Jérôme Bloch (360Crossmedia): selling the painting

How does communication affect the valuation of a company?

Valuation combines two things: what a company produces and what the market believes about it. The first shows up in the accounts, the second in every conversation an investor, a client or a candidate has about you before meeting you. Take two companies with identical revenue, identical margins and identical teams. One gets known, quoted, invited to speak. The other stays invisible. The first will raise money faster, close deals faster and hire better people. That gap costs nothing to produce and everything to ignore. Most executives treat communication as a budget line. I see it as an asset that compounds. Every article, every interview, every quote adds a layer of trust, and trust shortens sales cycles. A CEO who has been reading about you for three years does not need a pitch. He needs a meeting.

Which formats actually work today?

Formats have become a fashion contest. Everybody produces a 10-minute video because everybody else does, and nobody watches it. The question comes first: what do I want the reader to remember? A single sentence, printed in a magazine that lands on the desks of decision makers, can travel further than an hour of production. A podcast works when the subject deserves depth and the audience has time. A quote works when the message fits in one line. The format should follow the message and the audience, never the fashion. One strong quote repeated for a year builds more recognition than 12 videos published once and forgotten. When the format becomes the idea, the money disappears.

The greatest painters made good paintings, and they knew how to sell them.

Why do technology companies struggle with this?

Engineers behave like artists. They spend years building something beautiful and wait for the world to notice. The painting hangs in the studio, and they cannot understand why nobody buys it. The greatest painters made good paintings, and they knew how to sell them. Picasso and Warhol organised their own visibility with the same discipline they applied to their canvases. In tech, brilliant founders explain their architecture for 40 minutes and lose the room in four. Their product deserves attention, their story never reaches anyone. I tell them to spend a fraction of their engineering effort explaining what they do to someone who will never read a line of code. The moment they do, the pipeline opens, the recruitment improves, and the valuation follows. Talent without distribution stays a hobby. Distribution without talent stays a scam. The companies that win combine both.