NEWS
NEWS

NEWS

Comms is central to a company’s fortunes: NEWS is our favourite framework to know the right resource for our company’s messages, and when comms is not the right solution.

What’s NEWS?

We’ve all seen amazing company comms: think Apple for the past 25 years and Microsoft for the past 10, both creating overwhelmingly positive narratives and truckloads of positive media coverage.

We’ve also all seen the exact opposite: think Uber and Facebook in the mid-2010s, both digging deeper and deeper holes for several years before both starting to turn things around more recently.

To dig into company comms, NEWS is our first guest edition framework, partnered with Robin Moroney, a longtime Google Comms leader and business school Professor at IESE in Madrid (and, long ago, a Stanford classmate of James’s).

The NEWS framework introduces a 2 x 2 across Time Frame and Impact on the Business, where our company picks how we message based upon each dimension and the resulting 4 quadrants:

  • Time Frame split into long and short:
    • Narratives last for months, years and, occasionally, decades
    • Events last for days or weeks
  • Impact on the Business splits into bad and good:
    • Weaknesses hurt our biz, plus reporters are keen to talk about it, and we are not
    • Strengths help our biz, plus reporters are keen to cover it, and we want them to

Like so many frameworks we like, here’s the trusty 2 x 2 to show our 4 NEWS quadrants:

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Walking through our 4 quadrants starting from the Top Left:

Narrative + Weakness = VALUES or Eat vegetables publicly every day. “Do good and let people know” is the classic maxim of reputation comms. How you do good is actually a decision beyond comms. The cheapest and most impactful option is whatever consumers, partners, and officials see you do every day. The most expensive option is an ESG program, which will inevitably change theme as new execs come in, confusing people. Comms’s job is to work hard making sure this real-world good is seen. You have one or two talking points about products and/or policies that every spokesperson knows by heart. Over months and years this, ideally, turns your narrative weakness into a narrative strength.

Event + Weakness = FIRES or Absorb the incoming and take action. We love that “Ew” is the abbreviation here since this is the nightmare scenario that smells yucky because we’ve proved peoples’ suspicions right: the big bad oil company DID dump oil in the ocean or the high-flying company with a CEO with a wild reputation DID let too many harassment allegations go unanswered. Ultimately, the crisis will be ended by an action that feels right to the victims and the critics, and comms’s job until then is to absorb the incoming, keep facts straight and lay out the public trade-offs of possible actions to executives who sometimes don't realize how they're seen.

Event + Strength = EXTRAVAGANZAS or Invest our marketing $$ to drive influence and attention. The goal for many companies is to evolve to the point where they have a big PR and sales moment that sets the agenda for the year for their customers, employees, and the broader media. Then it’s about rallying all our fans around what they love about us, in ways that, ideally, might get non-fans intrigued about what the fuss is about: Disney's D conference, Google I/O and even Taco Bell have big annual moments like this that transcend smaller, less impactful announcements about individual announcements. Airbnb's CEO Brian Chesky is probably the biggest non-comms advocate for putting on shows as tools to promote your strategy and, in the process, design it.

Narrative + Strength: CONSTANT DELIGHT or Benefit from people instinctively listening whenever we want to discuss something. When we have a narrative strength, we can pitch a story whenever we want, and people will find it credible and exciting. These strong narratives are where we want to be loud and bold and have fun. The key resource here is executive time for interviews, comms headcount, and permission to be creative with small quirky events and have bold thought leadership from your experts that lean into these pre-existing positive perceptions.

When to use NEWS?

People start to fight over comms when they hit a certain size. Weird things happen: interviews go sideways, things blow up. No one can figure out why, but take a few steps back and it is obvious. When comms, leadership, marketing and public affairs are fighting, it’s usually a fight over these quadrants. Therefore, the strategic priority when setting goals or resolving crises is to turn to NEWS and ensure everybody agrees on which quadrant we’re in. For instance:

  1. Should we promote a great corporate ESG campaign message but no plan to put it into action? Don't put $ behind commsing it until it has actual results to comms.
  2. Should our CEO address a roiling cycle at our big event? If they have a clear set of actions, then yes. If it can be fixed directly by a strength, then yes. If not, then best to skip, as painful as that might be.
  3. Should our CEO take all interview requests on this strength? CEO time is limited; narrative strengths should breed spokespeople.
  4. We just changed our policy to ensure higher quality outcomes, but it reduces sales. Should we do something with this? Yes, this is fixing your narrative weakness. Do the hard work of putting a number on the money given up and make sure every spokesperson who is showing up to discuss a narrative strength knows it as a talking point.

How do we use NEWS?

Given it’s a guest edition, we’ll deviate from our regularly scheduled programming and have James largely interview Robin on the good, bad, and ugly of well-known companies following and failing to follow NEWS:

Robin:

Using NEWS shakes people out of two mental models for comms: the first is the John Grisham/House of Cards School where comms makes problems go away with mythical spin skills and/or a reporter ends up dead in Waterloo Station; then the second is the Billionaire Chess School of Comms – where reporters write solely according to the whims of billionaires. Both schools can make us sound very smart in a meeting, but don’t improve our coverage or get results. We should use comms to build up long-term narratives that will make people more likely to do what we want. Sadly, citing Chomsky, while fun, doesn’t do that. Being smart about how we build our brand over time will.

James:

I wonder what Chomsky would have to say about LLMs? Back to NEWS, can we use this this framework looking through the lens of probably the most successful company comms transformation of the past decade in Microsoft. Thinking back to 2014 and Satya Nadella taking over as CEO, Microsoft had clearly lost its mojo. Using NEWS, can you walk us through what it’s done so impressively to turn that around completely.

Robin:

Yeah, Nadella is the perfect test case of how brilliant comms can reverse a decade of stock stagnation. Nadella had a simple message: Windows is no longer the centre in a mobile- and cloud-first world, so we need to relearn how Microsoft helps people “do more.” Every decision he made was framed by that credo. It took enormous discipline: he understood that what his predecessor considered a narrative strength - Windows, the most successful software product of the 20th century -  had become a narrative weakness.

Nadella has since used a similar playbook for AI as he did with his initial mobile-first, cloud-first narrative: in the middle of the OpenAIcalypse when Sam Altman was temporarily voted out of OpenAI, then became a Microsoft employee, then went back to OpenAI, all in the space of a handful of days, Nadella’s comments when interviewed were the kinds of things he was saying in 2015: “Our strategy today is the same as it was on Friday,  trying to build great products and great technology and do real research around everything from AI safety and alignment to the next generation models.” He knows a simple narrative can be such a strength in times of crisis and rebuilding when you make it perfectly congruent with your actions.

James:

OpenAI is a fascinating one for me. Can you walk through how they fit into NEWS since, to me, the primary narrative remains that they’re the most innovative company in the world, NOT that they house the most dysfunctional executive team in the world. How is that?

Robin:

OpenAI shows how when something isn’t core to your brand or messaging, it doesn’t register. It feels like nine OpenAI executives could spontaneously combust, and it would barely dent the excitement around the company’s products. That’s because they shipped the most game-changing product of the past decade in November 2022 and followed it with major improvements on a seemingly monthly cadence ever since. A real crisis would be the day they release a really mediocre update, at which point the narrative would be “Altman should not have fired all those geniuses” as opposed to “Altman has a magnetic vision that will attract more geniuses after the prior round of geniuses depart.”

James:

OpenAI seems to have started to combine the Events + Strengths combo in the past 6 months or so, where their release events have become Steve Jobsian “Must Watch” sessions. Can you say more about who else has thrived in the Events + Strengths quadrant?

Robin:

The recent 2024 Dreamforce is almost a parody of the right approach. To a broad non-tech audience, it can be barely comprehensible, but it gets developers and partners jazzed. The John Mulaney snafu where he laid into Dreamforce attendees about the horrors of AI is a paradoxically perfect demonstration of how big spend and a strong message win the day. Salesforce had all their speakers lined up to say: We’re an AI company now.  Mulaney showed up, registered the AI message, and did his thing. Suddenly, Salesforce is an AI company. The comms team should be celebrating. To be attacked as an unfeeling AI company is 100% more valuable to the stock than to be praised as a last-generation SaaS/CRM company.

James:

So, should you throw everything at the wall at these conferences? Where are the limits?

Robin:

If a company doesn’t have a strong narrative, discussing everything you're doing can dilute the message to the point of having no narrative. The more you say, the less gets remembered. I remember one journalist who attended Google I/O in 2014 saying on a wrap-up podcast that he felt he needed a diaper like an astronaut to sit through the insane amount of news Google was shoving down his throat over four hours. Trial lawyers like to say juries can hold about a shot-glass of information in their heads, and you have to make sure you’re filling that tiny space but never putting more in than the shot glass can hold. I/O’s evolved to be far easier to understand, but you still find mid-stage startups doing events that boil down to “Here are 24 things we are doing this year.” At that stage, it’s time to focus on your narrative strengths and make everything fit them. If they don’t fit, drop them.

James:

Can you use events to address your weaknesses?

Robin:

I have a colleague Yago de La Cierva who quotes Emerson in his book on crisis comms at the Catholic Church: “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears that I cannot hear what you say.” The volume of your actions is enormous. So build an event around things you’re definitely, visibly, undeniably going to do. That will massively boost the effectiveness of your comms for the rest of the year. The preferred form of tech rhetoric in the 2010s was the sweeping visionary statement – a new one every year – with execution optional. The meta-narrative became: “Don’t trust a tech company that says everything will be amazing in 2030 but can’t do basic chores around privacy this year.”

My guess is that as AI matures and product innovations stagnate, we’re going to go back to that model: each AI company competing for attention with bolder, larger eye-catching visions of the future. The winners will be the ones who smartly connect a trustworthy vision of the future to everyday verifiable things that consumers, politicians and partners can see, smell and touch for the rest of the year.

James:

And that seems to be something Apple does really well. They feel like the poster child for narratives, including moving from product innovation all the time to services and privacy?

Robin:

Yes, let’s dig into Apple using NEWS. They use events and then policy news in an always consistent way.  They have these enormous events that promote how beautiful and well-designed their products are. And in between events, Apple promotes privacy. And that’s it. Journalists who message Apple’s comms team to get a comment on any other topic anticipate silence.

James:

As we start to land this plane, let me see if I’m getting this right: If we have a reputation for positive stuff, we essentially get a mulligan and perhaps a polite poke when we run afoul of something; but if we have a reputation for something nefarious, we get pummeled, not poked? For example, Facebook got completely slammed with Cambridge Analytica post-2016 because they had a long history of privacy violations. However, if Apple had a similar problem today, their long-term goodwill would make it much less of a brouhaha?

Robin:

That’s pretty much it! Apple has had a few really bad privacy cycles – the San Bernadino shooting and scanning for child pornorgraphy on-device – but the crises have been not “Is Apple evil?” but “Is Apple hypocritical to its values that we all admire?” In both cases, they ended the crisis by taking action that matched their pre-existing strengths and perceived values. The media accepted it and moved on. I teach the second crisis as a case at IESE, and the students love debating it, because it feels like a Sophie’s Choice: child pornography or on-device privacy for everyone? Apple picked their strength in Privacy. Tough call. So tough, that it registered.

James:

So the next time I face a crisis in public, how do I know how to get that discipline?

Robin:

One thing to emphasize is that if it’s not in this matrix, it’s not a comms problem or opportunity. A lot of stuff looks like comms problems because they're happening in public. But if it isn’t going to diminish your narrative strengths or worsen your narrative weaknesses, it's best to think of it as another function’s problem. Also, stuff that doesn’t build on your narrative strengths will likely distract from those strengths.

I had a boss who said “If it’s no one’s problem, it’s a comms problem.” But he said this wearily. It is a waste of time: you want comms to be your influence machine. Influence and persuasion takes focus. Give comms the real resources that make messages stick in the head forever.

Want to learn more

WANT TO GO DEEPER ON NEWS AND NARRATIVES?

Narrative Economics by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Schiller (book and course links below) is the best explanation for how narratives actively shape economic reality (and don’t simply reflect them). The left-side of the quadrant – the narratives – is the hardest part for comms to measure, but Schiller shows it is where the value of comms truly lies. It’s also a great argument for why no strategy works unless it’s easy to express.

Narrative Economics | Yale Online

This course is relatively short and proposes a simple concept: we need to incorporate the contagion of narratives into our economic theory. You can think of narratives as stories that shape public beliefs, which in turn influence our decision-making. Understanding how people arrived at certain decisions in the past can aid our understanding of the economy today and improve our forecasts of the future. Popular thinking heavily influences our answers to questions such as how much to invest, how much to spend or save, whether to go to college or take a certain job, and many more. Narrative economics is the study of the viral spread of popular narratives that affect economic behavior. I believe incorporating these ideas into our research must be done both to improve our ability to anticipate and prepare for economic events and help us structure economic institutions and policy. Until we better incorporate it into our methods of analysis and forecasting, we remain blind to a very real, very palpable, very important mechanism for economic change. Even in the dawning age of the Internet and artificial intelligence, so long as people remain ultimately in control, human narratives will matter. Maybe they will especially matter as the new technology exploits human weaknesses and creates new venues for narrative contagion. If we do not understand the epidemics of popular narratives, we cannot fully understand changes in the economy and in economic behavior.  The course is broken into 4 modules: Part I introduces basic concepts and demonstrates how popular stories change over time to affect economic outcomes, including recessions, depressions and inequality as well as effective inspiration and growth.. These stories can be observed from diverse sources such as politics, the media, or even popular songs. Part II seeks to answer why some stories go viral, while others are quickly forgotten, by defining our narrative theory more firmly. This module enumerates and explores a list of seven propositions to help discipline any analysis of economic narratives. Part III examines nine perennial narratives that have proved their ability to influence important economic decisions. They include narratives regarding artificial intelligence, stock market bubbles, and job insecurity. Part IV looks to the future and highlights the opportunities for consilience in Narrative Economics. We share some thoughts about where narratives are taking us at this point in history and what kind of future research could improve our understanding of them. This course offers only the beginnings of a new idea and a few suggestions for how it could be used by economists and financial professionals. The tone is not prescriptive or authoritative, as perhaps my Coursera course, Financial Markets, is in places. It represents the beginning of the journey (epidemic). This course is my way of floating the “germ” of this idea out into the broader community of not only professionals but of anyone who is interested in discovering how and why things become “important” to us as a society. I hope some of you will become infected by this idea, mutate it, spread it, and advance it. The beginning of the journey is the easy part. The challenge will come in taking these concepts to the next level. We have the tools to incorporate narratives into our research and the moral obligation to act; only the work remains.

online.yale.edu

WANT TO GO DEEPER ON SATYA NADELLA AS A MASTER COMMUNICATOR?

Take ten minutes out to read Satya Nadella in 2014 compared to 2024 and watch him keep the same themes current and engaging – a sign of a true leader. Once you got to know his greatest hits, listen to his interview with Kara Swisher to see how easy it is for him to answer questions in the midst of a meltdown by relating everything to his master goal for Microsoft, which has, yes, evolved, but also has recognizably descended from his original cloud-first, mobile-first memo a decade before:

WANT TO GO DEEPER WITH ROBIN’S WRITING?

Here’s his equal parts excellent and entertaining newsletter:

WANT TO GO DEEPER WITH OTHER COMMS-FOCUSED BLUEPRINTS?

Finally, seeing NEWS in all caps made James think of the poster for JAWS - his #4 film of all time - so perhaps the takeaway is to use NEWS or else you’ll get torn apart by the media sharks?!

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