Does your CEO speak cybertalk? It may be time to ask – politely. Cyber showmanship might just be set to become a prized attribute for the ambitious, investor-friendly CEO. Indeed, it may no longer be enough to be the most astute strategic thinker or the most ruthless, tyrannical boss in town.
The rewards of cyber-dexterity await. Corporate management may find it can jump over the traditional gatekeepers of big-name, powerhouse analysts and top financial media to speak directly to, and hear directly from, lower-rung analysts and mainstreet investors. Or it can deliver more powerful messages – complete with full motion, full screen, digital video – to financial decision-makers globally.The emergence of digital media as the dominant force in communications has been under way for some time now, as the Internet and commercial online services create new linkages between the financial community and its customers. In coming months, the drive gets kick-started into high gear. Things are getting exciting.
While some of us spend the summer trying to achieve a blissful lakeside shutdown, two North American information industry entrepreneurs are busy putting the finishing touches to new interactive services that will give IROs innovative, electronic and two-way reach to both institutional and individual investors. One will offer individuals a chance to quiz top executives online. The other will be delivering sponsored corporate multimedia messages direct to the desktop PCs of brokers and analysts.
Significantly, too, both International Corporate Forum’s Gerald Scott, developing the online executive interviewing, and Intellectual Capitalism’s Nancy Nightingale, behind the multimedia feeds into brokerage computer networks, represent a portentous evolution going on in the online world. The pioneers are giving way to the settlers. The technology is finding its own, unique functionality as it is harnessed to create value-added benefit to both information generators and recipients.
The road is finally merging, in other words, between what companies want to achieve from a presence on the information highway and what users want from a ride.
First up, Gerald Scott. The founder of the Boston-based International Corporate Forum has made a name for his company by offering companies and analysts an independent venue to meet, free from the sponsorship of a brokerage or asset management house. The quarterly conferences each attract some 300 public and up to 800 buy and sell-side analysts. Whereas investment conferences sponsored by a brokerage or investment bank tend to reward clients with invitations to showcase, Scott’s gatherings offer a more diverse agenda.
Whenever possible, Scott encourages the broadcast – sometimes live – of his forums across the NBC Desktop/Private Financial Network and Dow Jones Investor Network services, both of which are relayed into brokerage and trading offices, with programme sheets distributed to alert portfolio managers and others when a specific company is on screen. That represents something of a breakthrough. ‘Many analysts don’t like giving away information for free,’ through the broadcasts, Scott says. ‘But I’ll do anything to help companies extend their message.’
Soon, Scott expects to offer televised interactivity from remote sites into his forums. So an analyst from a small firm in, say, St Louis would be able to ask questions of a CEO speaking in New York, just like the big boys from Wall Street. ‘Brokerage firms are afraid of this technology,’ Scott says. ‘It’s changing the dynamics.’
Starting in September, Scott’s company unveils a new venture to take corporate IR messages direct to the PC screens of millions of retail investors – and those professional investors who are cyberhip – around the world. International Corporate Forums will begin a service dubbed Meet The Management on the booming America Online (latest subscriber count: 3 mn and growing) and Microsoft Network, the soon-to-be Goliath of the online world due for launch in August. (That was the subject of last month’s missive in this space, incidentally.) Projections of Microsoft Network’s audience vary, but some estimates peg the likely number at about 5 mn within a year.
Meet The Management will be a weekly programme carried on both networks, through which a corporation can present a 3000-word synopsis of its activities geared for those considering it as an investment. Slides of, say, earnings results can be displayed online, giving the text a visual complement. Online readers can then submit questions through e-mail, which Scott and his crew will whittle down to a dozen or so. The company then supplies the answers. (The programming will not be live for a host of legal and logistical reasons.)
Each week’s cycle will feature five to ten companies. Initially, only those companies participating in a forum may opt to be included in Meet The Management, but Scott expects eventually to begin offering the platform as a stand-alone choice. ‘Online will continue to go through upgrades,’ Scott says. ‘But we know already that this technology is leveling the playing field. Those who can be nimble with it will succeed.’
Nancy Nightingale knows that tune. The CEO of Toronto-based Intellectual Capitalism is harnessing multimedia – text, sound and visuals – to deliver Hollywood-quality, on-demand presentations to analysts and brokers direct on their computer screens.
The key words here are ‘on demand’: once a programme is fed into a company’s computer network, it can be called up and viewed at anytime. Want to see that corporate presentation from last month? Want to see the 3D animation of a machinery’s inner workings? How about the CEO’s annual meeting speech? Or factories that haven’t yet been built? It’ll be there in a database, ready for immediate call-up. Imagine a video recorder that never turns off.
This autumn, Dow Jones launches its latest video service for the financial market, a broadband service called Dow News Desk. Intellectual Capitalism has the exclusive third-party rights to develop and distribute sponsored corporate presentations over it. (New York-based Media Link, another force in the corporate video market, has the rights to broadcast video press releases; there is a distinction here.) Dow Jones expects to have its feed piped into some 200 corporate computer networks by the end of next year.
So where did the idea of bringing multimedia to financial communications come from? In 1994 Nightingale, a former COO of Canada’s Central Asset Management (C$10 bn under management) and top strategic planner for the Toronto Stock Exchange, saw a void in the technical means companies were using to get their message to institutional investors. ‘We saw the type of communications coming out in the investment management arena, and an opportunity to ramp up what was coming online,’ she says.
Nightingale approached a number of top-drawer financial information providers with a simple message. ‘We said that as you build your pipelines into the 21st century, your customers are going to want more and better content. You’ll need to open your pipeline to others.’ Dow Jones bought in to that message, and now holds an equity stake in the Toronto company. Intellectual Capitalism is also aligned with Toronto’s The Kessler Group, one of North America’s premier multimedia production houses that includes its own advertising agency and serves other agencies across the continent, and which has supplied multimedia expertise for the movie business.
‘Multimedia is becoming the domain of people with very sophisticated skills. It would be very difficult for a small multimedia producer to stay current,’ Nightingale says. The technical magic involved in the Intellectual Capitalism service is a digital compression technique called MPeg, which allows images to be squeezed into smaller digital spaces than previously available. ‘This is no longer multimedia in a little box. This is interactive television through the PC,’ she says. ‘Except it’s seven inches away from your face.’
As News Desk prepares for its start-up, Nightingale’s group is out selling its creative skills. The company will produce programming packages for large corporations for fees that can top US$300,000, but it is also offering pre-set packages for small cap companies at prices around $15,000.
For analysts, traders and others for whom information is the fuel of decision-making, Nightingale says her programming will be a catalyst for understanding more, quicker. ‘For the analyst, the view of a company will be more penetrating. Interactivity allows them to drill to the core of a company,’ she says.
And the impact for IROs? ‘When you move from the printed page to the computer, there’s an enormous transition taking place,’ Nightingale says. ‘You must leave behind the old ways of thinking. When you move to the PC, especially with multimedia, you have to reinvent your communications. It has to be more compelling.’
So the moral of this month’s column: Cyber smarts are no longer the province of the technically advanced. They are fast becoming basic level skills essential for survival in the financial communications game. So take the top boss on a cyber tour. Talk the talk, and pretty soon your IR department may just walk the walk.
And if you’re having problems getting plugged in to the big picture of it all, you’d better keep reading this column.
Want to know more?
Call International Corporate Forum on +1-617-523-1234;
Intellectual Capitalism on +1- 416-756-2125.
