Communications is the lifeblood of advertising and marketing. For businesses operating in regulated sectors, from financial services to healthcare, they are critical.
Get it wrong and you risk financial penalties, reputational damage, or both.
Fergal McGovern, a former technology executive and serial entrepreneur, founded his first tech firm, SteelTrace, in 2001. He successfully sold it five years later to publicly listed US firm Compuware. It developed requirement management software, helping businesses to manage and track IT applications through their development process.
“I was interested in making sure you avoid projects going off the rails, such as, today, the children’s hospital here in Ireland,” he says.
In many cases the diagnosis is the same. “Often the issues can be found deep in the documentation,” he says.
That realisation led him to found his current business, VisibleThread, in 2009. He had seen first-hand how often important requirements are buried in documents or spreadsheets in such a way that they are overlooked or misinterpreted, with the result that critical requirements can be missed.
VisibleThread’s products highlight risky content, finding and correcting the kind of confusing language that can cause friction between teams and even derail projects altogether. It also speeds up the document review process.
Its request-for-proposal (RFP) software solutions, VT Docs and VT Writer, are today used by enterprises in a range of regulated sectors, from defence and financial services to healthcare and energy.
Given the rise of large-language models and generative AI, which are often fed on data from the public internet, one of VisibleThread’s biggest selling points is security, says McGovern, who spent the early years of his career working in the US and Japan for large corporations such as Dell Computers, Bank of Montreal and Verizon.
Today he helps organisations understand where AI and generative AI can be best applied in the document review and creation life cycle, and how to do so securely, with zero business risk.
Customers include global business names such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Comcast, as well as government agencies in Australia, Canada and the US.
“Our products help them analyse important and sometimes complex documentation such as contracts, proposals or content going out to the investor community. We spot risk and complexity issues in documents, stuff that might blow up later in the cycle,” he explains.
“We also help people write important content, particularly in regulated industries.”
At the heart of all of this is the primacy of words. “Words are the lowest common denominator of all these complex projects,” he explains.
“What prompted me to create VisibleThread was that I was still seeing the same old problems. People weren’t reading the content very well. There would be misinterpretation. Different people would have different interpretations. I felt that if we could shine a light into these things, we could see much better outcomes.”
As any advertising copywriter who has ever tried to jam 20 seconds worth of terms and conditions into a 40-second financial services spot knows, marketing for regulated industries is already problematic. For their clients, getting messaging right is both a marketing and a governance issue, not least because regulations are designed to protect both the consumer and the integrity of the sector, McGovern points out.
But this can lead to tension between marketing teams and their compliance counterparts.
“You’ve got this constant tug of war between the people who are there to ensure that risk is reduced to the maximum extent possible, and marketers who are trying to communicate a value proposition to consumers,” he says.
Each is incentivised to achieve their own desired outcome. Unfortunately for consumers, risk-free content can sound a lot like gobbledygook. Indeed, from the outside, terms and conditions can feel as if they are deliberately designed to confuse.
Not so, says McGovern – it’s that someone in the organisation was determined to ensure nothing was left to legal chance. Just look at the pages of word soup that constitute property conveyancing, he points out.
It’s not that it needs to be written in such a way. “It’s that lawsuits are based on precedence, and precedence is based on language,” he explains, and vendors or lenders want to make sure everything is legally watertight.
But “forward leaning” companies understand that the words they use are an opportunity to differentiate themselves in the market, “creating accessible content as part of their brand value,” he says, citing Dutch bank Rabobank as a good example.
“Their core advertising approach, indeed their core brand proposition, is around straight talk,” he says.
Unclear talk, by contrast, can be toxic to a brand. If you’re an insurer, for example, nothing will damage goodwill faster than having your client discover they aren’t in fact covered for that storm damage, just after their roof has blown off.
If anything, clear wording is an opportunity for brands to build trust. “It helps to develop a much better brand ethos,” he says.
Trust is after all the reason many of us pay over the odds to buy Apple products rather than rivals that might perform just as well, if not better, he points out.
Clear language helps boost efficiencies too. For example, the Revenue, which also uses McGovern’s products, wants citizens to be able to navigate its site, and meet their tax obligations, with utmost ease.
Unfortunately for many other organisations, the rise of solutions such as ChatGPT has given rise to a temptation to simply feed instructions into a generative AI and get your clearly written content that way. The risk there is one of security.
“If I’m preparing a prospectus for a future flotation, or writing up proprietary insights about how we’re doing as a business, or I’m a government agency dealing with a case of a person who has been abused, I do not want – and cannot afford – for any of that data to go out into the public domain,” he explains.
For highly regulated industries this is hugely important. “It’s why they must have an AI solution, such as VisibleThread, that works 100 per cent isolated within their environment,” he explains.
Clear language can also reduce your operating costs. In financial institutions McGovern has seen first-hand how queries to call centres routinely fall when VisibleThread is introduced, because it means the companies’ online content is more easily understood.
“Great copy is very direct and gives you a better bang for your buck,” he says, just as in advertising. “Everything is communication.”
