The Creation of a 25th Anniversary Newspaper

by Maria Kirkensgaard Holm, May 2004

CCI Europe will turn 25 in 2004. As such, CCI Marketing has come up with the idea of creating a special 25 th anniversary commemorative newspaper. Given we are here for the newspaper publishing industry, what better way to signify our commitment to the newspaper industry than to produce a newspaper!

The content of the newspaper will be based primarily on contributions from all of our business partners, who will be asked to provide a PDF-front pages from each of their major titles. In addition to that, we will urge our customers to send us a more informal postcard greeting which is to be placed at the bottom of their front page. The newspaper will then constitute a snapshot of a "day in the life of CCI Europe", as seen through the work of our customers.

Contributions from our customers

CCI Marketing is preparing invitations to each of our customers explaining the nature of the project and a request for their assistance. We expect that customer services managers, project managers and sales people (in short the new CURE department) will help us to initiate the contact with the newspapers and ensure that they all participate. Therefore, if you are a part of the CURE Marketing we will be in touch with you within the next week to beg for your assistance in getting the appropriate contacts.

As you can see, each page of the newspaper will look something like the mock-up above. In the invitation, we will ask the customers to send us their front page as of June 1 st 2004 in a PDF-file as well as a postcard greeting. The postcard will consist of a greeting, most likely from the CEO or any other person with the highest authority, and a fact box explaining details about their CCI System and the newspaper. To finish up the image of a postcard, a photo from the primary city or country where the newspaper is produced will be included.

All contributions will then be collated into a tabloid-formatted newspaper.  

Besides the customer contributions, the newspaper will include a historical overview of CCI Europe's last 25 years in business. This will be accompanied by a selection of good stories from CCI Europe employees.

Tell me your stories.

It is storytelling time! In the newspaper we will also include a selection of stories told by CCI Europe employees in the different departments. This is to give an insight into CCI Europe from an employee perspective.

We are looking for the kind of stories told among colleagues which are uniquely CCI Europe (The Revue Group should have a million of them), and in some way have helped to define who we are today. This could be a humorous story e.g. about how you had a communication problem with one customer and how you finally ended up understanding each other.

To take care of the "story hunting", CCI Europe has employed me, Maria Kirkensgaard Holm as a communications consultant on the newspaper project. Throughout May and the beginning of June, I will be working together with Stewart Mullin and Torben Juul in CCI Marketing.

In 2.4.01 where I sit together with Stewart, we will soon establish a café area where good stories hopefully can blossom. You are all very welcome to stop by the café to tell us your story. Remember, stories can be short, long or somewhere in between. They can be humorous, sad, boring (we won't use those), in short they can be about anything. Therefore, do not hesitate to write or tell us a story.

If we choose one of your stories to end up in the final publication, apart from ending up in the annals of CCI's proud history, you will also be recognized with a token of our appreciation.

If all goes to plan, we should end up with a newspaper which will represent the day of CCI Europe's anniversary as seen from the perspective of our customers combined with some unique CCI stories.

So help us find the best stories ever told in CCI Europe!