Welcome to Delphi’s second quarterly update!
It’s almost the end of the year and somehow it’s six months since Delphi was launched ? Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve been up to since we last updated you…
Our work
We’re now working with eight clients and it’s been a particularly busy quarter on brand strategy and positioning projects. We’re working with a US tech firm on a new narrative, messaging and brand positioning. It’s being rolled out over the next month and we’ll be activating it with internal and external audiences soon! It’s some of our proudest work to date and we can’t wait to share it with you when the time is right.
What’s struck us so far is that a lot of our client engagements come with the goal of a liquidity event at the end. We wrote more about that here. This might be a quirk of our senior clients base, but we think it also highlights the value of strategic comms in shaping a brand’s reputation to deliver on commercial objectives.
We’ve also completed our first issues management project – creating a defined process from scratch and delivering a handbook to help our client respond to any business-critical situation that might arise. This kind of structural work is so important to anticipating and fixing many of the comms challenges that might arise within an organisation. Getting the process right pays for itself many times over.
What we’re seeing in the market
There’s no doubt about it – from a comms perspective, 2023 is the year of AI. It’s dominating the media agenda and almost every conversation in tech. Every company needs an AI narrative right now (let us know if we can help!). This, combined with a growing focus on regulation (from antitrust court cases in the US, to the UK’s new Online Safety Act), is shifting tech coverage noticeably. It’s demanding more creativity and strategic nous to cut through.
From an economic perspective, the tech market continues to be fairly subdued and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East has added to the uncertainty. But the mood is lagging behind the numbers – the US economy is booming, with 4.9% growth last quarter, and the UK economy has been re-rated to a stronger performance than we first thought. We’re expecting a steady recovery in 2024.
Thinking and speaking
In the spirit of openness, we’ve continued to share our thinking on the big topics in tech comms, as well as our experience of building a new comms business. Here’s a little rundown for you in case you missed any of these ?…
- Reflections on losing a pitch.
- Setting up on your own and the “hustle muscle”.
- Preparing for a liquidity event.
- Four ways to unleash comms as a competitive advantage.
- Six things we learnt at the Oxford Generative AI Summit.
- What generative AI means for media and marketing.
We held another Dine With Delphi event last month, with a group of tech comms and marketing leaders looking ahead to 2024. The conversation swiftly turned to the challenges and opportunities of AI, both in terms of how they’re using it in their organisations and how they’re aligning their stories to it. We’re hosting another dinner later in November, so drop us a line if you’d like to come along or be put on our invite list for next time!
Finally, our Delphi Digest rounds up the key tech stories of the week, shares what we’ve been reading, gives our take on a big issue, and offers some brain food for further inspiration. You can check it out and sign up here.
