Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
There is a persistent gap in how most listed companies communicate with investors. On one side: meticulous, compliant disclosure – results releases, quarterly reports, earnings webcasts. On the other: the human judgement, tone, and authenticity that investors actually use to assess whether they trust what they’re reading.
The numbers tell part of the story. The CEO tells the rest. And most IR programmes leave that second half to chance.
This isn’t a question of whether your CEO is a good communicator. It’s a structural one. The formats IR teams have relied on for decades were built for compliance, not comprehension. They tell investors what happened. They rarely tell them how the leadership team actually feels about it, what they’re prioritising, or whether they mean what they’re saying. That gap is where investor confidence is made or lost.
Key takeaways
- Investors want to hear from the CEO directly – not because it’s expected, but because it’s the only reliable signal of tone, confidence, and intent
- Statutory documents and long-form webcasts are structurally incapable of carrying authenticity – that requires voice
- Humanising investor communications doesn’t mean over-sharing; there’s a precise line between empathy that builds credibility and personalisation that undermines it
- The challenge isn’t content – it’s scale: how do you extend a CEO’s voice to a large, dispersed investor base without losing what makes it credible?
- Short, secure audio briefings are the most practical format for delivering that voice in the moments when investors are actually paying attention
Why investors want the CEO, not a lieutenant
Ask most institutional investors what they actually want from an IR programme, and the answer tends to be the same: access. Not to the annual report. Not to the earnings slide deck. To the person who made the decisions described in those documents.
As Andrew Craissati, CEO and Co-founder of Auddy, puts it: “The CEO is where the buck stops. This is the person who is the senior most ranking executive in the company, and investors want to talk to that person. They want to hear what they have to say. They want to be able to proverbially look them in the eye and get a good feel for them.”
This isn’t sentiment. It’s how capital allocation decisions get made. A portfolio manager holding a position in your company isn’t just monitoring your revenue line – they’re assessing whether the leadership team is credible, whether the strategic narrative is coherent, and whether the person in charge actually believes what they’re saying publicly. None of those judgements come from a PDF.
Read: Extending Executive Reach Without Diluting Investor Relationships
The problem is scale. A CEO can meet meaningfully with a small number of top shareholders. The long tail – the institutional holders, the analysts, the retail investors who collectively shape how your stock is perceived – will only ever engage with whatever format you put in front of them. And most of those formats were not designed to carry the thing investors are actually looking for.
Embed: Humanising Shareholder Updates Without Breaking Compliance – Campfire Academy Episode 3
What tone carries that text cannot
Every statutory announcement is, by design, flat. The language is precise, the structure is predictable, and the emotional register is neutral. That’s appropriate for disclosure. It is not sufficient for communication.
Tone conveys what text cannot – confidence, uncertainty, resolve, regret. Investors pick up on it instinctively, and they weigh it alongside the numbers. This becomes particularly acute at critical moments: a merger under negotiation, unexpected litigation, a leadership departure, a significant earnings miss.
In those situations, the “what” is rarely the whole story. The “how” – how leadership frames the moment, how they carry it, how credible they sound – shapes how investors interpret everything else.
Craissati frames it this way: “Getting the tone right, getting the authenticity right means that you’re picking up all the nuances that you want your audience to share and influencing how the investor therefore interprets the information that you’re providing them.”
Applied consistently over time, that authenticity compounds. It becomes an umbrella of credibility that extends beyond the CEO to the organisation as a whole.
Read: Closing the Gap Between Disclosure and Trust
Where humanising goes wrong – and how to find the line
Acknowledging that tone matters is not the same as saying CEOs should bare all. There is a precise line between humanising investor communications and over-personalising them – and crossing it carries real risk.
The instinct to show empathy is right. In difficult moments – a labour dispute, an operational failure, an industry-wide crisis – investors are paying attention to whether the CEO understands the human stakes of what they’re navigating.
A leader who appears indifferent loses credibility. But a CEO who tilts too far toward the personal raises a different concern: whose interests are they actually managing?
Craissati illustrates this with a straightforward scenario: if a company’s workforce is in dispute and the CEO speaks at length about the employees’ hardship, a shareholder is entitled to ask whether leadership is prioritising the right constituency.
The investor’s confidence depends on believing the CEO is managing for the long-term health of the business – not just demonstrating empathy for its own sake.
The BBC’s director general offered a more public version of this balance. Facing significant institutional criticism, he chose to apologise for genuine wrongdoing while simultaneously mounting a clear, principled defence of the organisation’s track record. Both things at once. That combination – accountability without capitulation – is what effective IR communication looks like in practice.
The lesson: show the stakes, acknowledge the complexity, and hold the strategic frame. Empathy is a tool, not a posture.
Read: How an Investment Firm Turned Leadership Updates into Must-Listen Content
Scaling the CEO’s voice without losing what makes it credible
The structural challenge in IR is not whether the CEO should communicate more directly – it’s how. One person cannot hold meaningful individual conversations with thousands of investors. Long-form webcasts and scripted quarterly calls reach a broad audience but sacrifice the qualities that make voice credible in the first place: spontaneity, directness, human register.
This is where Auddy’s Campfire solution addresses a real gap in most IR programmes. Rather than replacing formal disclosure, Campfire allows IR teams to publish short, secure audio briefings – CEO commentary, contextual updates, strategic narrative – that investors can listen to on the move, between meetings, without sitting through another hour-long webcast.
Read: Your Investors Are Multitasking. Your Comms Should Be Too.
Access is controlled and named-user, meaning only authorised investors and analysts can listen. Analytics show who engaged, how far they got, and where attention dropped – giving IR teams a clearer picture of investor sentiment than open rates or webcast attendance numbers ever could.
And the format is designed for how investors actually consume information: on a commute, at the gym, during the minutes between a meeting ending and the next one starting. That’s not a marginal benefit. For many investors, it’s the only window in the day when they aren’t buried in a terminal or a call.
Campfire doesn’t change what you disclose. It extends the narrative layer that disclosure alone cannot carry – in the CEO’s own voice, at scale, with the security and audit trail that regulated communications require.
Read: The Secret to Fewer Follow-Up Calls After Earnings Season
Candor and compliance are not opposites
One of the more persistent misconceptions about humanising IR communications is that it creates legal risk. That openness invites liability. That the safest CEO is the one who says the least.
Craissati disagrees, and the reasoning is worth sitting with. Lawyers and advisors are, by nature, a voice of caution – their job is to limit exposure. That voice matters. But it is not the whole job. The CEO’s role is to communicate with integrity, and that requires a different kind of judgement: not what keeps you technically compliant, but what honest, high-integrity leadership actually sounds like.
“You should listen to the lawyer teaching you what keeps you compliant with applicable law,” Craissati says, “but you should also be listening to your gut that tells you precisely how to be a candid, high integrity and authentic chief executive.”
In practice, that middle ground is usually accessible. Acknowledge difficulty honestly. Frame uncertainty without amplifying it. Don’t spin a bad quarter as a strategic opportunity – investors know the difference, and they mark down the credibility of the people who try it. The goal is neutral truth: clear-eyed about the present, measured about the future, and consistent in tone across every interaction.
What CEOs should take away
The CEO owns the narrative of the company – not just at the AGM or on the earnings call, but across every communication that carries the organisation’s voice. That responsibility doesn’t transfer when you delegate. It extends.
Every investor communication that goes out under your IR programme, whether you recorded it or not, reflects on your credibility as a leader. The formats you choose – and how much of your actual voice they carry – shape how investors interpret the numbers, the strategy, and the moments of difficulty that every listed company eventually faces.
Don’t treat that as a compliance exercise. Treat it as the strategic asset it is.
FAQ
Does humanising shareholder communications create selective disclosure risk?
Not when done correctly. Campfire and similar tools operate after formal disclosure has taken place – they add context and leadership narrative to information that is already public. The obligation under frameworks like Regulation FD or the UK’s MAR is to ensure material information reaches all investors equally; audio briefings can be designed to meet that standard while delivering the kind of human clarity that statutory documents cannot.
What’s the difference between authentic and over-personal in a CEO update?
Authenticity means letting tone and intent come through clearly – honesty about difficulty, confidence in the strategy, genuine acknowledgement of complexity. Over-personalisation is when the emotional content of the update starts to obscure the strategic frame, or when investors are left wondering whose interests the CEO is managing. The test: does this communication reinforce confidence in the leadership of the business, or does it create new questions?
How often should a CEO communicate directly with investors outside of earnings cycles?
There’s no single answer, but the principle is consistency over volume. A short, regular audio update – monthly or quarterly, separate from earnings – is more effective than infrequent, high-production appearances. Investors respond well to cadence because it signals that leadership is intentional about communication, not just reactive.
Can a CEO’s voice be effectively communicated without them being present live?
Yes – and for most investor bases, pre-recorded audio is more practical. It allows for structure without sacrificing authenticity, can be produced quickly, and reaches investors in the moments when they’re most receptive. The key is that it sounds like the CEO, not like a script written for the CEO. That’s a production and coaching challenge, not a format problem.
