Recently, reading the annual report of Razorfish, the Digital Outlook Report, the CEO Bob Lord points out to a new direction that has to be taken when dealing with creativity and innovation in communication. He argues that agencies are not the only ones that have to change in order to serve their clients better. They too, the companies themselves, need to undergo a great deal of change. His argument is that today, CEOs are the only ones able to take strategic decisions that can make a big difference to corporations, due to the current complexity of the markets and competitive environment.

Without going through further details, I found that his speech matches perfectly with the fact that I advocate a lot that fairly soon, all companies will need to have a Chief Content Officer (CCO). A post, that is usually attributed to media and content companies, will need to change its function to a much wider, and much needed, change in vision of how creativity can transform companies. This post for me would oversee mostly communication, design, and innovation. Less as a boss, rather as a figure that create convergence and coherence for the companies and for the brands they manage.

It is more logical to expect a media company that manages from print to online to have such professionals on the payroll. However, it is a mistake in my view, to think that a simple manual of good conduct, or a brand book, will be followed by an army of product managers, brand strategists, product developers, marketing managers, and supply buyers (these are increasingly responsible to evaluate and buy creative products such as design, communication, etc). Big corporations are becoming too complex, and their employees do not have much time to think about what the neighbour is doing, let alone the chance to think about a possible joint work.

Do more with what you have

Brilliant CEOs can do that, but there are not many cases to illustrate a successful story. So the person on the post should be seen as an integrator, something given to a generalist, who can see how people can do more with what they have, and also pointing out when something might be taking a wrong direction. This vision doesn't diminish the ability these corporations should have to adapt to local markets, manage conflicting brands, or having multiple channels of communications.

Quite the opposite, it will make sense of all this stuff, while sticking to the DNA of the plans set for the future and the DNA of the company itself. It doesn’t matter if you are an oil company, a retailer, a cosmetics producer, a food distributor. If you reach a certain scale in your business, it is easy to be trapped by the daily challenges and forget the long term commitments we have to keep to build coherence around objectives that will be achieved not in one, but maybe in five, maybe in ten years.

In this scenario, any (really, any) company needs a CCO to be another right hand of the CEO. To take on an example, the digital “layer” today is in every department of a corporation. The digital world has put the whole structure of all companies under one address (or a few), and ironically, it is easy to get lost. I always repeat that your Internet domain is the only permanent address a corporation has today. It has brought together from promotion to distribution, from public relations to advertising, from customer service to corporate reports, and is a place that can help as much as it can damage a brand. More than that, it can create a lot of confusion. Scrutiny is at the highest level ever, and companies need to take responsibility for what they do. If they are public, things get even worse, with shareholders being able to supervise the operations closely and with them having sometimes-conflicting ideas about the company’s future.

A holistic guru inside the company

For instance, the IT department isn’t anymore just a technical one, it can make a big difference and can offer a great impact in all areas. I am often (badly) impressed to see huge enterprises that seem not to care much about their portals. And I do not mean being fancy and having a website done in Flash and winning the FWA (even though it can be always a good sign). I mean having a page on the web that solves the problems.

I recently had a problem with an airline, and they asked me (after 30 minutes on the phone) to do my complaint online, but I couldn’t find any direct email, and none of the topics they offered as options for the complaints matched mine. And the irony is that the department is named “talk to the CEO”. Nobody on earth really believes that a CEO will answer to customers directly all the time, and they shouldn’t. So it is the kind of fake goodwill that doesn’t take a company forward. Of course, the founder of this company is not there anymore. So the vision is gone.

Unfortunately, there is no easy answer if you get to this point. So a new role post should arise for any modern institution to be able to have a sort of holistic guru inside, especially when anything is related to communication. It would make a big difference.

The most efficient channel to disseminate information

A couple of years ago, Meta Design in Berlin, a leading branding and design consultancy in Europe, designed the identity for the south of the Tirol region in Austria. The idea was very simple. They needed to unify the region’s many “home made” identities that were being used throughout the cities, food producers, and others. So if visitors drive through the region, they could eventually find similar logos, signage, and orientation, making sure that they were really in the south of Tirol.

Moreover, their products could aggregate value by stating clearly where they were coming from (and one day I really found an apple in a supermarket in Cologne with a sticker – with the new identity – on it). Achiving that these days without Internet is close to impossible, since it is the most efficient channel to disseminate information. But more than that they needed to convince everyone affected by the new identity to adopt it and to produce everything new.

The number of templates that need to be generated is massive. Not to mention that two languages are officially spoken there. They had to figure out how to motivate people to change literally hundreds of thousands of touch-points and send the same massage. And this message had to be coherent externally as much as internally. An internet portal showing the usage and with extensive guidelines for production was built to help everyone involved. This sort of project arises usually when people realize the potential of having an integrated face. Not many regions in the world work with this degree of intelligence, or hire top professionals like Meta Design.

Building new brands has never been so complex and expensive

Companies spend fortunes to train their employees and still leave an abysm between themselves, and another between them and their customers. Their internal and external communication platforms remain inefficient after all. And those can mean a lot, and be decisive for the success of a company. It’s go from the navigation of the intranet to the tools for sharing available, from the elements used in advertising to how they communicate with suppliers, from how they incorporate public relations as a key strategic division to how they present prototypes in internal meetings. It is very broad indeed. If a company doesn’t reinvent itself these days, it runs the risk of not only not attracting new markets and consumers. It won’t probably attract new talents that will make them grow in the future.

Communication is at fast pace everywhere and building new brands has never been so complex and expensive. The old rules seem not to work anymore. If we take a couple of big brands created online in the last years like Twitter, Orkut (Google’s social networking site, famous in Brazil and India), and think that they were both side projects of their companies. They suddenly became a phenomenon and start to play an strategic role. Some time ago no one could predict that a new brand would appear like that.

I advocate that 2 to 5% of marketing budgets should be used for experimentation and to exercise the lateral thinking of the professionals of any company. Design and communication design can do a lot for those ventures. Of course, it is not that alone. If companies do it, they might end up discovering amazing new ways to reinvent their business. Recently, Herman Miller, a furniture company, launched a project called Convia, which is a way to rewire an office without the help of electricians and also save up to 30% energy. The project started years ago as they foresaw that the market for furniture was becoming increasingly competitive i.e. they could expand their product lines to the whole office.

Content: perceived information vs. produced information

Content for me has more to do with perceived information rather than just produced information. And this is where the CCO will act, to make sure that there is an alignment in the perception, working across all divisions and collecting precious feedback from internal and external parties. We will see if a post like that will appear on the career’s page in the next years. Because the clock for change keeps ticking!

Julius Wiedemann was born and raised in Brazil. After studying graphic design and marketing, he moved to Japan, where he worked in Tokyo as art editor for digital and design magazines. Since joining TASCHEN, he has been building up the digital and media collection with titles such as Animation Now!, the Advertising Now series, the Web Design series, and TASCHEN's 1000 Favorite Websites.