Corporate communications continues to play a vital role in organisations of every size because the ability to create shared understanding has become one of the few true competitive advantages left.
In an environment defined by rapid change, information overload, and rising expectations for transparency, communication is no longer a support function.
Instead, it has become the glue that holds strategy, culture, and reputation together. Even the smallest organizations now operate in a world where stakeholders expect clarity, consistency, and values‑driven behaviour, and where silence or ambiguity can quickly erode trust.
The argument that communications is becoming less relevant because “everyone can publish” misunderstands what the function actually does.
The challenge today is not producing more messages; it is making meaning out of complexity. Employees need to understand why their organisation is changing and how their work connects to a larger purpose. Customers want to know what a company stands for, not just what it sells. Investors look for coherent narratives that explain long‑term direction.
Communications is the discipline that translates strategy into language people can believe in, and that translation is essential whether a company has 20 employees or 200,000.
AI is not going to change these needs. If anything, the rise of AI and digital tools has only reinforced this demand.
Technology can accelerate production, but it cannot replace the judgment required to decide what should be said, when, and why. It cannot navigate the nuances of reputation, values, or human emotion. As organisations face more scrutiny and more channels than ever before, the ability to craft credible, empathetic, and consistent communication becomes a form of organisational resilience.
Ultimately, corporate communications endures because organisations depend on people, and people depend on understanding. As long as leaders need to align teams, earn trust, and move groups of humans toward a shared goal, communication will remain a strategic force at the centre of how organisations succeed.
Ocean rowing has always occupied that curious space between heroic endeavour and complete madness. For years it was the preserve of a few hardy souls who thought nothing of spending weeks in a tiny boat, eating freeze‑dried food and talking to themselves somewhere between the Canary Islands and Antigua. Admirable, yes. Mainstream? Not quite.
But something has shifted. The sport is no longer a remote curiosity followed by a handful of enthusiasts refreshing race trackers at odd hours. Thanks to Starlink, ocean rowing has become a spectator event, one that people can actually follow, understand and, increasingly, aspire to.
Guy Dresser mid-Atlantic in 2019
The change is simple but profound: connectivity. Until recently, rowers vanished the moment they left the harbour.
Updates were sporadic, satellite phones unreliable, and footage almost non‑existent.
Now, with Starlink bolted to the stern, crews livestream squalls, post videos of dolphins pacing the bow, and send daily dispatches from the middle of nowhere.
The Atlantic, once a vast communications void, has become strangely chatty.
This has done wonders for the visibility of the World’s Toughest Row. Races that used to unfold in near‑silence now generate real‑time drama. Followers can watch crews battle headwinds, celebrate milestones, or attempt to fix an oarlock at 3am.
Sponsors, once wary of investing in something that disappeared for six weeks, suddenly see value in a sport that can deliver content every day. And for the rowers themselves, the psychological lift of being able to speak to family, or simply know they’re not shouting into the void is no small thing.
Of course, purists grumble that constant connectivity dilutes the essence of the challenge. But the race itself remains unchanged: the ocean is still enormous, the boats still tiny, and the rowing still brutally hard. What’s different is that the rest of the world can finally witness what we see as rowers.
Starlink hasn’t made ocean rowing easier; it has made it visible. And in doing so, it has nudged a once‑obscure pursuit into the edges of the mainstream, where it may yet find the wider audience it deserves.
First, a full confession: I used to write about tech startups in the dotcom boom. I met hundreds of internet entrepreneurs, financiers, self-styled tech wizards and gurus. Some were brilliant and deserved their eventual success, while others I thought were ‘fake it till you make it’ pretenders still managed to extract funding from desperate venture capitalists before their businesses went belly up.
I know better than most what goes wrong when journalists are trying to write in boom times. As in all gold rushes, media coverage can veer from the excited to the positively breathless. I’ve seen reporters get carried away. And, after the bubble bursts (which they all do), everything changes, the media sharpens its claws, and everyone associated with the boom gets a kicking, all of them tarred with the same brush, whether they deserve it or not.
So far, so dotcom boom.
Back in the UK in 2000 after the ‘correction’ in tech company valuations, things soured to the point that Lastminute.com’s founders Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman, who I interviewed several times, briefly became totemic figures for public and investor disillusionment with the tech sector.
Once, mid-way through an interview some time after the oversubscribed Lastminute IPO and the subsequent crash in tech stocks, a weary Hoberman told me he wouldn’t have minded so much if journalists just slagged off the company. Much of the media animus directed at him and Lane Fox, however, was so personal that it was as if reporters thought there was something wrong with them as individuals.
Unquestioning coverage helps no one, fair coverage does
How things changed over the following years. Media coverage of tech startups resumed its previous unquestioning stance. In the US this trend was particularly notable. Partly driven by their owners’ demands for page views and that other all-important commercial driver, ‘reader engagement’, journalists outdid each other in their glowing coverage of the people and companies coming out of Silicon Valley.
Elizabeth Holmes rode this wave like a pro. In 2003 the then 19-year-old founded the company that would become Theranos, eventually raising more than $700 million from investors and commanding a heady $9 billion valuation within a decade. It took till 2015 before the Wall Street Journal (behind paywall) published the first damaging revelations about Theranos’s technology, leading to legal challenges on all fronts and the company’s eventual collapse.
With Holmes’s conviction yesterday on four charges of fraud, including conspiracy to defraud investors, the question has to be asked: why did it take so long to uncover what the US Securities and Exchange Commission described as a “years-long fraud”?
Puffing up Elizabeth Holmes
The media has a lot to answer for. It puffed up Elizabeth Holmes. Hailed her as a guru. Lapped her up and promoted her as the great fresh face of tech entrepreneurs. She became one of the most idolised, most revered female entrepreneurs in the tech industry.
Her image graced the covers of business magazines and fashion titles alike. Even her dress sense, which aped Steve Jobs and his signature black turtleneck jumpers, was somehow seen as a sign of excellence.
Now, post Theranos, journalists seem to be belatedly regaining their credentials as people who realise they have to hold companies and their leaders to account. Critics will say this is no more than ‘doing a reverse ferret’, journalese to describe an abrupt reversal in an organisation’s editorial or political line on a particular issue
The media does now seem to acknowledge that the tech industry is not a just a world populated by aspirational and well-meaning geeks who run startups from the spare bedroom of their parents’ houses. But it’s a very late-in-the-day realisation that some of these people do wield real world power, whether it’s through commercializing our personal data, facilitating those who undermine elections, or what some might paraphrase as ‘doing stupid stuff’.
Many of the journalists who wrote flattering articles about Holmes back in the day clearly regret it now, even if they don’t say so. Fortune Magazine, to cite just one culprit, wrote this generous profile back in 2014 and published this creditable and lengthy mea culpa a year later. Wired did this one – but try finding their mea culpa or those of others.
So why did the media swallow Holmes’s hype? I’d argue subsconscious bias may have been at work.
Did male journalists just get carried away with this female CEO?
The male/female dynamic is far too simplistic an explanation.
Holmes certainly looked the part. She dressed the part. She talked the talk. She had big name investors. She amassed a star-studded board of directors. She did also tick a lot of the boxes for the many male, often middle-aged business journalists out there looking for a ‘good story’: Blonde. Female. Charismatic. Dropped out of a prestigious university to launch her business. Dressed like Jobs. Had a deep voice (honestly, even that’s been questioned). Made journalists feel special by maintaining extraordinary eye contact (seriously, there are even articles about how she likely taught herself to do this). Oh, and the technology her business did sounded sort of cool and game-changing.
But the reality is that at one time all journalists, whatever their gender, were gushing about her.
Some argue that Holmes’s ought not to be the only conviction here. The media is also guilty – of monstrous hype. Of misleading its audiences. Perhaps even of overlooking a fraud through its failure to probe sufficiently and ask hard questions.
Will it learn any lessons? Could the media make the same mistake again? We could be charitable and hope some lessons can be learned from the Theranos saga. Maybe, then, the next time a big investor wave comes along the media won’t just sweep us along in their excitement. We can but hope. But there are few signs to be all that confident.
One of the features of the Swiss media market that first strikes foreigners is the apparently robust health of its print media. Newsagents seem packed with titles and relatively high levels of newspaper and magazine readership sit at odds with the experience in other major European countries.
The pandemic has emphasized the rate of change, hitting both print circulation and advertising as lockdowns cut the numbers of people buying papers on the journey to and from work.
Newspaper industry revenues are expected to fall from CHF 968 million in 2020 to CHF 842 million by 2025, a drop of -2.3% annually.
While major media owners are moving over to new platforms this is not without difficulty. Publishers are running into the age-old problem that users think digital equates to free content. Finding new ways of monetising digital audiences will be key if publishers are to survive.
Competing with TikTok and Snapchat
Media companies are shifting to digital models, producing more audio and video content, but even so they will have their work cut out to compete for revenue and reader attention from established rivals such as Google and Facebook to emerging forces like TikTok and Snapchat.
There have been some successes: The free German-language tabloid Blick launched in francophone Switzerland in June. Its owner, Ringier, has also launched an online TV channel. Meanwhile, the biggest online news site in French – http://www.20min.ch/fr – increased audiences across its various channels (print newspaper, app and website) in 2020 to reach nearly 3.0mn readers each day.
That’s pretty impressive when you consider the country has a population of just 8.7 million, though it reflects traditionally high level of news readership and the fact that trust in traditional news sources here remains high at 44%.
Online advertising is the place to be, however. Switzerland’s Internet advertising market is already the sixth biggest in Western Europe, with total revenue of CHF 3.2bn in 2020. This is expected to increase at a combined annual growth rate of 6.5% to reach CHF 4.4bn by 2025, making Switzerland the third-fastest growing market in the region.
The impact of 5G
While online advertising continues to grow, PwC sees a surge in mobile ad revenue following the increasing take-up of 5G between now and 2025.
Switzerland is something of a trailblazer for 5G in Europe. It is now available to most of the population through two major providers, Swisscom and Sunrise. Revenue from mobile ads overtook that of wired for the first time in 2019, when it accounted for 54.1% of total revenue. By 2025 mobile will make up 64.4% of total Internet advertising revenue in Switzerland.
It adds up to a huge challenge for traditional media companies, who must adapt their business models quickly, or die. Those packed news stands in Switzerland may soon become a thing of the past.
I set up a communications agency earlier this year. During a conversation last week with a prospective client about reputation management, I was asked how I would dig HRH The Duke of York out of his current predicament.
Prince Andrew is currently in limbo. In PR terms, he remains a Royal PR sore, ridiculed by the news media, pilloried on social media and still living (indirectly at least) on the public purse with no one willing to offer him work.
The toughest of tough PR gigs
For a PR practitioner, Prince Andrew would be the toughest of tough gigs. His ‘brand’ is toxic thanks to his friendship with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. His ill-advised attempt to explain it away in an interview with respected BBC journalist Emily Maitlis was a catastrophe. And now he faces a civil lawsuit from an American woman, Virginia Giuffre, who alleges that he sexually assaulted her.
The court of public opinion has already made up its mind about Andrew – guilty of poor judgement to some, he is guilty of far worse to others.
Lawyers say there is no good legal way forward. If Andrew fights the lawsuit he will look unsympathetic. If he ignores it, he will cause collateral damage to the rest of his family and possibly even to the institution of the monarchy. Even if he settles with no admission of anything, some will still see it as an admission of something.
Start with an apology
Nothing can happen without a full and unreserved apology. And not the mealy-mouthed type he made when he announced he was stepping back from public life ‘for the foreseeable future’. Andrew has to acknowledge his own serious failings in associating with Epstein and has to admit he fell seriously short in terms of both his own judgement and the public’s expectations of a senior royal figure.
He then has to resolve his legal woes. Ms Giuffre was a vulnerable 17 year old – and thus a minor in the eyes of the US legal system – when they were photographed together at Ghislaine Maxwell’s London mews house in 2001. Andrew could apologise for the distress his association with Ms Giuffre caused her without admitting to any sexual activity. However, this will depend on a legal settlement and a generous financial offer to her. Only then would the damaging drip-feeding of allegations in the media stop and enable both sides to draw a line somewhere.
Legal settlement is essential
In the wake of a near total mea culpa and a legal settlement, something like internal exile and some form of charitable work is possible for Andrew. No public events, no waving from the balcony at Buckingham Palace, no media appearances, no more riding with the Queen, no more Air Miles, no golf. Some have suggested sending him to Africa as a charity worker but this would have bad optics. Andrew would be the very worst kind of ‘white saviour‘. He needs to find an appropriate charity in the UK and devote his life to it.
The only public figure whose example sets anything like a precedent would be the disgraced politician John Profumo. The then Secretary of State for War was forced to resign in 1963 after it emerged that he had lied to Parliament about a sexual affair with Christine Keeler, a model who was also in a relationship with the naval attache at the Soviet Embassy. Profumo later went to work for a charity in the East End of London and maintained an absolute public silence on the matters that led to his resignation. This redeemed Profumo to some and the media more or less left him alone to his good works for the rest of his life.
What is the best he can hope for?
Nothing Prince Andrew has said or done suggests he fully understands his current predicament. His former PR advisor resigned after the Prince rejected his advice not to go ahead with his ill-fated interview with the BBC. No one in their right mind will take Andrew on as a client until he accepts that he has transgressed and that he needs serious help. Once he does, he will have to work hard to cease being newsworthy. That is the best he can hope for.
guy dresser 