Bringing together over 2,000 attendees from the worldwide digital marketing community, DMWF was full of strategic insight into the challenges and opportunities for marketers and content creators. Over 100 speakers discussed the latest trends, strategies and technology that will help them look to the digital marketing trends of the future. So, what seemed to be front of mind for attendees across the Forum?
1. Keeping creativity in your social content creation
Kenny Metham, Social Media Manager at connective3, discussed how social media teams can experience burnout and declining traction trying to constantly create new content. The Forum was full of tips on keeping social content innovative, but Kenny highlighted that really, data is your friend, so you don’t have to create creativity from scratch. Are you seeing certain colours working on a particular channel? Build a campaign around it. You can use social listening to see what your competitors are doing that lands. If posts do well on a particular day, can you create a regular campaign around that?
Rachel Morman, Global Head of social media at PHD, highlighted that for data-driven content, you must use the right metrics. She discussed using the attention economy as a key KPI – you have half a second to grab people, so that’s where you’re competing. Counting follows and likes is less important than thinking about time spent or shares. Gabriela Torres, Head of social media for BBC World Service, said that when they looked to grow an organic loyal audience, they similarly prioritised metrics around engagement of users or returning users and that fed back into future content creation.
The other factor is a thick skin to failure. Alex Ioana, Manager of Digital Content Experience at Booking.com said resilience is key. When it comes to digital journeys you should only be testing things you think are statistically significant, which means lots of them should fail, but the purpose is they can still teach you about what to test next. And that takes marketers out of ‘what next’ limbo and into building effective content.
2. Influencer marketing is trending upwards
For all the brands attending Digital Marketing World Forum, there was a message loud and clear: unfortunately, people don’t trust you. Declining trust in brands means consumers are increasingly turning to other people – even strangers - to gauge who they should or shouldn’t buy from. Darren Teague, Senior Account Executive at Spotler, highlighted that 85% of people now trust customer reviews as much as they’d trust a friend.
How is this being leveraged by brands? It’s why user-generated content continues to grow. Finding your brand champions and giving them a platform will be more effective than what you are saying. That humanisation is also shown in the growth of Tiktok and new platforms such as BeReal where users are given two minutes to take a photo at a different, randomly chosen time each day. People are after more authentic humanisation.
Amrita Lal from LinkedIn said that B2B brands should consider using senior leaders and people across the business to share posts. Amy Woods. CEO of Content10x, said that people-to-people conversation videos are becoming increasingly popular. And Darren from Spotler pointed out that if customer reviews and user-generated content are so powerful, use them in nurture campaigns, but also put a lot of work into your customer experience. Remember the counter is also true, 95% of dissatisfied customers tell others about their bad experiences.
3. Last click attribution models are dead. Long live brand marketing.
Okay, well it might not be that extreme, but after years of digital marketers being told brand marketing was dead in the water, it appears to be making a comeback. With the end of third-party cookies, traditional attribution models will soon become less valuable. Abhi Juneja discussed the journey American Express has been on, shifting to aggregated rather than individual customer journeys, which has allowed them to rethink the value of brand advertising.
For example, a focus on last-click attribution models meant they were investing in remarketing and not in audio adverts. They transitioned to multi-touch attribution but could see it wasn’t future-proofed, so now view it in aggregate, and that's shown them they get far more value out of audio advertising and they can reinvest there. The disadvantage of this modelling is that it takes time to get results, especially around performance marketing, but it may also open up previously neglected opportunities.
For Duarte Garrido, Group Head of social media at Coca-Cola HBC, people are increasingly making decisions around value and purpose. He said that if 58% of people buy or advocate for brands based on their beliefs and values, and that the same generation is also less likely to click on adverts, you may need to rethink for the future. Brands that can build a community of trust with their audience and think about how they can help them, will benefit in the long run. And that will inevitably lead to more brand marketing and less focus on sell, sell, sell. As Amrita from LinkedIn said, brand awareness now is the demand generation of the future.
4. The rise of the metaverse
Gartner predicts that by 2026 25% of people will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse. That stat looks more realistic when you consider that it’s unlikely to be one metaverse, it will be multiple. As Andy Martinus, Global Head of Innovation at Team Lewis pointed out, if people are already watching Travis Scott perform a concert on Fortnite, it’s not as far away in the future as you might think.
James Poulter, CEO of Vixen Labs, said that thinking about the future of the metaverse means thinking about conversational AI, as people aren’t going to be typing in virtual reality. There is already significant progress with digitally synthetic voices, which bodes well for customer service avatars. And if you think that isn’t already happening there has already been a CEO who used it for an earnings call so that all they had to do was approve a script and let the machines do the work. These ‘fakes’ may be slightly terrifying, but also not having to record every piece of audio content, and the personalisation that could provide? Appealingly efficient.
If you’re still not convinced, James stressed not to just think about big VR headsets, it’s more likely people will have partial wear. We already have people used to having AirPods in most of the day, or the collaboration between RayBan and Meta, which means people walking around with a camera on all day.
Although this is early days, you’re already seeing the likes of JP Morgan set up in Decentraland, and cyborg influencer Lil Miquela having a brand partnership with Samsung and Prada. If it feels too soon for your brand to have a relevant space in the Metaverse (and it probably is) it’s still worth considering your understanding of voice search and how you can leverage advances in natural language processing, so you’re ready if indeed the predictions are true!
5. TikTok ain’t just for kids
If there was one media channel on everyone’s lips at the Forum, it was TikTok. It’s the fastest growing social media platform by far, and while in lockdown people may have written it off as a bunch of dancing tweens, by 2022 the content is varied, shortform video content is still growing in popularity, and it’s no longer just Gen-Zs with eMarketer showing that over half of users in the US are 25 and over.
Roberta Cianetti, Social Media Director at Conde Nast Italia, highlighted that TikTok has a lot of benefits over other platforms. There is still a lot of space for brands, there are communities you can tap into, and content is incredibly easy to create and send out. Naturally, you must consider whether the audience is right for your brand as the worst thing would be creating a TikTok just because it’s the newest thing (see social media burnout in point one!) but if you are interested in user-generated content, Gen-Z and Millennial audiences, and see relevant communities there, it’s a growing channel that shouldn’t be dismissed.
We always love to meet ambitious digital marketing businesses, so if you're considering investment now or in the future please do get in touch!
Insights
30/06/2022
Fiona Moore
Read Time: Min
What was on everyone’s mind at the 2022 Digital Marketing World Forum?
As part of our ECI Unlocked programme connecting business leaders across the ECI portfolio, we recently welcomed Sharon Langer and Robyn Johnston from MiQ to share how they built a high-performance global BI team from scratch in 100 days.
MiQ is a leading programmatic media partner for marketers and agencies, and as such it collects, analyses and serves back to its customers vast amounts of high-quality data. With increased reporting needs in their own business, Sharon and Robyn were looking to deliver the same data quality back to their own business. What would MiQ - for MiQ - look like? There were some key things they knew they were after, which was a high-performance team, with no compromise on data integrity, and focused on delivering performance. High standards even with a long runway, so how did they manage to deliver that in just 100 days and what did they get right?
1. The balance of teams and third parties
MiQ were aware that if they needed to set up the team at pace, it wasn’t going to be possible to hire everyone they wanted within the short timeline. However, they were clear on what they felt could be outsourced, which was task-based activity rather than ownership. Sharon and Robyn (who you may be able to tell by the end of this article are big F1 fans!) likened the use of third parties to F1 teams like McLaren using Mercedes engines. Engines are complex to design and build, if it’s something that can be outsourced, focus on other things where you can make more of a difference.
MiQ also made sure that third parties understood what was required of them and got them up to speed quickly. They were also conscious of making sure that once the team is set up and things become more BAU, that there was a plan in place to start to transition out third parties and begin bringing in people with great potential to take ownership, but recognising it was key to not try and do this from the start when you are running very quickly.
2. Have outstanding communication
Clear communication from the BI team to third parties and to end-users was key to getting everyone up to speed quickly. Putting this at the heart of the project from team stand-ups to end-user training will keep everyone to their objectives and avoid surprises.
Sharon and Robyn emphasised that it is important to remember high performance is inclusive and to deliver on that objective you have to make sure decisions are team-based. High pace can cause pressure, but this needs to not have a negative impact on inclusivity – making sure there are no micro-aggressions, interrupting, speaking on behalf of other people, etc. To deliver high performance have to have the whole team playing in.
3. Testing and quality control is key
Because MiQ put data integrity at the heart of this project, they knew they needed a rigorous testing programme to deliver that. When allocating project time, a large proportion was spent on cleansing the data in granular detail to check its accuracy. Trying to save time here will just cost you more time later.
It was also front of mind that things can go wrong at any point in the stack or data flow, so make sure rigorous testing is happening throughout.
4. Managing incidents
Have a process for discovering incidents, clearing up incidents and communicating incidents right from the start. At MiQ they have alarm bells set up for the things imagine might go wrong so they’re prepared when it happens. In fact, Sharon and Robyn said they quite enjoyed the process of creatively thinking of everything that could ever break! Just as in F1 they look at every part of the potential safety process from fire marshals to headsets – they consider everything that could potentially impact its performance.
Having transparent notifications throughout the pipeline means you can know what went wrong and where, and it means no blind troubleshooting. There are already clear resolution steps and checklists to follow prior to ever needing them. And if there are any incidents, make sure you also put steps in to have rigorous post-mortems and feed that back into the process.
MiQ now have a collaborative empowered global BI team, a data cube combining multiple disparate sources, a clear strategy for filling any data gaps, end-to-end data management and a steady roll out of the BI function that is driving change across the business. That Sharon and Robyn delivered all this at pace without ever leaving behind the high standards they set themselves is an incredible achievement.
Insights
28/06/2022
Read Time: Min
How to set up a global BI team at pace
We're delighted to announce the successful sale of award-winning Chartered Insurance Broker, Clear Group, today to the Private Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management following a four-year partnership, subject to regulatory approval.
Clear Group is a broker focused on offering peace of mind to its clients and is driven by its values of putting customers in the hands of an expert they can rely on, someone they can build a relationship with, who cares and will do the right thing.
This culture has helped Clear Group to double in size consistently every 3 years, with an Excellent rating on Trustpilot, and its distinctive values have also helped to differentiate the business. Since our investment in 2018 the business has completed 10 acquisitions, and the business will look to continue to scale and add additional specialist solutions for its customers.
During our partnership, Clear Group has increased its headcount by 175%, now employing over 600 people across 15 locations. It has also trebled its premiums, today handling over £330m. This growth demonstrates the quality of the Clear Group platform and people.
Macquarie Capital served as financial adviser, and Squire Patton Boggs served as legal counsel to Clear Group and ECI Partners.
News
27/06/2022
Read Time: 2 Min
ECI announces sale of insurance broker Clear Group
We're delighted to announce our investment in BCN Group, one of the largest and fastest-growing independent Managed Service Providers in the north of England. The investment represents a full realisation for Beech Tree Private Equity which invested in BCN Group in 2018.
BCN Group is a Microsoft Direct Tier 1 CSP and Gold Partner with bases in Manchester, Leeds, Runcorn and Bradford. It supports over 1,000 clients to deliver and manage business-critical technology solutions to over 30,000 users, with a customer retention rate of 98% and an industry-leading client satisfaction score of 89%.
BCN Group has completed five strategic acquisitions since 2018, significantly expanding its capabilities and customer reach, and our investment will provide capital to continue this buy-and-build strategy going forwards.
News
20/06/2022
Read Time: Min
ECI invests in managed IT, cloud and digital transformation specialist, BCN Group
Tom Wrenn and Michael Butler have featured in Real Deals' 2022 list of Future 40 Dealmakers, highlighting the dealmakers who were able to navigate and deliver outstanding value, strong exits and record returns in 2021.
Here is what Real Deals said about Tom and Michael's investment strategies and stellar results from the last 12 months:
Tom Wrenn
"Joining the list for a second year running, ECI’s Tom Wrenn makes this years’ list for leading the firm’s investment in Content+Cloud. Having first backed the business in 2016, Wrenn worked with management to strategically reposition the business as a Microsoft Partner for three cloud environments, targeting the enterprise, mid-market and public sectors. Tom was instrumental in leading the business’ aggressive M&A strategy, making six add-on acquisitions following a process whereby the team identified over 600 potential opportunities. Wrenn supported the CEO and chair in making a number of senior hires, and ensured that the management team had full access to the variety of ECI’s teams to support their growth throughout the holding period. The trade sale to Nordic IT services provider, Advania, in December 2021, generated an impressive return of 4.1x and an IRR of 32.1% for its investors."
Michael Butler
"Michael Butler led ECI Partners’ initial investment in professional services firm KB Associates. During the fund’s two-and-a-half-year holding period, Butler worked closely with the CEO to introduce a chair and CFO, alongside recruiting a sales and marketing and tech team. These hires, in turn, led to an improved ERP system, as well as improved systems and data reporting across the business. A milestone in KB’s growth was its organic entry strategy in Malta, whereby the business opened a MiFID investment firm in the jurisdiction. This contributed to the sixfold increase of the business’ AuM. The partner also built upon its employee engagement improvement programme, that allowed for improvements in staff recruitment and retention. Butler was instrumental in the exit process negotiations, which led to the trade sale to Waystone Group in January 2021 for 3.7x."
News
16/06/2022
Read Time: Min
Tom Wrenn and Michael Butler feature in Real Deals’ Future 40 Mid-Market Investment Leaders
Adam Hildreth, CEO of risk intelligence company Crisp and winner at the 2021 GP Bullhound Northern Tech Awards, joins us for our latest Building Successful Businesses episode. We discuss how he got his start in Young Enterprise before founding Crisp at only 20, why he thinks inexperience creates great entrepreneurship opportunities, how the likes of Twitter will monitor and manage risk in the future, and the relevance of whack-a-mole.
Listen to Episode 5:
Available on Apple Podcasts:
Transcript:
Fiona: Welcome to ECI's podcast, "Building Successful Businesses," where we speak to CEOs about the building blocks of their success and the lessons they've learned on the way. I'm Fiona Moore, and today, I'm delighted to welcome Adam Hildreth, CEO of Crisp, the real-time risk intelligence company and recent winners at the Northern Tech Awards for international success. Adam, welcome.
Adam: Thank you very much. It's lovely to speak with you this morning.
Fiona: Adam, Crisp seems to have gone on a really interesting journey since you began it 17 years ago, initially designed to help identify child exploitation online to now helping a whole range of people and companies identify threats. If we go back to the start of that journey, why did you set up Crisp all that time ago?
Adam: So, the original foundations for Crisp were built on the fact that I'd set up a social network back in 1999, 2000, a social network called Dubit before we had the term social network. Well, that came a bit later on. We were basically one of the first businesses in the world to introduce user-generated content, allowing people and, in particular, vulnerable people i.e. children and teenagers, to communicate online.
And what we found in that business was because it was end-users that were generating content, they were essentially in charge of what we were publishing as a business. It became very hard, very quickly, to manage what was being said in protecting those users. So, that led me to found Crisp in 2005, so that we could create technology that would understand the risks that were posed at that time to individuals, by what we refer to now as digital chatter. And we had to do that using very sophisticated AI.
So, the premise of the business was ultimately, how could we do this at scale without using thousands of people looking at chat logs and user-generated content histories and trying to work out who the bad actors were. So, 2005 for Crisp was about how do we create technology that can understand what people are talking about and understand whether it posed a risk to individuals.
Fiona: So, it sounds like from the first moment that essentially the first social network was created, you immediately realised there's danger here.
Adam: Yeah, because when social networks were created, and as I said, even back in 2000 we didn't have the term social network, everything changed from being a publish and push content to people, where they're in control of the narrative and the content that they push out to people with quite strict regulations, to now where we're in the realm of the end-user and they're creating the content and they can do ultimately what they want. And the vast majority of people are going to use that for positive purposes. Unfortunately, it only takes a very small percentage and a tiny percentage of people to ruin that.
When we started that was about threats, exploitation, and abuse that was targeting a generation that was extremely vulnerable. The only way to deal with that was to develop extremely sophisticated technology to understand it.
Fiona: And the services you now offer, as you mentioned, are quite vast. What was the driver behind the company broadening its risk assessment capabilities and how easy was that transition? You mentioned AI technology, was that there from the beginning, or is that something that's evolved over time?
Adam: AI is a really interesting word because everyone uses it. You can't be in business now, it doesn't matter what business you're in, without using the term AI. But for us, that's always been at the heart of what we do, which is how do we use machines and ultimately technology to understand what people are talking about and whether that poses a risk. Now at the start, that was very focused on how do we create incredibly reliable and accurate technology that understands when a child is at risk.
If you can do that, it's one of the hardest things because if you think about the space we're in, it's akin to the cybersecurity world. Every time you stop a threat actor or a bad actor from doing something, they work out another way of doing it in a different way. It's exactly the same in this space where as soon as you start to block accounts that pose risks to people, they change their language, they change their techniques, they change their MO.
So, our technology from the start was focused on one of the hardest areas to spot, child grooming. It's illegal, but the people that do it are extremely, from their perspective, focussed on how they are going to get around the systems that are there. So, once we've developed a technology that understands the really hard-to-spot problems, that then naturally moved on to all the other areas. So realistically, the internet, the social world, social media has evolved from being used by a niche set of players, so kids, early adopters, to going into a position whereby everyone's on it. So, it was a really natural progression for us to understand.
Fiona: And where do you see the future going? We have so many active users now. Everyone effectively is, like you say, an active user and with so much user-generated content, when you see the likes of Elon Musk talking about buying Twitter and the fact that actually, it should be freer, do you think companies have a responsibility to do this themselves in terms of monitoring risks, or do you think it's going to be third parties like yourselves who end up being the people who look at those risks online?
Adam: Let's take the two questions independently. The first one is, it's a really tough space. The internet isn't in a single location, so in terms of what's legal, what's illegal, that depends where you are in the world. So, that's number one, and actually we're getting better as a world at defining illegal content, things that shouldn't happen. Where it gets harder is an individual's definition of what's harmful, which is, it's not illegal, it might be illegal in certain places in the world, but it's not illegal ultimately in certain countries, but it is harmful, and the vast majority of people don't want to witness it, they don't want to consume it.
We then need to then work out who's responsible for understanding what end-users consume and what they don't. Again, akin to the cybersecurity world, we don't develop our own antivirus technology. We all buy it. So, the big social media platforms and enterprises and brands that are on social media, they are there to do good, but ultimately, they need to buy in the expertise, the services, the technology from third parties, just like you would, to protect yourself from cybersecurity threats.
And that's where we fit in terms of Crisp in terms of the services and the products and the solutions that we offer.
Fiona: And you mentioned the phrase digital chatter earlier. So obviously, it goes beyond just kind of social media. Do you think companies understand the extent of digital chatter? And do you think they understand the risks associated with it generally?
Adam: They do now, or they are at least starting to do. So, there's different levels of this. What's really happened is that there are no new risks that have been introduced by this new online world or this new social environment. They're not new, it's just changed the impact of them and the speed at which they spread. So generally speaking, when we refer to digital chatter, it is anything that's happening online that people are talking about, posting about, commenting on that will give you the earliest warning that for a business, you have a problem.
And, unfortunately, now where you used to have media monitoring services that said, ‘this newspaper's published this’, and you had probably time to work out whether you were going to respond to it, what you were going to do about it, you probably even knew before it was even going to be published that it was there. Right now, at 3:00 a.m. Saturday morning, something can absolutely destroy your brand reputation or pose a threat to one of your executives, and it can spread like wildfire.
So, it's just changed the impact of the risks. There aren’t really new risks. When we talk about mis- and disinformation, which is, you know, a big narrative used in the media nowadays, that's always existed. Nowadays, though, you've got a platform that can reach a third of the planet in almost real-time with that. And if it does start to spread, the impact is significant. For businesses and enterprises that are concerned about risks to their business, digital chatter actually becomes the biggest signal they can use to respond as fast as possible because when any risk hits a business, we all know that speed is everything.
And that's what we focus on at Crisp, which is we accurately identify what the risks are, but also we get there faster than anyone else. That's our two goals as a business, understanding whether something does pose a risk and then making sure the right people know about it as fast as possible.
Fiona: When I was looking through your website, there were some really interesting case studies around what the chatter looks like and what the risks might be, whether that’s online trolling and when it becomes abuse, then there was one, where disparaging commentary about a company's founder close to a quarterly earnings release was actually an attack designed to shock the stock of the company. Are there any projects you've worked on that really highlight for you the importance of having that digital chatter as part of your crisis management?
Adam: So certainly, for enterprises that we work with, digital chatter is the number one signal that they need to use to understand whether something's going to be a risk. What you also find is if digital chatter doesn't exist around a particular risk area and a problem, it probably isn't a problem. Ultimately, the biggest areas we see is yes, we deal with big reputational issues where brands are being massively affected, but ultimately it comes down to their individuals and their people.
In terms of where we feel we deliver the best value, not necessarily monetary value, but value in terms of what we're giving back to the world, it is protecting people. And ultimately, that comes back to protecting brands and protecting the enterprise.
Fiona: If we go back to the beginning of your journey, it seems phenomenal to me, and correct me if my math is wrong, that you founded Crisp when you were only 20 and you mentioned Dubit there, so it wasn't even actually the first company that you founded. Were you just a born entrepreneur?
Adam: I guess that's what people would say. From my perspective, I just see problems or opportunities and want to go out and solve them. I guess that is the definition of an entrepreneur, but I don't think you set out to be one. You are what other people think, aren't you? Yeah, we did see an opportunity. I had an opportunity at school with Young Enterprise because school wasn't a natural fit for me, so Young Enterprise allowed us to found a business. We weren't going to do something small. We wanted to do something big.
Ultimately, we wanted set up a bank for teenagers, which is a ridiculous idea. That led on to saying, how can we let teenagers buy online? That led on to us saying, actually, we need to prove there is a market, so let's get loads of teenagers online to form a community, that led to essentially a social network. That then led on to us understanding this, wow, social networks have loads of problems that we need to go and solve and that became my focus, which is if the world is going to go social, how do we protect it?
Fiona: When we speak to business leaders on this podcast, they often talk about, I guess the lessons they've learned on the way from often joining the bottom of a company and kind of working their way up. Obviously, you didn't really have that, having started at such a young age. How did you find running a company at 20?
Adam: It's hard. Everyone has to go through that learning curve and every day you learn something new and you get better. And you can't learn without making mistakes, but everyone has to go through that. The great thing about young people is they don't see boundaries. Unfortunately, the more that we learn, we put boundaries in our way and that stops us innovating.
So, you've got the best and the worst of two different worlds competing, which is when you don't know something, you presume you can just do it, which is amazing for innovation. As you learn and as you progress, which is what education is but you can be educated either by…in a formal way or just by learning by doing. And I'm a big fan of learning by doing, I think that's the best way everyone can learn.
But if you go down that path, ultimately, you still learn all the same lessons, and then you get to the point where…and this is not related to age, this is related to experience, but you get to the point where you set some boundaries, but that also then stops your innovation, which is why you want to go back to being a 15-year-old that thinks you can set up a bank because why can't you set up a bank at 15?
Fiona: So how do you keep yourself innovative, now?
Adam: So, in terms of Crisp and the culture that we have, we absolutely celebrate success, but we're always looking at what we can do better and what isn't working. Why is this not as good as it can be? So, that is ingrained in our culture. Even if everything seems to be working, you can still do things better. There is always someone behind you that wants to catch you. That's what drives innovation, which is not thinking you're the best in the world, but thinking that you're not doing as well as you can do.
Fiona: You mentioned that you'd learned some harder lessons on the way as well. So, what was the hardest lesson you think you've learned during the Crisp journey?
Adam: The hardest lesson I've personally learned, and I still haven't understood how to learn from it or how to best do it, is that not everyone thinks in the same way you do. Assuming that everyone gets your idea and assuming that everyone gets your plan is the biggest mistake everyone makes. They don't, because there's a load of stuff in your head that you've been thinking about, and if you've thought about something for weeks and weeks and weeks, and you brief people for an hour or two hours, how on earth are you going to get all of that thinking out in that period of time? So, the biggest lesson for me is how do I communicate effectively what we need to do without spending weeks doing it?
Fiona: Yeah, there's millions of strategies that are great, but never get off the ground because they don't get communicated effectively. So, you won the GP Bullhound Northern Tech Awards, which ECI also is a sponsor for, for international success. So, talk to me a little bit about that journey in terms of what was the international growth story for Crisp?
Adam: So, we're an interesting business in that international growth for us is our business. Our research and development is all in the U.K., but we don't really sell to U.K. businesses. We've always targeted the businesses that are going to benefit the most from Crisp, and at the moment, that has tended to be North America and global enterprises.
So, we go where the customers are and I think in terms of lesson learned or anyone that's looking at how do you get international growth, that's always been a part of what we've done. Here's a big problem, here's a solution, who are the biggest people that are going to benefit from the solution because they're the ones with a sizable problem that makes sense. And our philosophy was target the companies that need our solution and get on a plane to go and see them.
Fiona: So, what's next in Crisp's growth journey. Is it just getting on the plane and convincing more customers they need you?
Adam: The world has finally caught up, right? Everyone now understands that if it's not happening online, it's probably not happening. But also, if it is happening online, it might not be in the sense of mis- and disinformation. So, we are all about understanding digital chatter, understanding the signals, understanding whether they pose a risk to the enterprise, to their brand reputation, to the people that they employ, or their community, as in their end-users that they are trying to create an online space for.
So, the space for us is we are continually fighting against the bad actors out there that are trying to use an amazing tool, probably one of the best things that's ever been invented, which is the social world, for bad. And every time we create new technologies and new solutions to stop them doing it or alerting people faster, the people that are out there, those bad actors, those threat actors, are creating a mechanism to get around those things. So that's our job, to constantly stay ahead of the game and it's whack-a-mole.
Fiona: Yeah, and it’s not going to get easier; there will always be new threats. So, the last question from me, what advice would you give to business owners at the start of the journey?
Adam: The biggest thing I would say to anyone that has an idea, has a business or is selling to people, is really look at it from every angle. Don't just believe because you think it's a problem and you've got a solution, that everyone else is going to think the same way. Scrutinise it to the nth degree, and even when you think you're successful, scrutinise it again.
So, a lot of entrepreneurs are very confident in their ideas. Of course, they are, but they also need the opposite side, which is why is this not going to work? And it's one of the best questions I think you can ask anyone. I get it because you're telling me all the reasons why it's amazing, why everyone's going to buy it, but why are they not going to buy it? Because ultimately, that's how we all operate in life. You've got things that you want and things that you need. Are you really something that someone needs? And if not, why not? Is it really a problem?
If it is a problem and you've got a solution, it becomes really easy. But there's a lot of belief out there that they're solving problems that aren't problems for the people.
Fiona: Adam, thanks so much for joining me today. It's great to hear how Crisp has grown over the last 18 years. It's made me feel like I could have probably spent my 20s better hearing how you started at such a young age. But it's clear the way we interact continues to evolve and understanding chatter will be key to navigating that risk. So, I look forward to seeing Crisp win many more awards in the future. Thank you.
Adam: Thanks very much. Lovely chatting with you.
Podcast
14/06/2022
Fiona Moore
Read Time: 13 Min
ECI podcast ‘Building Successful Businesses’ with Adam Hildreth, CEO, Crisp
Joanna Swash, Group CEO of Moneypenny, joins The Nowhere Office's podcast in a special US-focused episode on how US leaders are looking at work and the workplace in a post-pandemic world.
The Nowhere Office podcast looks at the future of work and hybrid working, bringing the latest thinking, ideas and workarounds to listeners whether they're leaders looking for insight, freelance ‘solopreneurs’, or someone still clocking in regularly in an office.
The series is hosted by author Julia Hobsbawm and journalist Stefan Stern, and in this episode Joanna is joined by five other business leaders sharing their views on how Covid continues to impact the way offices run, and how employees are signaling changes in how they want to work:
- Anoushka Healy, Chief Strategy Officer, News Corporation
- Patti Clarke, Global Chief Talent Officer, Havas Group
- Rob Burger, Executive Director, Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox
- Candace Carroll, Chief Financial Officer, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
- Jeremy Sirota, CEO, Merlin.
Listen to Episode 1: View from the C-Suite
Podcast
08/06/2022
Read Time: Min
How is hybrid working viewed by US leaders?
The Clear Group has acquired Centor Insurance & Risk Management, an award-winning insurance and risk management broker in the City of London.
Centor is Clear’s second-largest acquisition to date and the 33rd broker that Clear has acquired since it was established in 2001. The Group now handles over £300m in premiums and employs over 550 people across 13 locations.
Commercial insurance focused Centor was founded by CEO Neil Walton in 2004. Since then, the business has grown significantly by providing its clients with a range of business and personal insurance solutions. Centor now handles GWP in excess of £40m with revenue exceeding £6m per annum. The business also has a strong reputation in the London market which will complement Clear’s current portfolio.
Neil Walton and his team of over 50 experienced professionals will now work closely with the team at Clear to maximise opportunities to grow the business.