The Pilot
BWS Top Picks for Super Bowl LVI Ads
Whether or not you thought Super Bowl LVI had the drama and flare appropriate for its Hollywood setting, the famously expensive ads certainly brought the star power. Maybe it’s just us, but the spots this year felt as if they leaned toward the use of celebrity surrogates over the message even more so than usual. […]
QOTW Series: What is your hypothetical personal “moonshot” project?
The Breakwater team closes each Monday all-staff meeting with a “Question of the Week” to get the creative juices flowing. QOTWs are posed by team members on a rotating basis and range from prompts on current global issues to the most underrated Halloween candy to imaginary scenarios that call for outside-the-box thinking. Our answers help […]
How Companies Can Talk More Effectively About Cybersecurity
By Steve Weber and Jim Wyderko Over one Exabyte. That’s how much data is now stored globally on the cloud. That’s over 1 billion Gigabytes – for reference, in 2003, technologists at UC Berkeley estimated the total words spoken by humans since the dawn of time to be 5 Exabytes. These quintillion bytes of data […]
Breakwater Books: 13 Books That Made Us Think in 2021
Whether to escape to another reality, test the limits of our own, or just better understand ourselves and the world we inhabit, the Breakwater staff collectively explored dozens of great books this year. Here’s 13 that made us think: Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris Shea Agnew Dan Harris’s path from up-and-coming, cocaine-fuelled newscaster […]
Employees First: Embracing the Shift Toward Worker Power Can Set Businesses up for Reputational Success
By Ben Williams Last year, we explored a relatively recent trend we’d been noticing: a shifting power dynamic within organizations from traditional centers of power – executives, senior staff, and management – toward employees. Our case stemmed from growing evidence of employee confidence in boldly calling out mismanagement, exposing toxic work cultures at senior levels, […]
Building a Model for Stakeholder Analytics, Part 2: How SAM Derives Predictions & How Strategists can Use It
Introduction In our earlier blog post on the development of SAM (Stakeholder Analytics Model) we described some of the thorniest contemporary challenges of developing expert insights around complex policy issues to systematize predictive foresight. With the signal to noise ratio as low as it often seems to be, and the channels for public discourse and influence continuing […]
Building a Model for Stakeholder Analytics: Introducing SAM, Part 1
Breakwater Strategy is developing a structured formal model for stakeholder analytics, which we call SAM (Stakeholder Analytics Model). SAM is designed to help bring together expert insights around complex policy issues and systematize the process of generating ‘predictive foresight’. The goal is to inform strategic conversation and add rigor to decisions aimed at “moving the […]
Rainbow-washing: How Corporate Political Spending Can Create Friction During Pride Month
By Devin Kiernan In the months since the January 6th Capitol insurrection, attention to corporate PAC spending has amplified. Consumers are now taking note not just of the cost and efficiency of a brand’s product, but increasingly of how that brand responds to moments of heightened political tension and, in particular, which politicians it helps […]
Consumer expectations for corporate activism are here to stay. Businesses should embrace them.
By Nora Wahlbink As the Trump presidency dramatically intensified political polarization in the U.S., corporate activism became nearly a must-do. Many companies that had never taken a political stance before decided to speak out against extreme policies and in support of movements for racial justice and equity. During the 2020 presidential election, we suggested what the future […]