Royal Dutch Shell

Preparing a 100 year old company for a new content era

With a 125 year presence in over 70 countries, Shell has an extensive content operation, stretching across multiple geographies and business units. With this much legacy and complexity, they needed to reinvent and streamline how it told stories of the brand, business, people, and impact.

When businesses expand, teams and processes are created in isolation, ineffective silos develop and brand messaging becomes disconnected. To counteract this, we developed a strategy to make Shell’s content ‘GO FAR’. FAR, standing for ‘Focus, Agility, and Relevance’, is an operating framework now adopted by global and local content teams. 

Over the course of a year, we initiated a new ‘Editorial Board’ for quick decision making, ‘Content Squads’ to tackle any content crisis, ‘Audience Intelligence’ and ‘Performance Practice’ disciplines to ensure focus on insights and tracking, and ‘Content Masterclasses’ for employees. The result is empowered and up-levelled content teams that coherently communicate Shell’s purpose and safeguard the brand’s prestige. 

THE UPSIDE

10,000+ workdays of trapped resources unlocked through new efficiencies 

FIELD NOTES

Start with company culture

The root cause of the issue was within the company culture. Only by putting in place mechanics to overcome these structural barriers were we able to introduce agility and focus into content creation.

Services

01.

Consumer & Culture Assessment

02.

Ecosystem Audit

03.

Ethical Data Analysis

04.

Insight Generation

05.

Ecosystem and Comms Plan

06.

Editorial Direction

07.

New Org. And Team Design

08.

Strategy Implementation

09.

Stakeholder Engagement

10.

Briefing & Onboarding Partners