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Journalists need fast insight, analysis and opinion that is accessible and easy to understand. Simple, right? Wrong.
Simple, accessible copy is something that lots of businesses, especially in financial services, struggle with. And itâs not surprising why. Jargon is a constant in financial services and acronyms reign supreme. Take pensions, for example. We have DB, DC, CDC, the PPF, the PLSA, TPR, DWP, LGPS, LDI, PPI. And those are just my favourites.
Letâs look at investment management. Weâve got OEICs, ETFs, TERs, OCFs, AMCs, IRRs, AFMs, CIS, NAV, UCITS, MIFID, alpha, beta and gamma, capital gain, capital growth, capital loss, capital return, total return and thatâs before someone asks you to explain active versus passive, open versus closed ended, hedging, gearing, liquidity or how derivatives or convertible bonds work.
We could look to science. A 2020 study suggested science was becoming less readable. The authors found that use of acronyms in the titles of scientific papers increased from 0.7 words per 100 in 1950 to 2.4 words per 100 in 2019. Their recommendation for tackling this was for journals to only permit the use of certain established acronyms. Generally, they hoped use of acronyms would decrease, but without much optimism.
They found the tendency to complicate is becoming more, rather than less entrenched, and suggested that the eventual development of a technology solution to screen out acronyms and address complexity might be our only hope for saviour. But when it comes to financial services, in a competitive media landscape where lots of experts are fighting for physical and virtual column inches, we canât afford to wait.
To stand out from the crowd, it is vital to realise that genuinely interesting and insightful commentary is simple at its core. Letâs take an example. Letâs say your business provides consulting services to help financial services clients adapt to industry change. A new regulation comes in and you see demand for your expertise, which you can increase as more people see you talking about that change in the media.
Complex topics donât require complex commentary. All you need to do is answer these three questions:
· What has changed?
· What should firms do now?
· And what happens if they fail to act or get it wrong?
You risk missing out on engaging potential clients, disengaging current ones and failing to meaningfully raise your profile. And journalists really donât like it. Here is a great example from Ruth Sunderland, group business editor for the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, who heard a CEO say EBITDA â which stands for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation â on BBC Radio 4âs Today programme:
Ruth swiftly called out the companyâs PRs for it because, as she rightly observed, most listeners wonât know what EBITDA means.
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If you donât know your EBITDA from your bad PR, get in touch.