@cperry248

At Weber Shandwick, we like to build new things. Or, maybe better put, we feel an obligation to explore by doing to understand digital media change and its implications for clients.

We know lessons are learned in the trenches — the continuous exploration of hypothesizing, hitting, missing and improving the work we make.

Some insights learned driving digital into the DNA of our our firm have been codified into distinct practices, like Mediaco, which helps clients become media companies.

The commercial success of Mediaco lies not simply in content production, but change management — helping clients update their culture and way of creating communications that factor in new processes, talent, technology and applied learning.

We’ve learned across 100+ Mediaco client engagements that you need a mechanism to make change tangible. In many cases, the mechanism is a website or content hub where new media content is brought to life. It serves as the visible focal point teams use to develop new content packages designed for a distinctly new and changing media environment.

To us, what’s more compelling is playing out behind the screens — the training, experiments, social media extensions, paid media pilots, and more, to deliver a new type of distributed, engagement-driven communications.

We’re applying this mindset and approach for ourselves inside Weber Shandwick, which is why today we’re sharing our own platform for learning: Media Decoded.

When you check it out, you’ll see we distill key themes, provide perspectives on shifts in the landscape, and learn from innovators reshaping media. We want to share some of the most interesting, most material subjects and encourage sharing and discussion around them.

In the process we look to transform our own communications and insights we can bring to our client work, like how we:

• Strive to deliver substantive content versus oversimplified how-to’s, listicles and other filler content, and in the process address knowledge gaps we see others not covering.
• Test and deploy advanced versions of Mediaco Publish — our own content management and workflow system we built specifically for brand publishers.
• Create a system to pull in insights from a network of 3,500 employees and hundreds of contributors and innovators in our extended network around the world.
• Pilot promising new capabilities from early-stage content creation and distribution partners we’d like to introduce to clients.
• Use our global content engine to fuel a stronger social media presence through our network in 120+ cities in 81 countries around the world.

We strongly believe new media and marketing success requires a combination of relentless curiosity and experimentation, combined with a core humility that requires us to constantly re-evaluate our approach and the results we drive.

Media Decoded is a vehicle to share how we are going about it all. As part, we’d like to draw on insights from bright, creative minds outside of our walls, too. So if you have something to add, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a note as we help to decode the world of new media, evolving daily before our eyes.