LinkedIn posts from chief executive officers at firms with at least 5000 employees jumped 23% over the past year. Photo: Reuters
The post-earnings C-suite video has become one of the hottest trends in corporate communications. First-time creators wanting to get their own messages out to the masses can look to Blackstone Inc President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Gray.
In a series of videos that strike the balance between the folksy and the financial, the 54-year-old billionaire has shared that Luna, his dog, is his secret earnings adviser and why it’s good luck not to wear shoes for remote TV interviews.
There’s a perception that business leaders “are like robots,” Gray said in an interview. “No, we’re like everybody else. We’re stressed out of our minds and we’re working really hard. So there’s an element of demystification here.”
So far, Blackstone says it’s working. “He brings some ‘America’s Dad’ energy to his videos,” said Cristin Culver, a long-time public-relations professional who counts Gray among the top practitioners of the C-suite earnings video.
A growing number of top executives running firms from Shopify to Spotify Technology are now experimenting with posting such videos to engage employees and customers about what’s happening with the business.
“It’s a casual explanation of everything we have done at Shopify that quarter that any person scrolling on social media will understand,” said Harley Finkelstein, president at the Canadian e-commerce firm, who made his first post-earnings video in February.
LinkedIn posts from chief executive officers at firms with at least 5000 employees jumped 23% over the past year, and those posts generate four times more engagement on the platform than average, according to the Microsoft-owned career networking site.
The videos are “a different way to think about earnings,” said Dan Roth, LinkedIn’s editor-in-chief. “You don’t get a ton of innovation in earnings announcements, so you notice it quickly. It’s wild to see all of them popping up.”
Crafting - and controlling - a narrative is the primary reason for the videos, according to corporate communications experts. “It’s about the larger brand story, not the financials,” Culver said.
Most of what executives say is “full of corporate jargon, and reads like a press release,” Finkelstein said. The videos, though, are about “connecting with people on a human level.”
Making corporate chiefs relatable is no small feat, as they typically earn about 200 times more than the median employee at their firm and can seem out of touch.
Christine Anderson, Blackstone’s global head of corporate affairs, said the firm decided last year to reach beyond its Wall Street fan base to talk to clients, employees and potential recruits. She said that posts full of dense financial jargon wouldn’t work on platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter, now called X. Instead, she said they needed to “meet viewers where they were at.”
And she wanted Gray to be the star.
It wasn’t an obvious casting decision - Gray has described himself as a “high-pitched, insecure bench warmer” in his younger years, and a company spokesperson once said he “lives a very private life.”
But Gray was ideal for the role, Anderson said, since he could condense macroeconomic mumbo jumbo into useful takeaways for just about anyone. After some convincing, Gray agreed to cut some solo videos.
He’s since become quite comfortable in front of the camera, knowing that C-suite videos can backfire if they appear overly scripted or workshopped. “If it’s all slick then people are like, ‘I don’t need that,’” he said. “That’s just a commercial, right?”
Gray’s body of work includes behind-the-scenes vignettes like a post-earnings recap where he casually strolls past Blackstone cubicles while rattling off a few highlights from the quarter, then jokes that it’s still “the middle of the day, so I can’t have a drink.”
“Going behind the scenes, with a little bit of humour and self-deprecation - things that show your humanity resonate,” he said. “It’s an unfiltered way to connect with large audiences.”
LinkedIn’s Roth said Gray’s success in the genre has inspired other executives to dive in.
“These CEOs, they needed to see what’s working,” he said. “If Jon Gray - someone in a heavily regulated space like finance - can do it, it’s an opening for others to do it, too.”
The cast of corporate chiefs now making videos spans the globe and includes Ralph Lauren’s Patrice Louvet, Barclays’s CS Venkatakrishnan, Diageo’s Debra Crew, Royal Philips NV’s Roy Jakobs and Walmart’s Doug McMillon. Some CEOs, like Chris Kempczinski of McDonald’s, don’t discuss earnings but instead deliver advice on public speaking or how to network effectively. A few, like Spotify’s Daniel Ek, resemble TikTok-style selfies, while others are more polished.
But no matter the production value, the point of these earnings videos is the same: Cut through the boring numbers and create a compelling narrative around the company’s progress, a story told by the person at the top who makes the tough calls.
The videos also capitalise on the rising credibility of business leaders, at a time when politicians and the media are increasingly distrusted, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual survey of more than 32 000 people from the public-relations firm. In this year’s survey, Edelman found the biggest year-over-year increase in “trust to do what is right” was for the CEO in charge of the respondent’s own organisation. Only scientists and teachers had more credibility.
“Public companies have a big megaphone, and every three months they have a soapbox to stand on,” said Culver, the public-relations professional. “We live in video-first world and people have the attention span of goldfish. So this meets them where they are.”
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