In the second of an occasional and informal series introducing you to our work at CPL One, we turn the spotlight on a global client.

Ahoy there, Captain Nemo!

What? There’s no Captain Nemo here.

Oh. It’s just that Nautilus was the name of Captain Nemo’s submarine in the Jules Verne novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Ah yes, of course. This is about the sea, though, you’re right. Nautilus International is a global trade union that looks after the interests of more than 20,000 seafarers, their dependents and other maritime professionals in the UK, Netherlands and Switzerland.

Switzerland? You’re having me on. That’s pretty famously a landlocked country.

Correct, but it has some major inland waterways and, in any case, maritime professionals from many countries are employed on ships that really do sail the high seas, across international waters – which means, as a trade union, Nautilus has a truly global reach.

So who gets to be a Nautilus International member?

It could be the crew of specialist research vessels in the Antarctic, or employees working on ferries or cruise liners, or servicing offshore wind farms, onboard container ships, tankers… maybe even superyachts. Remember during the early days of the Covid pandemic when people got locked down on cruise liners that weren’t allowed to dock?

Ooh, yes. That must have been scary.

Well, if the crew needed support, including legal advice and information about employment rights, they could look to Nautilus International. The same when P&O Ferries summarily sacked 786 people, many by video message, in 2022. Nautilus was there to provide a voice, assistance and offer guidance to its members.

What about the huge container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal?

That ship was the Ever Given, and it caused delays in international supply chains, impacting many companies in the UK and beyond. And then there was the global food security crisis caused by the war in Ukraine. Ships needed export routes to be re-opened via a humanitarian corridor in the Black Sea. No export routes means no-one gets Ukraine’s vast stocks of grain. No grain means no bread for your sandwiches. You see, the smooth operation of shipping and other maritime work affects our lives in many ways, and if Nautilus wasn’t around, many seafarers would be left without support and potentially at risk of leaving an industry that we depend on, even though most of us don’t know it.

I get the picture. So what does CPL One do for Nautilus International?

We started working with Nautilus International in 2018, originally to design and lay out its monthly member magazine, Telegraph. CPL One redesigned the magazine in 2022. Now we produce a whole range of multimedia content, to help them communicate with all these members we’ve been talking about – including videos, animations and podcasts, as well as social media collateral. For example, we’ve made animated videos for Nautilus’s campaigning work, as well as short, fun, awareness-raising social media videos for TikTok. We also produce a podcast, Off course: A sideways look at life at sea.

How’s that going?

Well, it’s just been shortlisted for a Memcom Excellence Award, so pretty well, we think.

OK, since we’re talking salty dog stories, what about pirates? Tell me about pirates.

Arrgghhh! I knew you’d ask that. Actually, yes, piracy is a big issue for seafarers. In fact, an Off Course podcast featured Captain Phillips, who was kidnapped by pirates – his story was made into a movie starring Tom Hanks.

What does the team at Nautilus International say about working with CPL One?

Helen Kelly, director of communications, campaigns and digital, says: “We’re always looking for new and fresh ideas that can help us be at the forefront of supporting seafaring. Our approach to campaigning and awareness-raising at Nautilus International is often digital first, and we find the team at CPL One are always enthusiastic, creative and agile in responding to any challenge that arises.”

What else should we know about CPL One’s work with Nautilus International?

We love working with Nautilus as it touches on many of our skill sets, from journalism and design to video and animation. It’s a holistic CPL One offering – and while the subject matter is big and important, we get to unleash some creativity and originality too. It’s fun.

Read our Five-minute intro to… CIBSE.

The groundbreaking work of John Reardon, a long-time photographer for CPL One, is highlighted in a new exhibition currently running in London.

John Reardon (1951-2018) photographed stallions owned by our client Darley in America, Japan, Europe and Australia from 2000-2016, pictures that graced advertisements, brochures, pedigree cards and much more.

(after) Whistlejacket, Contemporary Equine Photographs by John Reardon, is at the MMX Gallery, 448 New Cross Road, London SE14 6TY from 2 June – 1 July from 12-6pm on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays and from 12-5pm on Saturdays. Admission is free.

This is the first time these photographs have been put on public display. As Darley’s Creative Consultant Jocelyn Targett writes in an essay that accompanies the exhibition: “These photographs of thoroughbred stallions raced by Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai’s Godolphin stable, began as a half-derided summer job – ‘Just commercial work!’ Reardon would wince. It lasted 16 years, almost until his death at 66 five years ago. Back when it all began – on the eve of his 50th birthday and after photographing 14 wars and untold natural disasters for news pages and Sunday supplements, the kind of stark, stylish foreign forays that newspaper budgets would less and less stretch to – he might have feared that he was retiring to grass. In fact, it was to be one last wild ride.”

CPL One’s managing director assesses the implications of generative AI for the agency and our clients.

I’ve made a few rash promises in my time. 

However, few have been rasher than when I promised colleagues I would “draft a short, simple blog in the next couple of weeks” summing up CPL One’s position on iterative AI (and ChatGPT in particular).

That was more than a month ago. So why the delay? 

Apart from the obvious reason that we have a lot of other stuff happening at the moment, it’s also extremely hard to write anything useful on this subject that is either “short” or “simple”.

In the past few weeks, a dedicated section of my inbox has become packed with links to relevant pieces on ChatGPT and its ilk. And my notebook has filled up with plenty of scribbled thoughts about the pros and cons. (I suppose I could have asked ChatGPT to have a go at summarising what I’d written, but surely no robot will ever be able to interpret my shocking shorthand!)

Since I wrote a few lines about the subject in March, it has continued to grab the headlines. 

We’ve had plenty of warnings about the risks, including from Elon Musk and Google’s so-called ‘AI godfather’, shortly before the company announced its latest iteration of AI updates designed to rival ChatGPT. 

Closer to home, a session at a recent Content Marketing Association summit attended by CPL One-ers featured some cautionary tales about data breaches, lack of transparency and IP issues. Another colleague pointed out this podcast from John Oliver which is, in equal measure, funny and scary.  

Some of the other commentary has also been funny but, thankfully, rather less scary. 

For example, The Guardian’s Alex Hern spent a week with ChatGPT to see if it would make him a “healthier, happier, more productive person”. (The answer – summarised by ChatGPT, obviously – was not a surprise: “While helpful, ChatGPT cannot replace the depth and authenticity of human interaction.”)

Meanwhile, colleagues at CPL One have continued to experiment with ChatGPT and other similar software, taking care not to trust all that it delivers for them. 

One example saw an editor prompting ChatGPT to turn his quite heavyweight piece on a technical conference into “brilliant quotes for social media”. The result was pretty good – and the AI-generated words certainly took him less time to tidy up than if he’d drafted them from scratch.

So where does all this leave CPL One and our clients? Here’s five things I do believe and five I don’t.

I DO believe software like ChatGPT can:

• Drive efficiencies, especially in any type of proforma work
• Be one of a number of AI programs that will make web developers’ lives a little easier
• Speed up the initial stages of web-based research for our journalists and sales teams
• Help with a first stab at summarising and simplifying existing content
• Provide interesting career opportunities for anyone who makes themselves a skilled AI prompter.

I DON’T believe software like ChatGPT can:

• Be trusted to provide information that is either correct or original
• Replace highly skilled editorial and other professionals like those at CPL One
• Deliver work as creative, imaginative, fun or authentic as humans can
• Be a one-size-fits-all solution to sort out your content marketing challenges (but CPL One might be)
• Provide a reason for clients to try to negotiate reductions in fees charged by content marketing agencies!

We will continue to monitor the new iterations of generative AI as they emerge. And, even more importantly, we will continue to be incredibly proud of the fantastic, creative and individual work delivered day in, day out by the 70-plus humans at CPL One Group.

The Content Marketing Association’s B2B Summit was a day of forward-looking debate and ideas, writes senior content strategist Martin Bewick.

CPL One was in London last week for the 2023 Content Marketing Association B2B Summit. The full-day of talks from leading marketers and business and technology experts covered topics ranging from what content the C-suite is looking for to the role of social channels and AI in B2B marketing.

What did we learn? Well, lots of things. If there was one consensus drawn from the various sessions, it would be that we live in a very uncertain world with a changing world of work and rapidly advancing technology just two of the challenges we face.

Amid the insecurity, our clients want us to help them cut through the noise, disentangle and declutter their messaging, and help them to focus on the things that will let them achieve their goals.

Here are 12 take-outs from the day that might help us do just that.

1. Accept the connection paradox

It can seem like a paradox, but in an age of seamless and always-on connection, some audiences are increasingly disconnected. Our job isn’t just to reach these people, it’s to understand the disconnect and fix it with a product that really serves audience needs.

2. Make it good

The organisations we work with want good content, not just more content – because that’s how we reflect their customers’ needs and help businesses achieve their goals. Also, ‘good’ isn’t a synonym for ‘slick’, or ‘expensive’. For ‘good’, read ‘thoughtful’, read ‘useful’.

3. Be authentic

Authenticity needs to be at the centre of your business’s communications – that means hearing from employees and customers at all levels, not just replaying the marketing mantras of those at the top. 

4. Take me to your leader

However, in B2B your CEO is a fine asset for your ‘leadership brand’. Peer-to-peer conversation works and leaders always want to hear from other leaders – about their hard-won successes, and also about where challenges remain. Keep it real. 

5. Build long-term commitment

More than a sunshine-filled ad campaign built on KPIs, good content should be an ongoing expression of your organisation’s authentic purpose and values. Think of all the ways you can express those foundations, and keep demonstrating them.

6. Action it!

As well as being authentic, content should be action-orientated if it’s really going to stand out from competitors and create impact. Good creative work changes people’s minds and gets them to take action, so fill your content with purpose.

7. Use your currency

In an uncertain world, content also needs to be timely. Instead of future-gazing and going big on predictions, make sure your content is sharply ‘current’ and helps people answer the vital questions of today. Tomorrow can wait… for a while.

8. Serial love

Everyone loves video content these days – but no-one has time to watch your masterpiece. Instead of filming an epic, could you chunk up your content and serialise it, treating each short video as a building block? It’s all in the edit.

9. Get quirky

Be brave with your content, even when you’re not a consumer brand. It’s OK to be quirky. Who you are is defined by what you do and how confident you are doing it. So don’t be afraid of being ‘more you’. Forget audience pre-conceptions – and maybe lose some inhibitions. 

10. School your tech

The latest tech can be seen as a super-powered tool, whether that’s the potential of AI-generated text, or using Tik-Tok as a search engine. But don’t let hype confine you. Creativity is always the real key, so school your tech, don’t let it school you.

11. Get positive

If the world looks too difficult and complicated, can we make it simpler? If it’s chaotic can we provide some calm? When the impact we have on the world and society is positive and beneficial, it makes us feel better. It also builds trust and loyalty. This is a good thing, right?

12. Stay curious

If there was one take-out from the CMA B2B Summit, it was that if you want to be relevant, stay curious. Don’t just do what you’ve done in the past. Try something new. Start a conversation. Test an idea. See what comes of it. 

Okay, so you may not want to action all of these at once. Maybe start with the last point – and get curious. That’s the basis of what we do at CPL One, where we’re already talking to clients and working with these latest trends and insights.

If you’d like to know more about what we’re doing, get in touch.

In the first of an occasional and informal series introducing you to CPL One customers, we turn the spotlight on one of our long-standing clients.

First things first, let’s get the acronym out of the way. What does CIBSE actually stand for?

Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers.

And how do you pronounce it?

Do…  say Sibseeee

Don’t… spell out each of the letters.

What do CIBSE members do?

CIBSE says its members “drive better built-environment performance, unlocking economic, environmental and social value”.

Sounds impressive. But how?

Well, here’s one example from the CIBSE website. “Buildings account for almost 50% of damaging carbon emissions, yet innovative services design can bring dramatic improvements in energy efficiency.” According to CIBSE, “our members continue to create the most environmentally friendly systems in major projects across the globe”.

OK, now we’ve got that out of the way, what’s this got to do with CPL?

We create and produce CIBSE Journal, a monthly print and digital magazine for CIBSE’s 20,000-plus members. We also look after the accompanying content hub – you can access loads of stories, podcasts, CPD information and all the back issues from there.

Who’s involved at CPL?

The multi award-winning Alex Smith, who has been editor for the past decade, leads our team, which also includes reporter Molly Tooher-Rudd, technical editor Tim Dwyer and designer James Baldwin. Lots of other people at CPL One, plus a number of freelancers, also get involved. 

Why should I bother reading it?

For a magazine whose core audience includes some highly technical people, it’s actually pretty accessible for the rest of us. Sure, pieces such as this one contain more equations and graphs than some might be comfortable with. But there’s plenty for the non-scientific reader too. For example, a feature in March posed the challenging question “Who’s standing up to inequality?” and a January article on mental health in the workplace would resonate with most people. Plus, for those who love iconic (and hopefully sustainable) buildings, there’s plenty of those too, including a fascinating piece on the new Google HQ at King’s Cross this month. 

And what does the client say?

Well, CIBSE and CPL One have been working together since 2009 so we think it’s fair to say they rate us. In fact, CIBSE chief executive Ruth Carter often says that, before starting in her role in 2021, she believed the magazine should be managed in-house and not by an agency. But after a few months at the helm, and working closely with Alex as editor, Ruth was happy to acknowledge a change of mind. “He is an absolutely fantastic editor,” she says. “Even though he’s officially employed by CPL One, he is part and parcel of the CIBSE community, and has an innate understanding of the huge issues affecting our members and industry.” (Alex will hate us for including this bit, by the way.)

Anything else we should know about this client?

It’s an interesting example of CPL One being agile, in this case by working in a highly effective partnership with another agency. We’re responsible for all the content and the platforms it’s delivered on – they manage the advertising and event sales. We’re not saying this model would always work, but it certainly does in this case.