In conversation with WSJ's The Trust: the power of going beyond words

In this day and age, brands are under scrutiny to produce timely and engaging content, especially when everyone is fighting for a piece of the consumers’ attention. Beyond just jumping on trending social media platforms, brands need to really think about the type of content they produce and how it can fulfil consumers’ needs and wants.

In this episode of In Conversation With, Aisha Speirs, creative director and executive editor, APAC, The Trust, WSJ Barron’s Group, shares how her team helps brands figure out the best ways to engage their audiences, and the types of content that works for consumers.

The Trust is the intelligence-led creative consultancy for The Wall Street Journal Barron’s Group. Among its list of clients are Maserati, British Airways, Tech Mahindra, and Samsung.

Before joining The Trust, Speirs oversaw the editorial process for The New York Times’ T Brand Studio in Asia on programmes across the tech, business, luxury and place branding sectors. Originally from London, she served as Monocle’s bureau chief in New York and Hong Kong, working on newsroom and partner stories across magazines, books, films and Monocle 24 Radio.

Listen to the podcast here. This conversation is powered by The Trust, WSJ Barron’s Group.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: With so much content now being created, how do you help brands figure out the best way to engage their audience and stay true to their brand?

Speirs: The focus again is really working on the brand, on each individual brief, and need. No two content solutions are really the same; they’re never going to be the same. So our first challenge is to understand the problem that a brand wants to solve with the content. Are they trying to increase brand awareness? Are they trying to tap into a new market, communicate a recent piece of news, generate leads, and the likes?

Then, it’s about building a story, diving into the approaches, and finding formats that best do that in order to meet the specific KPIs set by the brand. Afterwhich, of course, it is building all of that using insights, both proprietary and external, to understand where to meet our readers’ interests.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: How do you know if your content resonates with your audience?How do you measure it, and how do you make sure the content is working for the audience?

Speirs: Performance and data is just so important to the work that we do. It increasingly informs everything we do from the ideation stage through to tweaking things in the middle of a live campaign. We track various KPIs such as scroll depth, and dwell time, to video completion rates, and the success of various drivers.

There are some things we can tweak mid campaign, and there are some things we can’t. However, the performance reporting, and rap reports we provide to the clients after, often form the backbone of renewal campaigns, because it’s essential for us and for the client to know what worked and also what didn’t work.

We’re really lucky at The Journal to be able to rely on really strong first-party data through data and insight to inform our stories and see how those stories are performing. That’s a mixture of behavioural data where we can see how readers are behaving on site, and it’s also declared data from our membership network.

For me, it’s often important to remember that The Journal was one of the first places to put up a paywall way before everyone else. I remember when it happened, and everyone was confused and up in arms.

But what it means is we really have this rich amount of data from a membership of loyal readers who we know very well. And so it means we can mix that data to get quite a lot of scale with regard to how we advise clients on strategy and where the story should go.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: We are all living in the world of attention deficit. What advice do you have for brands to ensure the investment they are making into creating content isn’t forgotten in our 24-hour news-cycle world?

Speirs: I think it’s really important for brands to get to the root of what they offer, where they add value, and what their purpose is. As you say, with a click of a button, we can find any information we want, and that means you can click off site, and we don’t want that.

So, for something new to stick in terms of content it needs to relate to us as readers or viewers, and open up some level of interest or empathy.

Personally, I find that the real story is often hidden in a brand, sometimes behind the marketing message and agency campaign that will initially get delivered. It’s often held in the stories of people who have worked at the place for a long time.

For example, we’re currently working with a well-known Japanese electronics company which is famous for its medical equipment. During the initial meeting with one of its teams, we learnt about what drew this particular employee into working with the company. He was so passionate about his role and about joining them. We weren’t necessarily meeting him to talk about his role, we were meeting him to learn more about the company and the upcoming campaign.

Through him, we really uncovered this long history of this particular company investing in equality in society. And the passion of this person we spoke to inspired then a totally different approach to the story.

Rather than simply sort of sticking to the innovative, and frankly, life-saving machinery that this company invents, we’re actually now getting sucked into a really genuine, quiet leadership that this company shows in empowering less supported communities in the workplace across the world.

When clients are open to working with us to uncover these sorts of stories, and in a sense, getting the true value out of working with an agency that is staffed by people with a sort of journalistic mindset, and with this sort of data behind us, it’s often where we find stories that go past that sort of news press release or current marketing message.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What kind of content do you see most in demand from clients, and what kind of content do you see that best resonates with audiences?

Speirs: We have such a diverse client base so it’s hard to really pinpoint one type of content, but many of our clients and many of our readers are faced with various questions around transformation and business every day, from sustainability to digitalisation, to the future of the workplace.

For us, finding stories that can break down the complexity in those areas, and then present solutions or thought leadership that enables decision making for our busy readers is the sweet spot.

That’s often very successfully done through experiences of real people and case studies, because I think it’s one thing to digest information that is theoretical, but if you actually hear the testimonial of someone who has gone through that, or have somebody lead you through like an expert, those are really useful things for people to understand, especially when they’re pressed for time.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE: What are some of your plans for the Asia arm of “The Trust” – what are you working on that’s going to be new in the world of content?

Speirs: I think a lot of Asian companies come to publishers such as The Journal to communicate stories outside of the region because it’s an international title. Whether it be about international business expansion or acquisitions, or offering international viewers and readers a deeper understanding of the opportunities to be found in the Asia Pacific region.

There is so much growth here in this part of the world as we know, and so many exciting opportunities. So there’s a lot to talk about in terms of innovation and potential here. And I think when companies speak directly from this region out to the rest of the world, they have this ability to get deeper into the stories that perhaps don’t come out always in other sorts of campaigns.