The art of corporate communications — why Axios HQ keeps it brief, but smart

Published by Diginomica on May 24, 2024

In the land of internal comms, you rarely hear someone complain that a message was communicated too clearly. Much analysis has been done on the best way to get key messages across. Images pop up on LinkedIn with visual cues in ever-decreasing font to demonstrate how readers consume information.

While organizations and devolved teams are regularly responsible for keeping staff in the loop, the art of reaching everyone with timely and digestible information can still be elusive. This in turn can lead to frustrations, mixed results or disenfranchised employees. The days of memos in pigeon-holes may have gone the way of the dodo, but there are still plenty of employees who aren’t tethered to a computer or watching their email like a hawk.

I talked about some of the challenges of internal communications with Jordan Zaslav, Chief Operating Officer at Axios HQ. After training as an engineer, he spent time at companies including JP Morgan and Twitter before joining the organization. During that time, media consumption continued to change as formats shifted to try and capture the attention of modern consumers and get their message across in a short time – and Axios had done a lot of research into the matter.

Smart, but brief

The research by Axios led to the development of “Smart Brevity,”, designed to streamline internal communications, making them more effective and engaging. The company initially experimented with machine learning to create a tool that could mimic the editing expertise of Axios' editors. Then came generative AI, which Zaslav refers to as  “a game-changer.” 

Zaslav explained that while media formats were changing, workplace messages didn’t evolve at the same rate:

"Axios was really founded around this idea of the way that consumers were consuming information has massively changed. People were creating content and news, including media organizations, yet corporations hadn't changed the way they communicate to their employees in a couple of decades.

"We know, for example, that 80% of people don't read past the first 250 words. There's two ways you can look at that piece of information. You can continue to follow the style of traditional media and put the key message at the end to really wow them. But the reality is, most people aren't making it to the end. If you want to serve your reader, you should put the key points and all the context they need in the first 250 words and then earn their attention to keep reading."

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