By Janus Boye
“Where you are based in the organisation matters much less today”
Do you need more why or are you ready for the how? Adam Feldt is Senior Manager, Digital Communications, Global Marketing and Communications at Topsoe, but as Adam says, titles in digital are of dwindling importance these days. What matters is how you can make an impact, in particular when it comes to sustainability.
Topsoe is a global leader in decarbonization technology, a complex B2B firm based just outside Copenhagen.
Topsoe has just executed a brand refresh to sharpen the focus on how the company is ready to do decarbonization at scale. Actually a brand refresh is some understatement; I would rather label it an award-winning global rebrand, including a complete overhaul of the digital channels. Adam was closely involved in this project as a digital leader and also has a fresh take on what comes next.
Adam is our expert of the month.
Becoming a digital leader
Before we get to sustainability and a 2022 award-winning rebrand, let’s go back in time some 25+ years. Having done digital communications and websites since the mid-90’s, Adam has learned to navigate changing organisational and technology landscapes since the World Wide Web was in its early days.
Prior to joining The Danish Institute for Human Rights back in 1996 as an ICT officer, Adam studied language and philosophy at Roskilde University and later masters in comparative literature at the University of Copenhagen. And while that may not have set him on a straight path to where he is today, that deep understanding of language and behaviour actually quite often comes in handy as how we talk and think about digital is of real importance. To quote Adam:
“As digital keeps changing, our language around it also shapes both our thinking and our abilities.”
After some 11 years doing digital communication in the international law space, launching amongst other initiatives a huge educational website on human rights, Adam in 2008 moved to big business, and the fascinating world of food cultures and enzymes at global bioscience leader Chr. Hansen. In his role as Digital Communications Manager, he had the global responsibility for external online communication as well as development and implementation of online communication strategies.
Like in his previous job, Adam was focused on the promise of digital to make things more accessible - and to easier communicate value.
“Chr. Hansen is a fantastic company that was transitioning from a sleeping beauty to a lean modern leader in its field, and to shaping and strategizing how that was communicated through digital, leading up to the public listing of the company showed me the power and range of digital.”
In 2014, he then moved onwards to Topsoe, where he added digital marketing to his remit.
Adam at one of the popular roundtable discussions at a past Boye conference in Aarhus. This one is from the Boye Aarhus 21 conference held at Godsbanen. Photo: Ib Sørensen
Being a part of the Topsoe rebrand
At our conferences and peer group meetings, I would say that the importance of top management buy-in is something like an evergreen topic.
After years of building the digital marketing and communication muscles at Topsoe, implementing Hubspot CMS and other notable progress, Topsoe decided to go for the big off- and on-line rebrand package with strong support from top to bottom in late 2021. The goal was to be recognized as a leader in the field of decarbonization technology. They worked with London-based Interbrand to make it happen.
This was really a project, where the stars aligned and when I asked Adam why it worked, he answered:
“Topsoe is one of the very few companies in the world who can actually help solve some of the really hard problems of decarbonization and thereby of the climate crisis, and we have an urgent need to communicate this to a new set of stakeholders and companies in order to play our part. Everyone in the company knows this, everyone wanted it.”
The project had a sense of urgency driven by the sustainability agenda, which made it easy to get people involved and engaged. Decarbonizing is clearly important and also resonates with peoples emotions, and this gave everyone involved a strong sense of purpose to go with the top management support.
The topsoe.com that was launched during 2022 looks unlike any chemical engineering website you’ve seen before
Topsoe, with its complex B2B play, needed to be part of a bigger conversation. How do you communicate some of the things that they offer and where Topsoe can be a part of the solution?
The new brand has opened the door to new conversations, but according to Adam, also changed the game, so that it is no longer just engineers communicating with other engineers. Working with the agency on this to further sharpen the focus on plain language and powerful simplicity in the digital space, loops back to his formal education. The task was really to portray Topsoe with thought leadership and the brand’s new tone of voice is a lesson in powerful simplification. Do you want the now and the how of decarbonizing the way we make, move or power the world of today? Topsoe can help.
Reflecting on this project, which won Gold in the Creativepool awards, Adam brought up the disconnect that often exists between where the company sees itself and where the world sees the company. This disconnect can be hard to see from the inside, but the rebrand process at Topsoe is one of the best Adam has experienced in terms of closing that gap.
What comes next: Communication, trust and escaping gravity
Topsoe is moving and changing fast and digital is everywhere in its future. This is the case for many companies, but as Adam quotes science fiction pioneer William Gibson:
“the future is already here it is just unevenly distributed”
As Adam sees it, Gibson points to the fact that data and digital opportunity is neither accessible or visible to everybody. Not in society and not in organizations. On top of this, the promise, ideation and promotion of optimizing communications, not only between people (rhetoric, presentation skills, leadership skills, writing skills), not only between people and systems (IA/UX/UI/AI/VR/AR) but between systems and systems (taxonomy/API/blockchain) increasingly cut across internal organizational silos and responsibilities.
Instead, this uneven distribution creates a chaotic coalition of the brave in a lot of companies, where many potentially important decisions about the direction of digital live or die.
“Coalition of the brave” is a play on the fact that more and more people are realizing that digital is in everything and has revolutionary potential. In analogy Adam brought up the fun fact, that when paperback books came out, rather than realizing the revolutionary potential of popularizing access to literature, many were concerned that people would die from reading them, because they would read them while walking in the streets. This is how it often is with new ideas and technology according to Adam. It takes time, new language, new habits and new behaviors for the bigger impact to surface. Adam continues:
“Organisations need to realize and make room for this, because organizational structures form gravitational systems where decisions gravitate towards the reward systems inherent in their silos and governance. If we do not escape that gravity we will end up prioritizing what we did yesterday over what we should do tomorrow.”
Clearly sustainability really matters today. While it's not a new agenda, it’s the one big topic that is changing the game and still interesting, many digital leaders have not yet picked up on it according to Adam.
“Things are moving, but the mere fact that technologies such as blockchain is bound to be a part of the way the new energy economy will be driven digitally tells you that the environmental footprint from digital needs to be dealt with soon.”
Similarly, there’s few if any who have nailed privacy, another big topic to tackle. The innovative tools bring amazing powers, but with this also comes great responsibility. To quote Adam:
“We’ve moved from a wild west state of collecting data to a first attempt at regulation. Clearly, we are not there yet and as digital leaders we need to do the right thing. Digital has always been about balancing trust and control, but where control has been the key driver for years, that control needs to be distributed to the users and trust needs to take center stage.”
Also, how we build websites is changing, e.g. with the advent of MACH, and software start-ups, which doesn’t come with the legacy of many other parts of the MarTech landscape, but these new tools better enable connections and collaboration internally as well as externally.
“In many ways this new generation of API centered tools have not yet been popularized to reflect their true potential. This will be a major driver for digital opportunity in the near future.”
That’s probably enough on the agenda to keep most digital leaders busy for the foreseeable future. So, how do we really prepare for this? The problem as Adam sees it, is that many organizations can’t keep up with the rate of change. Digital doesn’t scale unless you tackle it in a smart way. And to Adam, a key ingredient to escaping gravity so to speak, is to move quickly between lines of organizational units:
“Communication is, as is often the case, the key factor. Investment in skills, tools, time and space to communicate about the rapid digital change and opportunity in a truly cross organizational way is the most important accelerator for the future.”
Learn more about Adam Feldt
You can naturally connect with Adam on LinkedIn.
You can also meet Adam in person in our digital leadership peer groups.