The Guardian's chief commercial director David Pemsel advises brands be 'open' with their marketing communications

"It is clear that even in this fragmented world, and with all of the changes that are taking place within newsrooms, that we still have an awful lot of power. The things that we do with NSA and phone hacking, however disruptive our business is, we still have influence and power and equally our brand owners and people who own the brand narrative also have a huge impact on society, he began.

"When I talk to brand owners and senior marketers, at the core of a lot of these brands are incredibly compelling stories, that unfortunately over time seem to become packaged up into rather conventional ways of telling those stories," he stated, before adding that timespans for planning and organisation had dropped to hours, and that companies had to become more agile in determining the content they launched towards their audiences.

"This is something when you are in a real-time news organisation that you are thinking about constantly. There used to be a time when we used to do a newspaper, our journalists would go home at the end of the day, conversation ended, then they would come back again in the morning and start again. Clearly those days are long gone and you as brand owners have the same challenge. Just because you stop communicating doesn't mean the story has stopped and you have to strategically understand that more - there is a huge amount of chaos."

Openness, he said, was exemplified by The Guardian's desire not to introduce a paywall, adding that it measured its success not by the number of paying subscribers but by the impact of its content.

Pemsel added that openness was necessary because of the audience's desire to be a part of the conversation and that The Guardian had opened up its platforms to embrace engagement with its readers, which he advised brands to also implement. "You as organisations and brand owners also have to think like this because the audience is hungry for messages and doesn't understand your comms plan. So when you open up your strategy, the audience won't think like that. The audience wants to have a conversation."

He continued to state that marketers no longer controlled brand conversations and advised that if they were looking to engage with an audience they begin to consider the time of day and how different content might affect engagement levels.

"Stories evolve in the open so the idea is that you should come up with something around your brand that can be shared - people will be open to that...you can't create content in a closed way. Content is about storytelling. It is about asking a question and expecting a result, which is why most companies grapple with it. Setting things free is what most marketing organisations are scared of."

He concluded by advising that brands better consider how they spend their marketing budgets, suggesting that instead of spending millions on a big brand campaign, they could look at investing in publishing content, which, should it fail, could be pulled without as high an impact as a failed marketing launch.