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Our product strategy for ITV News was simple, bold and probably as obvious in hindsight as any good idea should be. We set out to create a digitally native news service, something made for the web and mobile that left behind the Guttenberg-era baggage of ‘pages’, ‘articles’ and ‘editions’ that most news websites haven’t been able to shake off, as well as reworking some proto-web typologies like ‘navigation’, ‘liveblogging’ and ‘galleries’. 

We wanted to make a news service that answered the question: “What would news be like if we had networked digital media (and digital cameras and phones and laptops) but there had never been newspapers or broadcast TV news programmes?”.   

video - would be a massive culture shock. There was nervousness, especially about time and resources, offset by enthusiasm for change and a leadership determined to exploit the potential of real-time news delivered across multiple devices. We also had a strong conviction that opening up the news gathering process - rather than adding new work - would give us the content we needed for the stream. 

Jim refers to ideals as the 400 percent advantage. Why? Because the brands identified as The Stengel 50 by Millward Brown Optimor have outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of four over the past decade. Representing a wide variety of product and service categories they are united by one common factor; they operate in harmony with their ideals.

Ideals provide the “North Star,” the compass bearing by which these companies steer through good times and bad. Particularly noticeable from the chart comparing the Stengel 50 and the S&P 500’s performance over time is the rapid recovery of the Stengel 50 from the recession in 2008. These companies are not hindered by their ideals in tough times, they are helped by them.

Ideals probably have their strongest influence through the people who work on a brand, but can also have a positive effect with customers and consumers, not least in how their communications are received. In Grow, Jim reports work conducted by Millward Brown’s neuroscience practice, showing that people find the Stengel 50 brands to be more empathetic, more ideals-based and more memorable in what they stand for than their competitors. The end result, people are more likely to want to share the advertising with others.