PwC: Creating a B2B Insight App and Transforming PwC’s Publishing System
My Role & Agency
Product Design Lead / Associate Creative Director, R/GA
Awards
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Silver Midas (Mobile/Hand-Held Device)
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Midas Certificate (B2B)
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Midas Certificate (Products & Services)
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Midas Certificate (Accounting, Audit & Tax Services)
Goals & Challenges
PwC initially tasked R/GA with creating a reader app to leverage their extensive library of expert content. This content served as a vital opportunity for PwC to deliver insights, upsell services, attract new clients, and reinforce their market leadership. However, our analysis revealed that various teams created and published PwC's content without a centralized process or library. This led to redundant topics, difficulty finding existing articles, and misaligned content strategy. Additionally, their outdated publishing process, designed for print, required content to be recreated multiple times for different platforms, resulting in inefficiencies.​ Recognizing these issues, we expanded the project's scope far beyond the initial request to include modernizing PwC's entire content publishing system.​
Solutions & Outcomes
We assembled a cross-functional team of client and agency members. While the content strategy team collaborated with PwC leaders to establish a centralized publishing team and processes, I led the design of a user-friendly, customizable CMS with master asset creation templates and reusable assets like icons, charts, and images. This CMS connected to a centralized library where content creators could easily save, find, and reuse articles and assets. We structured articles based on usability testing, incorporating executive summaries, scannable sections, vibrant photography, voice recordings, videos, author details, and related topics for further exploration. After a 30-minute training session, PwC content creators could seamlessly use the CMS, which automatically formatted new content for websites, iPads, iPhones, and print materials.
In parallel, we developed a universal reader app that gave PwC consultants and clients instant access to every article written by experts. Readers could customize content and topics based on their preferences, with features for bookmarking, sharing, communicating with experts, and discovering the latest and related articles.
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Released in mid-2014, the app received excellent ratings, was recommended by Apple and Cnet.com, and won several awards, including a Silver Midas. Our multi-year collaboration transformed PwC into an expert in creating marketable, flexible, and user-centric content, strengthening long-term client relationships and attracting new prospects.
Transforming PwC's Publication System
Our team concluded that PwC needed to get rid of the old publishing cycle and build a new ecosystem that would generate marketable, flexible, and user-centric content. Our cross-functional team worked together to achieve this by participating in hiring and training of staff and setting content strategy and planning. We also set guidelines to create digital-centric content that could be effectively distributed to different media.
Collaborating with PwC's Content Design Team
With our training, guidelines, and easy-to-use CMS, PwC's content team was able to effectively create content. We also collaborated to build an icon library and trained PwC's visual designers to correctly use design master files and brand assets in order to apply consistent branding.
