Lessons learnt from Neptune Orient Lines interview

We learnt three important lessons from a recent engagement to produce a television interview for Neptune Orient Lines, for internal consumption. Addressing critical issues for staff, CEO Ron Widdows spoke with me on camera in an interview just as I would have done it on CNBC.

First lesson: The questions weren’t scripted. Our guest was clearly prepared with the key messages he wanted to communicate. That’s his job. But he did so in a candid, authentic and sincere manner. It’s a credit to CEO Widdows and the corporate communications team that they didn’t stage-manage the interview.

I preach to whoever is willing to listen: if you want your audience to believe you, drop any hyped motivational speeches and cut to the chase. Internal audiences generally are quite cynical about edicts from the top. So, you have to be real. As Carly Fiorina likes to say, “people watch the walk, they don’t listen to the talk”.

Second lesson: segment, segment, segment. When it comes to online videos, attention spans are far shorter than on television. We digested the 27-minute interview into three 6-minute segments. I was fearful this would still be too long, but CEO Widdows spoke well, so as a viewer you didn’t really notice the time pass. He held the viewers’ attention well.

Third lesson: push for feedback ...correctly. One of the lessons of radio talkback is that in order to get listeners to call, you have to give them a provocative, closed question. Don’t just say “call to give us your views”, because the immediate unspoken response is, “why should I?!”

At the end of each segmented interview I delivered a short piece to camera to encourage viewers to provide their feedback. The questions I asked were, first, “was this interview of value to you?”, and second “would you like to see more such interviews”?

The IT team, in conjunction with the corporate communications specialists, ensured a link to a survey was close by the video screen.

Result: They received hundreds of comments from staff, which were hugely positive.

Needless to say we look forward to continuing to work with NOL.

Separately, we have a couple of other clients and projects in the pipeline, which I will update you on later this month.

Please feel free to drop me a line, if you have any questions on any of these.


Best regards

Mark Laudi
Managing Director
Hong Bao Media (Holdings) Pte Ltd
mark.laudi@hongbaomedia.com