The year in stories

Liberty Global is the parent company of, among others, Ziggo and Virgin Media, and is the largest international cable company in the world. With employees spread all over the globe, the annual report is a good occasion to share stories from the past year with each other and with the outside world. We focus not only on investors, but also on the press and public, politicians, employees, and job seekers.

From 2012 to 2016, we worked closely with Liberty Global to constantly improve the quality of the stories for all these target groups of the online Annual Report.

Brand building
Online annual reports
2012-2015

The year in stories

Liberty Global is the parent company of, among others, Ziggo and Virgin Media, and is the largest international cable company in the world. With employees spread all over the globe, the annual report is a good occasion to share stories from the past year with each other and with the outside world. We focus not only on investors, but also on the press and public, politicians, employees, and job seekers.

From 2012 to 2016, we worked closely with Liberty Global to constantly improve the quality of the stories for all these target groups of the online Annual Report.

Brand building
Online annual reports
2012-2015

2014: a mosaic of stories

In some years, there was clearly a highlight for the company, such as the acquisition of Virgin Media for 24 billion dollars in 2013. On the other hand, a lot happened in 2014, but there was no real cover story. So we presented the stories that year as a mosaic on the homepage, without hierarchy. The stories are illustrated with as much variation as possible using infographics, photographs and video clips.

2015: Do more

In 2015 the theme was the new strategy: ‘Do More’. Three videos introduce the themes: ‘Do more for customers’, ‘Do more to stay ahead’, and ‘Do more to do good’. These videos together tell the big story. For each theme, a number of stories provide additional information about the theme, based on the activities of Liberty Global in 2015. The design encourages browsing through the information, so that people can easily find the relevant stories.

Each target audience has its own stories

In November each year, we spent a day with an international communications team from Liberty Global in an intensive work session. We made a list of possible topics for stories and plotted them against the different target audiences of the annual report. We aimed for a dozen leads for stories in this session. Once we had an overview of possible stories and visuals, we determined the main theme for that year.
 

Input from around the world

In order to write the stories, we needed information from people working for Liberty Global all over the world. We developed a compact template for this. This made it clear to everyone what type of content we were looking for. We also asked for available material for visualizations, such as video, photos or input for infographics. Based on this input, a professional copywriter from Liberty Global wrote the stories. And we made a proposal for a visual. That could be a photo, video or infographic.

‘We are getting such great feedback and I think everyone agrees that it is the best one yet!’

Hanne Thue Wolf, Vice President of Corporate Communications in 2014

Marketing

At the launch of the report, we organize an internal campaign that encourages employees to share individual stories with their network. In this way, we lead potentially interested parties to the online annual report via a story that is relevant for them.

Team
2014 Edenspiekermann: Boris Thorbecke, Lukas Nolte, Jennecke Stradmeijer, Pieter van Kemenade, Marieke Griffioen

2015 Edenspiekermann: Kay Hooijmans, Jennecke Stradmeijer, Pieter van Kemenade, Marieke Griffioen

Video production: Liberty Global