways to pay digitally as they're performing more commerce online, and therefore naturally paying digitally. And that's dry. That's one of the big shifts that we're seeing. But what we're going to be watching in 2021 are really kind of the ways this dynamic unfolds among four big non bank, let's say groups. The first are the challenger banks. So, you know, it's, it's transfer wise and and and Monzo and Revolute and 26 in Europe, Chime, Varo, which just got a banking license in the US, so five. So we're living at those companies and even when we in the UK, they are quite the challenger banks are pretty far along, pretty close to being comparable to the traditional banks, when it comes to mobile app users. So they've made a lot of strides. The products are relatively simple, but they're adding to them. And when they start adding things like lending, right, they already have debit cards, they have a basic account. It's all online. They start anything like lending, you know, they're really kind of beginning to chip away at that core importance part of traditional banking. And the progress has been quite, quite strong. Really, since I was in the pandemic came out for several of the companies, you can really see the curve, you know, just, just going, going straight up. You don't see so much of an increase in mobile users for the traditional banks, you know, really since March, April. The other group that we're looking at, which is, which is one that we're most excited about are the wallet providers, PayPal, squares, cash app, right, and then you have the hardware based ones, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay. They're all now getting more and more into banking services. So they started with sort of a free service, you know, peer to peer payments. But as that helps suck in users, they are now beginning to try to monetize that user base. They're doing it with debit cards, now credit cards. They're beginning to offer bill pay. We'll see more of that rolling out next year. They're starting to do direct deposit. They started with stimulus checks, tax refunds, and that kind of got that business going and now it's moving into payroll. If, if a user starts to use direct to pay, direct deposit of their payroll into their wallet, that starts to become a primary account. Right. And that gets a little concerning, obviously for, for the banks, you know, PayPal has 330 million active users. Right. That's a big base to tap into. Venmo, cash app are, you know, between 30 and 40 million, still pretty big and bigger than what any of the banks or challenger banks have. In terms of mobile app users. The third group we're looking at are the new lenders. The new lenders, you know, some of these alternative lenders, they've struggled a bit to really make big inroads in terms of growth and profitability. But one area that's really interesting, and I'm sure you've been hearing more and more about it is by now pay later. Afterpay, Klarna, now a firm is going public in the U.S. Really, you know, getting to triple digit kinds of growth levels this year. And that is tied to what I was mentioning earlier, which are debit cards. Right. People are using debit cards more. You know, sometimes it's for budgeting reasons. Sometimes it's because they're just buying basic goods these days. And they tend to use debit cards. And also because I was talking about so many new issuers of debit cards from challenger banks to wallets and so on. The way to make things more affordable on a debit card is with by now pay later. Right. It no longer has to be just the cash that's in your account now. Now you can stretch it out over several installments, makes it much easier. And it's really kind of taken off along with that rise in debit. And we know millennials, Gen Z's really love this kind of way to pay. They don't trust credit cards. They don't so much trust big banks. So this really sort of played into what they can do. And the companies have managed quite well considering now in terms of their charge off rates. We'll see how that how that holds up as the as the pandemic continues. So we're watching that group really carefully. And then of course big tech, right. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, right now they're starting to get into banking. Some of the company Amazon I think is more about about Amazon, right and improving their model, not so much about competing with the big banks. But you have Google just rolled out Plex with checking accounts and savings accounts. We're sure they're going to be doing more there. We expect Apple to follow as well. They already have the Apple card, you know, we think other things are going to begin to come more into their wallet new services like bill pay, maybe debit cards, advising lending investing, you know so many, so many areas like that. The interesting thing is that big tech seems to be more inclined to partner with the big banks. And this could be a nice way for the big banks to catch up digitally, right to reach a younger audience, and to be able to really harness the power of big data, which big tech is so good at right to be able to do a better job at risk assessment and personalization and reaching customers. So that I think that the tech company involvement actually could be a positive for banks. And we should start seeing more and more partnerships we think, as the, as the year unfolds next year. Thank you, Julie. I'm missing the power of big data for finance as well, as well big tech is going to go up. Just a quick question, just to go back to Faisal, there is a question, a good question I think for the audience in relation to the vaccine, which is, how do you think governments, the questions about the UK in particular will address the trust issue? When you look at some of some, some polls, you see that not everybody wants to be vaccinated, and it depends on the country. So how do you think governments will go about trying to persuade people to to get the vaccine? So, I think they're aware that in this current kind of political social media age, where authority is atomized all over the place, you need to be transparent and credible, particularly when self evidently this has happened more quickly than will be the typical timeline for vaccines. So they've been quite upfront about that I see the Department of Health have already started even yesterday, sort of tweeting out social media videos explaining why and how this has happened in a year, rather than typically five or six, five or six years, as you would expect. But the numbers are pretty stark. I think 36%, according to, I forget which institute it was, they polled it to all those in academic paper that came out over summer. So 36% of the UK were either uncertain or unlikely to want to take a vaccine. And if you look at the rates of population, so-called herd immunity that would be required to make it effective, you need 70, 80% people to take it. So if that was taken at face value, that would be a problem. So I think they're well aware of it. Probably the way to do it is just let the experts try and take the big front of house presentations of it all, rely on medics and doctors. And they'll also be relying on a social factor here. What seems like a sort of scientific experiment when suddenly your doctors, nurses, social care workers, people you care about who are vulnerable, when they all start taking it, it suddenly starts to become quite normal. There's another separate thing, which is extremely interesting, which is the extent to which it is mandated for various activities. And this is not a government that wants to say that. But there will be decisions foisted upon them on things like travel, not even made by the UK government, maybe been made by other governments. And I think that the things that are happening in passports are normal, right? Just that most people don't normally encounter them. Suddenly it will become potentially a very real thing, extraordinary thing in your passports, if you want to go to relatively ordinary holiday. But that's a clear benefit. So I think that they are well aware of the behavioral finance around this. And they'll be using big data, we just heard about big data there, they'll be using big data too, I think. They're inviting a battle, frankly, on social media to this best one by transparency experts, and not seeming, not trying to make this kind of big politics. I think, can I just jump in? I think this presents an interesting challenge for businesses too, because there's some executives that we've been speaking with. And that idea of like a vaccination passport, and it goes, it dovetails with like testing too. You might need that to go into the office, potentially. There's some privacy issues with that obviously. That the pressure there to get vaccinated or tested before that, or to prove somehow that that you are immune to the extent that we know is something that I know also, you know, boardrooms are dealing with because they're trying to figure out who they led into the office and who they don't trying to also take all the privacy implications into account. And so I think that's another angle to all that. Yeah, and there I say it's a responsibility for the press as well, because you guys, we will have to kind of convey the message that it is actually safe and encourage people to vaccinate or at least try to do so. But we'll talk about that in a second. Jason, I'm going to stay with you. I want to ask an economics question, right? There's a lot of parallels being drawn by the media in between the time Biden was last in the White House with Obama and this time. That was, of course, after the financial crisis. The economy then was much, much worse. So Biden is actually inheriting a better economy than, right? How do you see the trajectory? What do you think the administration will end up doing? Especially because we have wide financial markets as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's another crisis administration, let's say. So yeah, things are bouncing back up when they join as opposed to teetering down, but digging out of a huge hole as we all know. And I think that's, to a certain degree, that does seem to inform some of his cabinet picks that these are people who are very well versed in the past crisis who were often in the White House or in key agencies doing that. Clearly, the kind of mood music from the administration is that they learned then that you need to go big, early, and I think to a certain extent under Jay Powell and even the CARES Act, the original stimulus act in the U.S. And I think there's an approach that that has already happened, although it does seem like probably most people think that another stimulus is needed, but definitely bogged down in partisan gridlock there. So I think there's definitely a, let's say more, I don't know, aggressive approach to stimulus to, you know, bailouts, if you want to call it that, coming in. It's hard to see at the moment how Biden could potentially get past the hyper partisanship in the U.S., which has always been there, but clearly is becoming more sticky, let's say. And that seems unclear and we won't know who really controls the Senate until January. And so that kind of clouds the picture, but I can imagine from an agency from a regulatory perspective, especially with people like Yellen at the Treasury, we will see a lot of action to the extent that Biden can use executive orders, and can impose rules, can shift enforcement of various actions, that that will be the first act of stimulus. But they are pushing very hard even before they take office for some sort of new stimulus package, which may or may not happen. Congress is not really in session for all that long until the holiday break. We'll see. And even if there is something, it will probably won't be as much as the Democrats want. So I would still expect a pretty frenzied period of executive orders and regulation and that sort of thing that you could control from the executive. Interesting. Are you, what's your, are you optimistic or pessimistic on the stimulus package? Right. It's this, you know, there's this, there's this kind of bipartisan group that came out this week, basically splitting the difference between Republican and Democratic leaders who seem pretty dug in around $900 billion. And the difference is there is their package. I, it, it, everything I hear is that that's not going to go anywhere. And I think everyone is kind of dug in ahead of these Georgia Senate runoffs, which is, you know, the bold, bold, the debate about stimulus and the prospects for it run through Georgia, basically it's not something you would have expected this time last year but that's what we're looking at now. You know, it's like, ask me again in a month and we might have a better idea. James, it's a slightly different question on, but picking up on what you were saying before, in other periods of massive dislocation, the most recent probably after the financial crisis, China took advantage of the fact that it was in better shape than the west to gain financial, economic and political ground over the west. I mean, do you see this happening now, you know, what you were saying before about the economy and the way they responded to the virus? Are they emboldened? Are they willing to go forward? Yes. Coming back actually before I get to that, to what Jason was saying, it's interesting that you mentioned that Biden is not keen to, you know, lift the tariffs that the US imposed on Chinese exports. From this perspective over here, the question is sort of, well, we can understand that he might not want to do that immediately, but the question is sort of why not? Because it looks from this perspective as if the US has lost the trade war. The Chinese trade surplus has been shooting up. It won't quite be a record in 2020, but it won't really be that far off. And the last few months we've seen it growing very sharply indeed. So it doesn't appear as if the US has managed to impose a great deal of pain on the Chinese economy through this trade war policy. The pain has been there, but it hasn't come through tariffs. It's come through direct actions on Chinese companies like Huawei and many others. I mean, there's more than 150 Chinese companies on the US entity list being sanctioned in various different ways. That has been painful, particularly for those individual companies. But, you know, when it comes to sort of outstanding geopolitical questions and one of the things that from here it looks as if should be in Biden's inbox on day one. That might be it. And some of the others are, you know, obviously, should the US rejoin some of its, you know, some of the big trading agreements, what used to be called the TPP. Now is the CTPP, I believe rather a lot of acronyms there. China has just joined its own trading block called RCEP, which, you know, is composed of a lot of countries in this region, not just Asia, but also so-called Pacific countries as well. So I think there is quite a lot for a Biden administration to kind of get its head around, because it looks to me at least, and to several others over here, as if this is not going in the US's interests. When it comes to the economy of Francesco, as you mentioned, I think what's interesting is that we're not seeing a repeat of 2009. You will remember that time. I remember you're reporting from that time. 2008, the global financial crisis comes along. China was the first to stimulate its way out of that. And we saw Chinese growth go from the doldrums at the end of 2008. And let's not forget, they lost 30 million jobs in two months. And then they unleashed the biggest stimulus package the world has ever seen. And so we had growth going over eight, nine percent in 2009, 2010. This time, we are not going to see that. And the reason is very obvious. Chinese debt load is huge. And Chinese property prices are very high. So China does not have the ability now either in terms of adding to its debt load or in terms of creating another liquidity bubble that would push property prices even further out of reach of Chinese households to unleash another stimulus. So I think what we're going to see, Francesco, is just fairly robust growth around current levels, five, six percent, maybe next year getting to seven percent. A lot of it depends on what happens in the rest of the world. Thank you, John. Also, thank you for remembering my reporting in the learning financial crisis. That makes 12 us. So, Julie, if China is not a bubble, I have to ask whether your sector is a big bubbly, right? There's a lot of high valuations in there and a lot of what you normally call speculation. How do you feel and what do you advise investors to do to navigate what can be a rich sector but also big bubbly? Yeah, valuations for sure have gone through the roof, square, PayPal, you know, tens and tens of multiples of what they've traded at historically. So, you know, the way we think it's going to play out through this sort of pandemic time, right? As things are beginning to, people are going to read the writing on the wall of how bad it was going to be. Everything sold off. And you begin to sort out who the winners and losers might be during this sort of pandemic period. And a lot of people watch down to this digital payments opportunity. And so there's a few games in town and everyone loads up and the stocks get really expensive. So the question is what are investors looking at now? What are investors seeing for 2021? Who are the winners and losers they are going to be? And if we have this vaccine, the general thinking is that by the middle of 2021, a majority of people will have the vaccine available and be vaccinated. And by the second half of 2021, the economy starts to look more normal. And so the investment community is going to be looking at who's going to come back, right? Who comes back in that scenario? And it tends to be the more beaten up stocks, the cyclical stocks that are going to recover. And so we expect at some point earlier in the year, we'll see this rotation from, and we started to see some of it already in tech broadly, some sell off. And so we think that that's going to continue. Probably we'll put some pressure on some of, and many of these stocks with, you know, especially that the highest fliers doesn't mean they're going to come crashing back down to where they were pre pandemic. But we'll probably see some correction. But I don't think the fundamentals are going to change. And that's the most important part. So that's what you want to look out for those periods where there is that correction, there's a rotation back to cyclicals. These stocks are to look less stellar. They come down a little bit and we call that a buying opportunity, right? So we can't necessarily time the market. We can't pick it perfectly, but we can watch the fundamentals and we can watch the strategies and the news and what these companies are rolling out. And we expect that to be all positive and we would take the weaknesses of buying opportunity. Thank you. We have a few minutes remaining. So I would like it possible to take the audience for you guys take the audience inside your working lives. I think it's it'd be very interesting for financial marketers to hear from top journalists about how this period is unusual. It's sort of a period has changed your working lives and your if you're like the stakes you're playing with as journals. Right. Maybe I'll start with you Faisal because you report for the BBC and so the demands and challenges of reporting for the BC are different. Perhaps a lot of news organizations. How does it change as he made it even more paramount that you are. Or has he made you as increase the level of responsibility if you like. Yeah, I think so hugely but I mean to link into the question that you posed earlier about about vaccines and the extent to which we should be supportive or not and all that sort of stuff you know there is it there is a mode of journalism which is kind of aggressive accountability journalism. And that's vital and important where we see lies exaggerations and untruths to kind of report robustly. There is a sort of public information aspects to some of what would be does particularly in the middle of a crisis and that never weighed with me more in my sphere, which is economic than when you know that the government is cooking up extraordinary fiscal intervention to pay the wages was extraordinary for the UK not so much for Germany France and Spain, but extraordinary intervention to pay the wages of millions of workers which is frankly unbelievable from the UK perspective even in February that that would have happened. So, you'll then face with a whole welter of speculation about that. And I think, for me, and at the time we were getting 15 million audiences, including probably like a million or two business owners. You know, when you've got mass audience, a small fraction of that is still a lot of people. They don't understand this new, no one understands this new virus, and they certainly don't expect the government at that point to step in and pay 80% of wages that literally unbelievable. So to communicate that as it's evolving. You know, remember this one point where it looks as if it was going to get taken away. And I had people on the phone from, you know, high up in business organization saying you know, if you even hint in this direction and you're short live with you Edwards, that it's going to get taken away when we don't think it is going to get taken away. There are hundreds of thousands of people who might actually get fired. I think that was maybe a bit of an exaggeration. But for example, getting the Bank of England governor to say very clearly in a way that central bank governors do not normally say just say straight up. What are you saying to business owners who have their hand hovering over a mouse or a trackpad as it probably would be now ready ready to fire people because of the spreadsheets that say they've got no cash left. And he just said, wait, hold on, things that you would never expect are about to happen. And you might just find you'll be able to keep those people on more than you would expect. And so to be able to communicate that as well as hold the government to account on their performance at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, strongly matters. That last bit that accountability stuff is really important for our credibility to communicate the more information stuff. So if we were soft on stories about medical testing or, you know, the vaccine, then, you know, our credibility is really important. It's important that we're seen to be strong and tough and ask difficult questions of government. And I think that I think those in government realize that too. There's no point just having people reading out press releases. It's no good for anybody. Makes sense. Jason, what's your perspective on this? I suggest something, but feel free to disagree with me. I also work for a US based company. And sometimes I found that during this pandemic, the connectivity was a bit frayed, right? It was a bit difficult to communicate. And, you know, I couldn't just fly to New York as I would have done perhaps in the past. I don't know if you experienced the same thing or what's your perspective on that? Yeah, for sure. Going remote has been tricky for big media organizations that, you know, rely a lot on newsrooms and those kind of informal networks and that sort of thing. But that's not totally unusual for any big company. But when it comes to, you know, quickly and like Faisal said, you know, accurately and responsibly reporting and writing, that can be a little bit tricky. I think one thing that I've seen change that's been kind of interesting is, you know, I mean, there are news wires out there. Obviously, there's a bunch in your company. But these stories, the election, the virus, everything that's happened this year has become kind of, it's lent itself to more like live journalism even for a newspaper like I work for. So we're running all these constantly updated briefings, you know, three, four, five, seven a day on certain topics. And, you know, one of the most popular, let's say, and that's a good thing, I think, to come back to accountability journalism is that we launched something called the Daily Distortions. And so we have a running blog basically that tracks viral misinformation. And a lot of that has been related to the election in the US recently, but there's a lot of plenty of vaccine misinformation out there too. And taking that head on with in this in this style and this and this and this fast updating style where all the headlines are basically no comma, this isn't what they say it is, you know, and then and then we explain why that is those have been, you know, encouragingly incredibly popular as far as the traffic goes because I think in our information ecosystem if you want to put it that way there's a lot of pollution out there and so and so cutting through it in that way has been interesting and then just as far as the craft goes, I think there's a real shift, especially at at perhaps older outlets like the one I work for now to get more in that mode of updating things quick, you know, putting things up quickly and then filling them out having a lots of different formats and not just the you know, 1500 word story that comes out in print the next day and all that kind of thing so that's, you know, not necessarily unusual for as far as digital media goes but but it's it's been you know, a fairly major revolution inside these walls at least virtual walls. James. I mean, you are by far, one of the greatest journalists I've ever worked with. So I want to ask you this question because I've seen you in action. I haven't worked with the other so I don't. I'm looking forward to working with all the others. So how is this affected your sourcing. I mean, you can't. Well, at least here in Europe you can't go out with sources anymore. It's very complicated and to get a story out of someone zoom is really tough. I mean, how have you. Yeah, you're so right. I'm not right about me being a great journalist but you are right about the the point you made. It's basically it's it's disastrous for journalism that relies on sources so investigative journalism which is a big part of what the Financial Times is doing in Hong Kong and what I'm supposed to be doing. You're not only miss the face to face contact, the kind of whispers over lunch, but you also miss that vital aspect which is the serendipity of a natural conversation. So you're having a natural conversation with somebody and they let something slip maybe that they didn't intend to or just sort of popped into their head. The type of interaction which is so vital for journalists just doesn't happen in this type of format. And then the other thing I'm sure everybody's experiences, a lot of webinars and zoom conferences and things like that, which which are great. I mean, you know that they really are our lifeline these days, but the problem is that you don't get people's name cards. And therefore it's really tough to build up a relationship with people that you first met so I really sympathize with younger journalists who are just starting out this has been a terrifically difficult time for people who don't have pre existing sources. Yeah, and I completely agree. Julie last word to you and a similar question perhaps related to clients. So how do you interact with clients now that you can meet them. Yeah, yeah, it's tough. I mean analysts spend so much time on the road and on one hand meeting with company management teams right CEO CFOs and you know not meeting a person you sort of you miss the body language right the words can be really can be really really clear and and and and direct and all but end up but the body language can tell you something else when we miss that. And then the other time we spend on the road is meeting clients and sharing with them our ideas and having that that give and take and when we just can't do it. So we decided that we need to do more webinars I mean great you know revelation I know everyone's doing it right and so early on in the pandemic it was it was great and we were doing webinars. Traffic was huge. We had a lot of people around as the months have gone on everyone's been doing webinars everyone's a little webinar out. And so it's hard to keep people's attention. We don't really have a better way yet right and things are getting even even tighter once again. So I think you know what we what we are trying to do now is make the webinars more more interesting. Have them be more thematic. So people are coming for answers to a specific pressing question and pulling in more experts sometimes company management teams sometimes outside experts but to just try to bring to our clients people who they may could have probably could not have heard from otherwise it's done well but it's getting more competitive and we're you know we're competing competing for every user now on those webinars. What we call what we would call must have content right that stuff that people come to because I have to. Unfortunately with so that's all we have time for but I would like to thank the panel and I'm sure the audience if we were doing it live would give you a round of applause because it's such a great it's such a great panel. Thank you very much. Jason James and Julie and back to Kristoff. Let's just go and kind of before you go away and thank you very much. This was an absolutely inspiring discussion. I'd like to ask a last question to you because that big topic about ESG hasn't been addressing in terms of what your view is whether this trend towards ESG will change the economic situation positively because we've all experienced. That we don't have to travel so much on business and I appreciate all your comments made because of you know the lack of personal interactions absolutely correct but I don't think we're going to go back into the 100% world of business travel and stuff so what are your personal experiences and views as to the economic impact of this topic. I could jump in on that. As I think, you know, ESG, particularly ESG investing, you know, is obviously growing incredibly fast and that's an important driver of some behavior but I think generally it seems to me and I was just talking to a to a to a chief executive of a big European business that that this this idea of stakeholder capitalism, you know, versus shareholder capitalism and the kind of things that like the business around table Chamber of Commerce is talking about now seems that that cat is out of the bag. For lack of a better term and and and I think companies are doing that I think that ESG investors were maybe pretty early on in terms of sort of needling them to to change their behavior but I think now it's coming from from all sides from governments from employees from suppliers from customers all that all that sort of stuff and so I think that everything is pushing in that. In that same direction like for example like another interesting thing is that like the stock exchanges so this week Nasdaq is applied for permission to essentially force the companies that list there to have more diverse boards or else face delisting and that's kind of another interesting angle I think it's coming from all sides and you can call it ESG, which I think is mostly a kind of investment term that that's, it's, that was just the beginning and now it seems like it's only going to grow. If I just quickly jump in there. Okay, I'll go quickly I wanted to just kind of share what Bloomberg is doing because there is a real change underway in terms of what we do with research around ESG because of the very strong interest from the investment community. We've been building up our team of ESG analysts and one of our sort of marquee products in Bloomberg intelligence, our company primers. So, for, for really thousands of companies we now have analysts writing primers if basic research talking about key themes and key investments topics for each company, we've now added ESG primers for each of our companies and that's how important it's been that we are dedicating as much ESG coverage to each company as we can, aside from just adding, adding people but adding real product behind it. I just quickly say that clearly in the UK, a lot of this is also being driven by changes to financial regulations, what the Bank of England is doing what the former Governor Mark Carly has been doing and basically going around to the to the other side of the table, what is your net zero plan is now a legal requirement, and that's that drive within government to the extent that it might have been forgotten because of the pandemic is now doubled down on again by the Biden presidency the likely election, all that stuff is going to be a big agenda now with huge momentum that you might have thought might have faltered a little bit because of the pandemic separates to that I know that because of the pandemic, actually channels of communication via ironically via what we're doing at the moment from employees to very high ups have been quite fluid, and on things like Black Lives Matter, a number of things that may have been left unsaid inside an office environment, have been said digitally, and I think that that will change things fundamentally, when we get back to normal in terms of the expectations of employees of their boards of their bosses. Could I just just add a little bit. Yeah, I think, like Julie for the Financial Times, ESG, particularly as it attains to investors is a really huge topic for the for the FT. We actually have a newsletter dedicated to this every day, it's called Moral Money. So, my personal comment about ESG would be that I think an awful lot of work needs to be done in terms of definitions. What does the E actually mean what is being represented by, you know, environmental social and governance standards. How, how compliant is the investing world to the definitions that are out there and a lot of the time, the definitions are extremely vague. It's very easy for a company to claim that it's doing environmental, abiding by environmental standards when it's actually not. The same is true of social and the same is true of governance. So, I think that it's an early stage revolution in investing, and an awful lot of work needs to be done to cut out the fakery. Okay, just say I can give you a bit of a scoop which is Mark Carney has given a series of lectures to the BBC. The first of which went today the last of which is on climate change and some of the techie finance stuff behind that that goes out every time it's four weeks. Well worth listening to on the subjects. Christopher bought a really interesting point about about business travel. Right. And you know we know that it's been very all of us staying home has been very good for the environment. You know, one of the things about the about the turnaround that we see sort of post vaccine is travel coming back, and that can be a really exciting opportunity from an investment standpoint you think how much the travel companies, airlines hotels cruises have sort of been beaten up, and everyone expects personal travel to come back first that's a pent up demand, and then business travel to come back. And with concern with companies being more attuned now to ESG being more tuned to the effects on the environment. It'll be interesting to see if business travel, maybe doesn't come back as much or as quickly to the point where it was pre pandemic. Thank you very much for asking that question and thank you so much for this wonderful panel to Francesco and team. Thank you for joining us at this important conference. And I hope you can stay a little bit longer. I hand back to Jacob, the host of our conference. Yes, thank you very much. So if we can ask, if you can ask you to turn off your cameras and we'll get ready for the next session. So the next session, what are financial services marketers looking for in their external media partnerships in the post covered world. So if I'd like to ask Tony Jarvis to now come on. Great. And yeah, there we go. And you hear me. Yes. Wonderful. Well, thank you, everybody. I mean, what a what an act to follow some of the foremost news minds in the world. And actually leads beautifully into into what we're going to be discussing the title for our panel very short, sharp panel session today is what are financial services marketers looking for in their external partnerships in the in the post covered world trends. Some trends have been accelerating this year. We've been hearing some have been turned completely upside down and some underlying trends which continue nonetheless. I'm going to introduce our esteemed panel very briefly, we have a slight issue in that for Helena, who I believe is on Helena, can you hear us. Yes, I'm here and hi everyone. Helena has having some issues. Helena Jarvis cover from CME group is having some AV issues but can hear us and we can hear her. So that's fantastic to have you with us Helena, Dr Winfried dawn from UBS and Alison Harvard from invested. So, in the preparation of our session today, we've been thinking about all the different dimensions of media partnerships and what financial services marketers are looking for from those. And of course it is a mix of brand leadership, lead generation and fostering new relationships, all of which, as we know have been turned upside down I think, as we run through a very short power session today we thought we'd look at it in three look at the tackle the issues if you like in in three blocks. So the first of those is around using media partnerships to access and influence niche audiences that we wouldn't otherwise be able to reach. The second is very often the sort of the mechanics of media partnerships in the content and convening. And then thirdly, ROI and data measurement for all marketers. And that is absolutely key to, to everybody. So, we'll tackle those in turn and so just thinking about the first of those, we're using media partnerships for access and influence and listen to that panel session. We've, we've just, just heard we have marketers want to align ourselves with that those news editors as closely as they will allow us to and the brands that they represent as closely as they will enable us to so to open our discussion I wonder. If I can call on you please, as media suppliers are looking to up there again but a lot of media suppliers listening in today from a sales and BD and operational perspective with the world media group at ovens. As those groups up, you know, invest and look to develop their capabilities in in in driving integrated meaningful partnerships. What are the challenges that you see. What are the bear traps to avoid and what are you doing. What are you doing to overcome them, but you get a few comments from me to start on that. Thank you Tony for the question and clearly it's one that I could talk for the next 48 hours about I'll try to be a little bit shorter. And so, so at UBS, we've been doing, you know, media content partnerships with with different publishing brands for the past five or six years, really more than a dozen and and and you can pick whatever you prefer. It's anything from Bloomberg CNBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, so a lot of the brands that we've also seen of the on the on the previous panel. And I think they're a couple of learnings. So first of all, we very much believe in the format and otherwise we wouldn't be be doing this on a on a continuous basis we invest quite a lot of money and effort into these into these partnerships. One thing that we found relatively early on and was that when when these kind of partnerships are being pitched to us. A lot of focus is being put on the creative and on the tech and design capabilities of the content studios that are associated with these brands. And that's understandable and and these these companies and agencies, I'm almost inclined to call them, they are very, very good, you know, a lot of these publishing brands have been outstanding capabilities. However, as you very often want to co create content as a brand rather than just buying something of the shelf that is shiny and nice. You really after is also an editorial capability that is on the same level as you as a consumer would see it on the editorial side of that particular publishing brand. That isn't always the case and this sounds terrifying, you know, terribly critical from my end, but what I'm saying is, you know, let's let's speak of subject like a sustainable investing which was just on the other panel ESG investing. It's obvious that from any of these published publishers on the editorial and I can find dozens of people who know this topic to such an extent that they could discuss it and develop content on a very, very sophisticated level on the commercial content studio side. That's not necessarily always the case. So it requires sometimes a lot of effort to get there. So to make a long story short, I think that a lot of the capabilities are there, but the quality of the editorial stuff can always be even better because they have to deliver stories that sometimes are quite complex and sophisticated. And then the other thing is the old conversation around to what extent do we benefit from a brand halo effect from the publishing brand. Right. This is thin ice. And I'm going to track carefully here because I am very, very mindful and respectful of the editorial integrity. And yet, one of the reasons why we do partner with these brands is, well, because it's those brands, right? So something with the New York Times or with the Financial Times. Somehow we want their editorial credibility to rub off on that content. And different partners have found very different answers to that. And some are very, very hands off and some are, you know, understandably concerned. And I will give just one example. And, you know, when you go through these proposals, you will see a lot about promoting this content and promoting it on social handles. And when you dig a little bit deeper, then sometimes that means we're going to promote the content on the social handles of the content studio, which sometimes has 45 followers, you know, I'm carefully provoking a few people on this call. But what you really want is obviously the social handle of the editorial team, right? And some people do that, and some people don't. And that's not a distinction between bad and good publishers. So it's really down to the individual agreement and down to the individual content partnership to really whittle this out on a very detailed level. And that can be a little bit blood, sweat and tears. But generally, the result is always really, really good. That's really interesting, isn't it? I remember Francesco talking earlier about the excitement he has around custom content. So as we go and move in this journey over the next years, it will be interesting to see where the new levels of comfort can be. We need to clearly maintain a different relationship and a clarity of distinction between custom and editorial, but how those sit together in a really combined world, integrated world will be fascinating to see. Well, we're prepping for this. Alison, you had some great comments thinking in terms of that access and influence with media brands to thinking about changing consumption behaviors. I wonder if I can ask you to just tease that point out that you made. Sure. Thanks, Tony. I guess, you know, one thing we can be grateful for this year is that we're all coming out of it with a lot more data than we went into it in 2020. And the publishers have got massive vats of this data and where that's incredibly valuable for brands is for them to be able to use that data to advise us on the kind of media consumption habit changes for our specific audiences. And where that really holds value is as we're thinking about the future. And so as we know, creating valuable and useful content takes time. It takes resources. It often takes a good bit of budget as well. So as we're thinking about how do we plan for the future? Being able to layer over publishers data that says we understand that these specific audiences that you're trying to reach have actually changed the way that they consume data. They've changed whether it's format, whether it's time of day, whether it's their interaction levels, how much they're prepared to interact with this kind of content. This has changed. And so as you, the brand, are thinking about the sorts of things that you can do to engage with this audience. It looks very different from audience A than it does to audience B. So by saying these are the predictions for the year or the couple of years ahead, and of course this is a million dollar question I appreciate. So maybe our timeframes are a bit shorter than what they would narrowly would be. But to be able to turn around to a brand and say, here's the insight that we've got access to. Here's the crystal ball that we can be able to give you some kind of predictions for the next six months. This is how you need to think about the ways that you can engage with these audiences differently based on what we can see from the media consumption habits. So if I know there was some talk in the previous session about business travel, if business travel is back on the cards again in 2021, what does that mean for a CFO audience that's got European client bases versus a more desk-bound institutional investor or asset manager? What does that mean in terms of the way that they're going to consume media in the next six months? And so how do we work together then with the media partners to be able to generate the right kinds of content that land well with that audience as we're thinking about the integration with the client journey? And at what stage are we trying to raise awareness or convert or generate interest or drive advocacy based on these different audiences? That's interesting isn't it? I mean lots of the pitches that we all receive from these media providers talk about understanding their database and how their consumers are, how their readers and viewers are consuming data, but looking ahead, surveying that audience, looking at societal changes certainly now and how that then plays out into media consumption and therefore successful media partnerships, that would be absolutely key to follow and couldn't agree more. Okay, in terms of the next block of content that we wanted to cover, it was a block about content. Digital saturation has obviously been rife this year across both written content and viewable content and of course the webinar fatigue that everybody is on Zoom calls all day and all night and I wonder Helen if we can bring you in there. I know you have a lot of very, very niche partnerships and a plethora of event engagements that you've been continuing with this year. Some fascinating numbers that you were sharing with us. I wonder if you can give us your sense on, okay, in the virtual digitally saturated post-COVID world, what is the role for an external media and external convening partner to help bring audiences together? I hope you can still hear us and your connection is still there. Can I pass to you on that point please? Yes, no, absolutely. Hi everyone. Sorry, I am here and I apologize you can't see me. No great setup. Thank you, Alison. Actually, I totally agree. All of our clients had to switch to working from home overnight, just like us. They're commuting routines have been totally disrupted. And these are typically the routines where a lot of our clients used to read the content we published with media partners. So we're having to radically rethink these touch points to make sure that we can serve the content to our targets when they're looking for it. And that's new for a lot of us. We've managed to expand our persona work at CME Group and better understand our customer journeys. We're trying to get to customer 360 next year. We know that we need to remove frictions that prevent them from switching between channels and provide us in what we now fully understand is a nonlinear buying journey. So just going back to digital events and the content that's generated at those events. You know, it's meant whether that digital event has been real time or on demand. It's meant that we now have to create new digital assets and think about the broader customer journey and figure out how to market these pieces of content effectively pre, during and post event. And just to provide some context, as you mentioned, Tony earlier, we've run 260 events with third parties this year. And that's out of a total of 683 events this year. And we've learned a lot and there have been a lot of teething problems just as much as I'm sure my finalists have seen today. Sure. Sorry to interrupt Helena, but was that 680 odd that CME Group overall is engaging with? And then the 200 number was for EMEA? The 260 global events with third parties out of 683. Total. Total. Okay. So fascinating number, a lot of clients and we take a lot of temperature of a lot of marketers across this year, who have been really reticent to engage in the virtual in external industry events will certainly in the early point of COVID, let's sit back behind the parapet, concentrate on our proprietary events and come back to face-to-face events when society allows. But with that now pushing out to seemingly Q3 next year, we're seeing a lot of re-interest in engaging with external events because we can't go that long without that form of engagement. So sorry to interrupt you, I was fascinated by that. I totally agree. And I think there have been some media partners that managed to innovate and involve, especially their technology partnerships and provide us with solutions that we needed. So I did want to actually just list off some positives with the rest of the audience. They certainly, these digital events certainly have a border reach. There are no geographical time boundaries, better data acquisition, that's a big one for us. I've seen impressive tie-ups between firms where publisher became a sponsor and the host asked the firm where we've shared the content and managed the content with our audiences. I've seen some nice opportunities where video has been inserted between life conference segments, speakers being beamed from all sorts of locations, real-time polls and questions from audiences that shaped life panels in the way I haven't seen at a face-to-face conference. So these are all great positives. And obviously we still have a lot of work to do with media partners on how to continue evolving these formats and make sure that we continue producing the right content for our customers at the right time. And I do actually one last point on niche publishers. We definitely work with some niche publications, trade publications in particular. We like publishers that continue to focus on the growth of their subscriber base. We like when their subscribers prefer to stay within the publisher's domain. And that's when we actually start blending our CME Group produced content with the editorial content. And that creates a brand new experience for our readers. So as long as we can figure out how to manage the third-party data that's shared with us, we are happy. Very interesting, isn't it? When we were prepping for this discussion, we were talking about the journey that the virtual events have been on, virtual event users, senior bankers and relationship managers, thought leaders inside your own organizations, ourselves as marketers and as those in industry. And there's clearly innovation needed. We are hopefully we will not be engaging into our webinars at this time next year irrespective of where society is and where the pandemic is. But is that need for innovation? And Winfrey, do you put this really well, innovation with credibility that we don't just become too gimmicky in terms of what we're trying to do? I don't know if you had an additional comment there or I know you wanted to create examples from earlier. No, I think you get to that really well. I do think that both in terms of storytelling but also in terms of sort of evolving any kind of content program through different channels and formats, it is, yes, it is important to engage the audience through whatever format and device suits them best and the time and certainly these evolve as the previous speakers have also said. A good example is we've just finished producing sort of a docu-series in-house while not really in-house with a professional company or PC behind it that goes into the usage of alternative data in illustrating economic problems and that could be a very dry topic. And so the brief to the company was this has to feel like Netflix and it has to be as entertaining as Netflix which is a tall order for any financial service company. I'm incredibly satisfied with the result. You'll be able to see it a week from now but I guess what I'm saying is you constantly have to raise the bar and because especially this year due to COVID everybody has been huddled in front of Amazon and Netflix and so on. So almost subconsciously, your expectation level of what good content especially good documentary and non-fictional content looks like will have raised. Having said that, we are very, very cautious of anything that feels too gimmicky because it may serve to create that initial spike of visitors to any kind of website but that spike is going to last for about three days and then the whole thing is that. So we always try and go for something that has legs and that will be interesting to people four weeks from now just as it is today rather than a one hit wonder and then you need to move on to the next thing. It's fascinating. That me for innovation, I know that Deutsche Bank and Jacob and Christoph have pioneered this year a really innovative, engaging way to a network with attendees at Cyprus the biggest banking event out there. And I know that there is serious challenges with that but real credibility that comes from that pioneering spirit as well and taking that audience on a journey in a really careful, thoughtful way. I loved also what Kieran was saying earlier that with 300 pounds and something better than a Samsung phone or any kind of phone that you could engage with a really, really immersive VR environment and network with others at events. So that's certainly coming our way, isn't it? We could go on. I know that this is the sort of discussion that could be a two hour panel and I wanted to make sure that we cover this last point this last block around ROI measurement data. One of the great opportunities with the current environment is that so much more can be measured when we take events virtually when we take so much of the buyer journey now digitally. So Alison, let me turn to you. What are the new challenges that you're grappling with but what are you doing about them in terms of data on ROI measurement? Well, I guess that the data piece this is a bit of a gift now. And I know there were some earlier conversations around digital marketing and not letting that sort of overwhelm the general marketing piece just because of the circumstances we find ourselves in but nonetheless, I think we talk a lot in marketing about quality over quantity but I think in many environments and it's not just in a marketing environment but also with business stakeholders they're often a bit dazzled by quantity metrics. And so there are plenty of business stakeholders and marketing stakeholders who will be delighted with hundreds or thousands of people that register to an event rather than being able to go into the detail around well, what's the quality? What was the actual outcome? What happened as a result of this great thing that we built? And so what I'd love to see the conversations with media partners start to evolve into next year is where they can help us on some of those quality metrics. And so being able to blend what their understanding is of data for the specific audiences that we're trying to target and thinking about that before, during an activation, after an activation. And so before the activation the sorts of things that I think publishers can help us with is giving us a sense based on the audience that we're trying to reach what kind of content, what kind of themes are they interested in? Have they stopped reading content on a particular topic? Where actually we thought that they were interested in that and are they now reading all sorts of other content? Were they reading loads of emerging markets content up until three months ago? But clearly their strategy's shifted and now they're going for less high risk areas. So can we engage in a different conversation leveraging that insight that comes from the publishers? When we get to quality metrics around an activation we really need to understand what the quality of interaction is. What do people really care about? Not just did they show up and do they fall into some sort of generic job title description? But what was it that they actually cared about and how did the activation, whether it's a virtual event or it's some sort of content series or whatever the activation is, how did that genuinely interest the particular participants that were involved in the target audience? So which bits did they interact with? What were they curious about? What changed after this activation in terms of their behaviors? Did they then start looking at other content related to the same thing? Did they change their sorts of behaviors in media consumption with that particular publisher? Did they care so much about the content that they've gone on and shared it with others and they've become an advocate for the perspective that we were able to provide them with? So those quality metrics are tough to come by. We know that and if it was easy we would have solved it by now. But I think there is real value in the media partners and the brands coming together to be able to do it together because none of our clients invests world alone or in UBS's world alone. They exist in their entire world which means that they are on the FT site, they're on UBS's site, they're on my site. They're existing in all of these different environments. So when I can come together with some of those publishers we've got a much more meaningful output and a quality conversation over quantity. Fascinating, Madison, thank you so much. We're out of time, we're almost out of time. I would love to ask each panelist please just to close with, we were going to go with two but just one piece of advice please from each panelist on either what you would ask marketers to think about before they're engaging in their next media partnership or what you would ask the next sales person who is going to pitch you an integrated partnership from a media supplier, what you would advise them to think about before they approach you. Can I go to you first, Helena please? Can I answer, can I come back? I do actually have one answer for each. So let me start with the first question certainly when speaking to media houses. I'd love us to talk in more detail about customer intelligence on readers and subscribers and have that inserted into your pitches. Show us how you will support our efforts in terms of metrics. Have that conversation with us up front just going back to what Alison's mentioned. And in terms of the second question, for us it's all about lead acquisition. As product marketers, we're really focused on delivering on revenue goals and is the media partner well-positioned to help us deliver on those goals? Perfect, thank you. And Alison to you next please. So I'll answer the second question around if we're talking to media partners, what can we do? And I guess it's getting specific on three core things, know exactly who we're targeting, know exactly how we can help those particular clients with what we're targeting and at what stage of the client journey we're focused on. And then if a media partner can come to me and say this is where our audience overlaps with exactly what you're trying to achieve, then let's talk to Erky. Very good, thank you. And Winfrey, let me come to you please. There's really not much that I can add to that. I think all and everything has been said, it's really, really important that you bring the necessary depth of understanding that we can together create a story that is new and that helps your audience to engage but also to understand things that maybe need a bit of education. And then let us know how far you're willing to go in order to promote this and to make this truly a co-branded effort. Yeah, that's a key point, isn't it? And I'll just say thank you everybody. I know Jacob is messaging me that we need to move on. But thank you all so much. And last comment from me would be that just in terms of media partnerships that are gonna last to your point, Winfrey, they need to be meaningful, really meaningful to the target audience. An over-served, a flooded audience needs something that is gonna truly elevate them in their role and be meaningful in their marketplace and be aspirational for them. So yeah, fascinating. Thank you all so much, Jacob. So let me hand back to you. Thank you. Amy, say hello to everybody. Another fantastic panel and a special thanks to Tony. He's been a great partner with the EI advisory on this program. Right, so Amy, over to you for the final fantastic panel of the day. Fantastic. And I'm really excited to invite my panelists to turn on their videos if you are lurking in the background. I'm really excited to be talking today about brand vision and culture. And I have Josh Dimmons, hopefully, who is Black Rock's UK head of MEA marketing. David Weldon, who is former CBO at RBS, not CBO. And Lorena Hilton, MD, global head of brand comms and CSR. And I have David Excellent and Josh. Lorena, are you there? I'm here. Sorry, I can't. Sorry, you can't see me, but I'm here. And there seems to be a gremlin and a few people's system for it. It's not just you. And we saw that it worked great for Laila just now. So I'm sure we can... It may be a little bit better. Not just you. So just to give you an intro, I think, you know, you're also a few fascinating stories. And I could very easily say to them, like I did to you, we would take our whole time just telling the stories of how you built incredible culture programs at your organization. A little bit of an echo. So I might say, if you could just on mute and fill your tools, I'm not sure anyone else will hear that. But I think, you know, one of the things and one of the words of the year for me has been pivoting. And I think I'd like to start there, really, with how important it is to have a really strong and clear corporate culture in place, have that well understood and well grounded throughout the organization to enable a company to pivot effectively and take everybody with them in times of difficulty and challenge, which I think we've all certainly seen this year. My pivot was to step down from that West Group, there's been our name, just as the purpose launched and the name of the company was changed from RBS to that West Group, which was work I'd been intimately involved in. And I noticed, so my pivot was to join the world as slow living. I won't talk about that. What I will talk about is how well that West have pivoted because the purpose statement that was launched in February, February the 14th, was amended pretty quickly when COVID came along to take account of good times and bad times. So hats off for doing that. But I think the real thing that I've observed my old company do is use that purpose as the North Star to drive their activity. So, you know, nice to watch it from the outside. And I have to say, in depth, that all my colleagues are working their socks off, nice to not be doing it on the inside as well. I think that's the beauty of stepping it up. But it's very... Shall I continue while the others try and work with their tech? I mean, I do think the, you know, one of the things that's observable is how difficult it has been for everybody to get used to working from home, but how impressive it has been. And actually this use of technology, which on the whole has been seamless, couple of teething problems now, has enabled that. But, you know, I do think when you look underneath that, there are some issues that we should all be concerned about and let me talk about culture here, because I do think it's been difficult for people to share their problems, because it's much more difficult to read, for instance, Amy, how you're feeling looking at you on the screen than it would be if I was sitting in front of you. So the whole notion of mental wellbeing and how people have coped, I think companies have done well with. And actually, if you're gonna put a purpose out, you have to be able to live it and be seen to live it. And I think especially in the bad times. And as I say, hats off to my old colleagues at NatWest, because they've been doing that. And I think a couple of other examples I've seen, I was doing an interview the other day for somebody who was talking about how they had done check-ins with people that didn't report to them, how the Exco had carved up the next level down and said, right, call these people and check-in and how that had helped everybody get to know each other better. So ironically, in this extremely difficult year, many people have managed to pivot to get to know the people that work for them better and to be more effective in what they've done. How are we doing on the other two? I think we've definitely got Lorena and her lines sounded pretty clear. So I might go over to you, Lorena. And I'll speak my best to fill in. Thank you. Hi, yeah, thanks so much for that. Yeah, I'd really just build on what David has just said. This has been the year to pivot for sure. And I think it's not about starting from scratch, it's really about building on a strong purpose, a strong foundation and adapting and being able to adapt. So we launched our purpose and our brand strategy in 2017 internally first. And then we went externally in 18. And then we were building up with lots of good groundwork behind us during 2019 to our 150th anniversary this year. And so we were all ready to talk about our founding purpose and how we can now connect that to our existing purpose. And the pandemic happened and we had to pivot very quickly to salvage that work because actually it was still very, very relevant and important, but we had to make sure it didn't sound like it was falling out of the sky and completely out of context and out of sync with what was going on around the world, and affecting everybody. So we were able to adapt it. And actually what that allowed us to do was really demonstrate the bank's response to a pandemic from a, certainly from a client perspective, and there was a huge momentum there, but also from an employee one in terms of really making sure employees were safe and their wellbeing was at the forefront. And of course society in the bank was very involved in a very large response actually from a societal perspective. So that really built on our purpose. And in a way, it allowed us to really think about new formats and new ways of doing things, which I think some very good stuff has come out of. And we're currently working on a new way of demonstrating that the bank's response in much more granularity, which we'll be looking to publish in the next few weeks. So yeah, I think if we didn't have all that foundation, we would have probably struggled, but it allowed us to move quickly. Great. And do you think that that was in part because you had the established channels and people had trust in those channels? So do you think it was a sort of more ephemeral piece than that and then you were able to build through new channels? Yeah, less about channels really. I think the internal audience has been, the employee audience has been critical. They're very familiar with the purpose now. We've spent a lot of time really embedding it through the organization. And obviously as sort of ESG becomes more and more critical, we're developing it constantly to sort of embed the, the social piece is very clear, but definitely embed the environment piece and obviously the governance piece. So I think employees are very familiar with what the bank stands for and they know their role within it. And we'd been working to really rally everyone behind this as a kind of common goal, if you like, for the last two or three years. I think actually the pandemic brought it all to the fore because employees, the response from employees to the bank's response has been so positive in terms of pride and morale and productivity that actually it's like it's really accelerated things. I mean, I know it's a terrible thing that we've all had to go through and that has happened, but in a way, I think it's really unified employees despite working from home and not really being together. People are more connected than ever. Great, I have a message saying that Josh is on audio. Josh, can you hear me? Hey guys. Thank you so much. I'm so sorry about that. It just wasn't really flowing. Come in at a perfect moment. I don't know when you came in, but Lorena was just talking about ESG, which I was going to do some filling for you, but I'd love to hand over to you now and ask you the same question about, you know, whether or not you have to have that sort of strong culture in place in order to be able to really pivot successfully as a company. Okay, great, thank you. Yes, I think it's really important that you have that cultural foundation if you are going to change your strategy and we have made some pretty big changes over the last year to really embed sustainability into our brand and culture pillars. I agree with the comments earlier around the pandemic has definitely accelerated the rush to sustainable investing. And we're seeing investors moving assets into sustainable solutions, and that's obviously creating a lot of flows in the investment industry and actually into BlackRock. But I think if I was to jump into sustainability, I think the one aspect that has probably been hit the hardest is the social side of sustainability because ultimately we're in this health crisis, there's mass unemployment that's starting to happen, you're seeing social divides widening and obviously companies are going out of business. And so this is where from a cultural standpoint and a firm standpoint, we are having to pivot parts of our business and also our marketing communication strategies. But ultimately I believe that companies have a social duty to support really four key areas. And I'd say that first area is around employee well-being. I think that COVID obviously has forced a lot of people to work from home and that's been very testing and a lot of people are suffering from burnout. But also it's put onto the table very much the mental health aspect. And I think it's important that we try and support our employees around mental health and awareness of it. And so what we've been trying to do at BlackRock is we've been trying to support our employees through things like offering them counseling, setting up workshops around building resilience, other types of educational tools and resources around dealing with stress and anxiety and offering even things like free meditation apps. So employee well-being I think is critical. The other piece is obviously social impact. We work with a lot of charities, we work with a lot of community businesses. But it's really important that we use our capital and our resources to try and help the people that need it the most right now through COVID. And we've actually invested around two and a half million pounds into various charities for likes of National Emergencies Trust, St. John's Ambulance, et cetera. And I think it's really important as a company to support local communities and charities. And then really the third point is around clients and the companies that we invest in. You know, we're a fiduciary to our clients. And that means we want to protect their capital, we want to protect their investments. But also we want to try and look after and support the companies that we believe are strong long-term investments. And a great example of that is that during the height of the pandemic we saw many companies that were struggling, but one in particular potentially was going to go into administration and lose around 30,000 to 40,000 employees. And as a consortium with other investment groups and banks, we were able to help them get the lines of credit that they so desperately needed. And so whilst we chose this company based on its investment credentials, we see that our capital is actually being used for a social purpose. And then the final one is around building a more inclusive economy. You know, we've seen these social divides widening between wealthy and the poor during COVID. We've seen racism and the issues around that become stronger and stronger in the US and the UK. And I think it's our duty as companies to try and actually build more diverse and inclusive workforces and industries so that we can better serve that social purpose that's so evidently needed right now. Yeah, I think there's an interesting point there about actions and communications and which ones of those sort of create the culture more and how we sort of weave those together. But before I suppose that as a specific question, I think David, did you have a follow-up point on... Yeah, I mean, it's really a bit of a build on what Josh was saying, many of these things that just described many financial companies should probably ponder why it was that they weren't doing all of that before the pandemic because nearly all of that should have been paid attention to before. And there's a harsh light being put on companies. And in fact, it was the famed Larry Fink letter that started that a couple of years back when he was asking companies to prove the delivery of ESG not just say they were gonna do it so it's great to hear that there's lots of pivoting going on but I just wanna underline that most of it should have been happening before. And I do think the people that work inside financial institutions have been asking that question as well. So it'd be interesting to see what happens when we get out the other side. Yeah, I fully agree. And I think that's kind of the sort of point of the question really is how do you communicate culture? So I think, Lorena, you came close to this when you talked about launching internally first and really making sure that a culture build or a culture program is led and owned by those employees and then becomes all pervasive rather than necessarily being sort of campaign or tactical led. I'd like to sort of unpick that slightly because I think that's where we start to get into the impact of brands which is overall the point of the panel. But can I ask you to go into that a little bit, Lorena? Yes, of course. Yeah, I think, I'm not responsible for culture at the bank, I'm responsible for brand but these two things have to be completely integral to each other for sure, for it to work. When we started the development I started off this project wanting to reposition the bank from a brand perspective. So first and foremost I was thinking externally, if I'm honest, and that was because the bank was under, as was the industry but our bank was under significant reputational pressure for obvious reasons, we're all aware of those. And it was really important that we were able to counter that and not counter it with spin if you like but with real stories. But as I started to develop this I realised that what we'd been guilty of as an organisation, but also I think again many years before that from an industry perspective was that we always communicated out from a brand perspective and expected our employees to sort of embrace it and pick it up without really engaging them with it from the start and that was a massively missed opportunity. So we sort of took a step back and said actually before we even think about the external perspective or external expression of it we should start from the inside and we were obviously wanting to start with the purpose and we wanted to rally our employees which is very diverse, you know we're a huge 80 plus thousand organisation multiple different types of businesses but also a lot of infrastructure groups like all of the guys that are on this panel they understand what I mean including yourself probably and we needed to give people an understanding of sort of a fresh understanding of what we stood for and what we each come to work to do every day. And so that was where the purpose really started and we felt that we wanted employees to find their role within that or find their space within that and say okay maybe I work in risk management or maybe I'm a corporate finance banker or maybe I work in hand in communications but how do I contribute to that to collectively deliver this firm in a consistent way? And so that was our starting point really and we wanted each and every one to be part of it and it to be two-way rather than communicating this is what we stand for you must adhere we wanted employees to say oh this makes sense now how does that work for me doesn't matter where I sit in the organisation and there was such a huge response to it internally when we launched it because employees were completely starved if you like with positivity and they suddenly saw something that was bigger picture and felt very strongly about sort of navigating themselves within it or orientating themselves within it so we did that for a whole year before we even thought about externally of course whatever is internal is external immediately so it was obviously sort of seeping outside the organisation and that was fine and that was a really, we created an internal hub we asked everyone to post on it and actually that hub today is still running strong and people are posting comments on it every day so it has been very positive in that respect externally we moved to a kind of client testimonial campaign if you like but we used real bankers, real employees versus something that felt staged and again just wanted to demonstrate what our bankers and our employees do every day to help their clients realise their plans and ambitions and that was kind of the crux of what we were doing so I think internal is critical otherwise you'd never get that really kind of ingrained and a bank-wide response It sounds so simple when you say it like that but it is anything but and I think we all know that David I'd like to pose that one to you actually in any previous roles really do you think you can communicate culture or do you think it's something that builds how do you, you know, what's your view? Well obviously you know I was five years at what was then RBS and I was part of, I'll describe it, is the cleanup team you know the bank was in recovery led by Ross McEwan and actually the purpose at the time was serve customers well it doesn't sound like rocket science and but it was necessary because it was a reminder for everybody that worked in the bank that that was the reason to exist and we had to refocus on that and actually I think there's a combination where you have to understand that brand, service brands are built from the inside out so you have to, as Lorena so eloquently said, take people with you on the journey but you also have to set the tone from the top and the Exco and the board need to own culture and cultural change and it needs to get measured and needs to be tracked and actually if you look back at the data that Ross inherited it was not it was a fairly poor culture it was bottom quartile as measured by the time I left it was top quartile now that is hard yards and you can't do it through communication it is what you do it's not what you say but they have to be in sync and actually I do think this year that's really been in focus because the brands that have been saying things that are out of sync with their actions have been called out by their own people as somebody said earlier in a way that perhaps people wouldn't have done in days gone by because of that mysterious thing of the corporate culture things don't work like that around here but yeah build brands inside out and do it with authenticity is what I learned along the way and another thing that I'll pick up from what you were just saying then and I think it was referred to earlier is actually how you shape your culture and your corporate culture is ever more obvious I think or accessible to the outside and it does become a definer you know we no longer live in worlds where culture stays within the four walls and only is really observable if you work there everything with you know with social media with everything else you know it is very easy to get the tone or get the feel for a corporate culture and so I'm going to turn to Josh ask you a sort of closing question if you like on how much is a brand really intrinsically linked nowadays to its corporate culture and what's the sort of relationship you see moving forward and Josh yeah I think I think I think brands are very much linked to their culture BlackRock we have we have four guiding principles that ultimately are the backbone of our internal culture it is how employees it's what sorry it's what employees hold themselves against just the benchmarks they hold themselves against it's how they hold themselves accountable and so I do think it's inextricably linked the four principles that we have are we have a principle around innovation because we believe in trying to drive our industry forward through innovation and trying to provide better solutions to our clients the next one is around being a fiduciary to our clients and it's this piece around decision making that is focused on the client at the core of everything we do and putting our clients first the next one is about being one BlackRock you know we're a global firm but we try and operate as a single entity if we can because that's how we can make the best use of our culture and our resources and then finally it is obviously about performance it's about trying to drive impact within our own industry but driving impact outside of our industry and even contributing to society so those are our four guiding principles and they really are the backbone of everything that we do at BlackRock Great thank you very much Lorena coming to you on that question that link between brand and culture I think you spoke eloquently on it before but if I might tweak the question slightly because you did address it before have you got any thoughts on measurement or that kind of how you think about potentially salience or those kind of brand measurement in relationship to culture That's a very big question for the closing minute I'm sorry Okay that's all right we do well what I can tell you is that we from the day we launched the brand purpose and all of the material that went with it as well as then the external campaign later on a quarterly basis we do measure via our employee barometer the employee perspective on that both from an awareness perspective so are there where the purpose do they agree with it but then all of the sort of brand attributes that go with that and the campaign materials and then so are they aware do they agree and do they engage across a number of channels that we work on as well so we are able to measure that consistently and as new material comes we test that as well and it's really important because it's a very diverse organization with many branches in Germany a big branch network in Germany and then we have sort of an institutional business in other regions as I said we have a big infrastructure or support functions as well I mean employees need to you need to resonate with them across different cultures and areas so yes I'm pleased to say that awareness is very high and support is still very high and actually we obviously measure our brand perception too against that against a number of attributes and what I will say is it was nudging up but during the pandemic it has increased significantly and I think you know as I said before employees feel very motivated they feel very proud and they feel they want to you know they want to rally behind the organization which is going through a whole transformation anyway from a strategic perspective so we definitely have some great momentum and we really want to build on that going into 2021 great thank you and I will also say I've had a few questions that relate specifically to Deutsches programs all very complementary but I don't have time to ask you them so I'm just passing on the love from the questions thank you thank you very much just be kind David a couple of final minutes from you a couple of thoughts on that yeah I mean I do think all in financial services get absolutely used to what gets measured gets done but it is getting underneath the numbers sometimes so understanding employee engagement and pride as Lorraine has just said absolutely key so if I go back and I was I joined Barclays I was hired by Bob Diamond four months before LIBOR happened and when that happened people were ashamed to say they worked for the bank and one of my colleagues said they worked for a bank at an event and had a glass of wine thrown over them just to give you that so you know that to rebuild emotional engagement is a difficult thing and to make sure it's done so that it's authentic and you're tracking it and you can show the pride and loop it back around but of course ultimately you have to mind the gap between what you're doing internally and what you're delivering externally and it's the customers that must feel the love of the rebuilding of a culture and because brands then develop so probably the brand that we managed to reboot and rebirth really effectively was the Royal Bank of Scotland in Scotland which had suffered from the attempt to build the global brand RBS but has recovered by just applying the simple principles driven through serving customers well and people being pride in what they're doing proud of what they're doing and doing it well well thank you I would say thank you to all three of you I've really enjoyed that discussion I think you know thank you to Josh for pivoting with the tech and rejoining us so quickly and to both you David and Lorena for your thoughts on this topic as with all of them today I really I think we could have gone on in much greater detail but it's much more fun to gallop through lots of fantastic topics and cover loads of ground so I think you know that's been a really insightful session Hi Christoph, how are you doing? Thank you very much Amy and Jo a panel I think that was just great to see that wrap-up because when we are looking back at what we've experienced today in sort of a short wrap-up we started the day in getting a view from a journalist how the environment has changed what the challenge is when you do no longer experience like the little tweaks and the giveaways that you experience when you talk to people then we we looked at a very specific creative approach on financial literacy which is important to all of us because we as a financial service industry we have to make sure that we are as simple as possible to understand and that most of the people can navigate also privately in this new environment and therefore great great example shown by Bino and the Bank of England and then we heard about the relevance of digital marketing as well how it will change or the importance of relevance in digital markets better to say digital marketing so that you really have to focus on less is more but you have to know when you get out with relevant content then we we looked at the the very complex environment in our editorial panel that is still with us but that also offers loads of opportunities for change be it in the situation of vaccination but also be it into ESG and the future of business and then we looked at media partnerships how media partnerships increasingly become data partnerships and fantastic how you Amy and your esteemed panel have wrapped this up in terms of everything only makes sense when a company looks at their their brand and their purpose and as Lorena impressively described if you give staff the opportunity to have a hand in driving the brand then you get you know everybody on board and also we we had great examples of mental health of focus which in my view is absolutely pivotal because so many people now struggle with this situation and it's great that companies really take this seriously and don't see it as a nice to have so all in all super impressive and with that Amy thank you for your moderation we hand back to our esteemed Jacob thank you yes absolutely thank you so much Chris Stoff and Amy and thank you to everyone that's joined or everybody that's helped out to pull this fantastic agenda together today so big thanks to Tony Jarvis and Belinda Barker thank you to Andrew Carrier for the amazing tweets that he's going to turn into a report that he will send round to everyone but you know amazing panels amazing speakers so thank you to everyone amazing which way round to that way to the host thank you thank you we still have a final session three but unfortunately we couldn't do it for the full the full hundreds that were signed up for the webinar but those that are going to be joining us we look forward to seeing you on zoom at 4 30 so with that I'll draw this session this year's session to a close and I look forward to seeing you next year as well so thank you again thank you thank you all bye thank you