Thought Leadership Insights, Episode 8

Best practice in managing and establishing a successful thought leadership programme

In the eighth episode of FT Longitude’s Thought Leadership Insights podcast, Rob Coveney, Head of Brand and Internal Communications, DNV GL – Oil & Gas, talks about best practice in managing and establishing a successful thought leadership programme.

Rob shares his insights on how the company developed the DNV GL’s oil and gas industry outlook report, a barometer to assess sector priorities and sentiment. Now in its eight year, Rob discusses how DNV GL has ensured this initiative remains relevant and insightful for the market. We also explore how the outlook has advanced over the years, drawing on richer data and a widening portfolio of marketing channels to connect thought leadership with lead generation.

Topics covered

00:00 Introduction
01:01 About the role
02:46 DNV GL’s Oil and Gas Industry Outlook Programme
03:41 How the programme has evolved
06:55 Segmenting the audience and targeting the thought leadership
09:01 Targets and outcomes of the report
10:21 Measuring these outcomes
12:30 Internal advocacy for senior stakeholders
13:28 The role of social media in low-level advocacy
15:56 Long-term trends vs. short-term insights
18:40 Recommendations in campaign planning
20:47 The 2018 programme

Listen to our other podcasts:

Episode 7: Peter Richards on managing and establishing a successful thought leadership programme

Podcast Transcript

Fergal Byrne: You are listening to the FT Longitude Research podcast: Thought Leadership Insights, where senior figures from the firm together with leading marketing executives explore key trends, shaping the evolution of thought leadership and marketing. I’m your host, Fergal Byrne.

I’m very pleased today to introduce Rob Coveney to the podcast. Rob is Head of Brand and Internal Communications at the Oil and Gas division of DNV GL. Rob has managed DNV GL’s annual industry outlook, an oil and gas industry barometer, for almost eight years. In that time, this research has grown and evolved to adapt to a changing landscape in a volatile market.

In this interview, Rob shares his insights as to how DNV GL has ensured this flagship Thought Leadership initiative has remained relevant and insightful over this time. How the firm measures success and discusses the importance of internal advocacy.

So thank you very much, Rob, for taking the time today to speak to FT Longitude Thought Leadership Insights podcast.

Rob: Thanks ever so much for having me Fergal, I look forward to speaking with you.

Fergal: Yes, I’m very much looking forward to talking to you today about the great thought leadership programmes you’ve been doing at DNV GL, particularly the Annual Industry Outlook and various other research reports and surveys that you’ve been working on over the years. Maybe a good place to start, Rob, if you could tell me a little bit about your role at the company, and maybe also about the scope of the business.

Rob: Yeah, of course, so I’m Head of Brand and Internal Communications for the oil and gas business of DNV GL. We’re a risk management and quality assurance organisation, working as technical advisors to a number of different industries, including Oil and Gas, Power and Renewables, Maritime and Life Sciences as well. We’re an organisation of around 13,000 technical experts, based in over 100 countries and our head office is in Oslo, in Norway.

Fergal: So you’re Head of Brand and Internal Communications, Rob, what’s that entail exactly?

Rob: So from the brand side of things, Fergal, one of the key elements of my role is to develop DNV GL’s position as a provider of foresight and insight to the industries that we serve. That’s really key for us because we’re an organisation of technical experts, we sell our expert’s knowledge and expertise. And so to come across in the market as an authoritative commentator, not just on technical issues that support the efficiency, sustainability, safety of the oil and gas industry in particular. But also to be able to come across as an authoritative commentator on macroeconomic industry trends, where’s the Oil and Gas industry going in the years ahead? It’s very useful for our customers, and it helps to build the brand position that we’re looking to achieve.

Fergal: Right, now can you tell me a little bit about the Oil and Gas annual industry outlook?

Rob: Yeah, so our industry outlook programme has been running for just nearly eight years now. The purpose of the research programme is to survey, nowadays, just over 800 senior oil and gas professionals, across the industry, across the oil and gas value chain, we use this as one of our flagship communications and thought leadership programmes for each year. The industry outlook programme is pulled together into a report identifying key trends for the year ahead identifying key trends for the year ahead, but it also goes much wider, it forms the backbone and the context for much of the media relations work we do as an organisation, many of the events that we attend as an organisation. So it helps to provide context to the industry issues that we help our customers overcome, and it also helps to position us, as I’ve said before as a key commentator on what we expect and where we expect the industry to be going in the year ahead.

Fergal:Can you talk a little bit, Rob, about how it’s evolved over the past seven or eight years – that’s quite a while in the world of thought leadership and content marketing?

Rob: Yeah, of course. One of the things that have kept the industry outlook perennial over the past nearly eight years now is the flexibility of the programme, the fact that we have been able to use it to help shape senior oil and gas professionals thoughts about key trends for the year ahead, in an ever-changing market. And over the past seven years, the oil and gas industry really has changed rather radically, and we’ve been able to reflect that in the research.

We started the programme in 2011 with a key purpose in mind, and that was that we’d identified that we were very good as an organisation at technical thought leadership. So, for example, going to events, writing papers in journals that really look at the nuts and bolts of the industry, and how from a very technical and academic perspective we’re helping oil and gas companies across the value chain, to become safer, more sustainable, more efficient in their operations.

What we noticed was that we didn’t have a position as a commentator at the macroeconomic level. We weren’t talking alongside our clients about key trends across the oil and gas industry, that we were expecting to see, and we felt that we needed to pull the two elements of thought leadership together and this is why the Industry Outlook Programme was important for us, at the time.

We launched our first report in January 2011, and it was just some months after, I don’t know if you remember the Deep Water Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico, which had a large bearing, not only on the way that the industry was perceived, but also the way that the industry worked. We noticed that our clients and our customer’s patterns were going further up the hierarchy of command, I suppose. So more senior people among our clients were taking a greater interest in the services that they procure. Partially as a result of what we saw from that incident, and that meant that we needed to be able to position ourselves, talking about issues, alongside more senior clients, that we didn’t necessarily have to do before. So it was an ideal time for us to launch a research programme that really focused towards the c-suite.

It’s evolved quite dramatically since then, if I remember back to 2011 we surveyed 120 senior professionals across the industry and produced a report on key trends based on that. Now, we’re just going through the process of surveying senior oil and gas professionals about what t...