Dear CMO’s: It’s time to start building this new team

Welcome back to Spark, a weekly newsletter from Vivace Content. We compile news signals from across the business, financial, and cultural landscape, and spark ideas to help you and your business jump on something new to talk about. Send tips and feedback to [email protected] or just hit reply.

Happy Monday,

Have you missed us in your inboxes? A very eventful March plus Beyoncé’s new album prevented us from our regularly scheduled programming but we’re glad to be back.

In today’s issue we’re taking a deep dive into a single topic that we’ve been obsessed with for years. Let us know what you think of this approach. We’ll be back to our normal Spark style next week.

What to do with your greatest untapped resource

Data is the new oil. 

Every company is a technology company, therefore every company is a data company. 

What gets measured gets managed. 

Worn though they may be, these corporate clichés contain more than grains of truth. Most of us work for companies that value, process and communicate in data. And while the amount of data each company creates has grown exponentially in recent years, it remains a language that is often left to data analysts, analytics functions and other back-office support groups to decipher.

It’s a trend we at Vivace Content have been bullish on for several years. While at LSEG Data & Analytics (formerly Refinitiv), we built an internal function called the Data Insights Team around a simple proposition: to create insights and stories about world news and events using the company’s rich and vast sets of data. We rallied the firm’s storytellers, designers turned data visualizers, brilliant subject matter experts, and data analysts to create a virtual ‘newsroom’. Our weekly editorial meetings tapped into this collective to maximize every opportunity to insert our data into the business and finance news of the day, all the while upskilling our team, tools, and processes.

Anyone who can appreciate the power of storytelling can see how a well crafted data visualization can replace paragraphs of text. That an animated bar chart race can keep someone’s attention much better than a table or a bullet pointed list. That an interactive chart can make an audience feel like they are part of the story by having a chance to actually ‘touch’ the data, in a way that even video cannot replicate. 

The opportunity ahead

It’s for all of these reasons that we strongly believe forward-looking marketing and communications leaders have a real opportunity to start building a new team to capitalize on this trend. A good working title for this team might be: Data Visualization & Storytelling, with the aim of being a center of excellence that partners with your existing Marketing & Communications functions. Their initial remit could be: to research, develop and promote best practices of information design, data visualization and data journalism across your business. 

What would this new function look like? 

Every firm will have a different need, but a lot could be accomplished with a data visualization specialist, an analyst, and a data journalist. Much like the discipline of social media began with a single person or a half role, so too could this new capability begin and grow in remit and resource over time as the ROI grows with it. 

Have you already begun to build this function? 

We’d love to hear examples of firms who are either starting to do this or think about it. We’ll share back some of the best stories and examples we hear and continue to provide resources and examples that can help those who want to learn more. In the meantime, get in touch if you’d like to explore and discuss this topic with further with us. Until then, we’ll leave you with a few of our favorite examples of data storytelling. Hopefully they spark an idea or two for you.

Thanks for joining us this week. Anything we missed? Something we should include next week? Please send all ideas and feedback to [email protected]. 

Spark is a production of Vivace Content, where we help our clients navigate what to say and how to say it every single day. Get in touch if you’d like a no-hassle consultation about how we can help you. Have a great week ahead, and see you next Monday.