Nora Barry: Story Teller Extraordinaire - Bridge View Media
Meet Nora Barry of Bridge View Media, a creative agency that takes a consultative approach to the problems companies need to solve with their communications, and then develops strategies and content to help execute on those solutions.
Barry is a relatively new member of NAWBO, having joined in February this year. She had always been a solopreneur, with a wide and varied range of interests. For example, she loves languages and speaks several – as well as having created and launched a German short film channel for Europe Online. She enjoys history, and is often able to use it to help clients hone their messages to the market, the media and mass audiences. Barry is also a screenwriter with multiple screenwriting credits.
Twenty years of experience with her firm Druid Media, Inc. helped hone her skills in content development and communications strategy. AT&T, IBM, Verizon, Avaya, Lenovo and Lucent, as well as multiple mid-sized cloud-based services companies are some of the technology-based clients Nora has assisted, as well as bio-tech companies like Astra Zeneca, MedImmune, Genentech, and many more. Not only did Barry produce content for digital communications and sales collateral, she was tapped to develop content for presentations and live meetings, event videos and brand stories.
Since many presentations were to be given by executives of her client firms, Barry also became a masterful speechwriter and coach.
“What is your message, and what are your stories?” Those are the key questions Barry uses to help clients focus on telling their stories to the marketplace. “Storytelling is a word that has been overused in the past few years,” she says, “but it is still the best way to get a message across. We have developed a process to break down a company’s core messages and then distill them into certain narrative blocks. We coach executive presenters until they understand and are comfortable with the narratives, and they don’t wander off track when making important presentations.”
Barry used the tale of Red Riding Hood to illustrate her point. “How many variations of this story have you heard over the years? Sometimes the hunter destroys the big, bad wolf; sometimes Red Riding Hood saves the day,” she says. “But the core message is always the same – beware, be aware.” She coaches executives to stay within their firms’ core messaging while maintaining some flexibility to address multiple situations.
For example, when an executive at a major technology company needed to develop messaging around several key topics for a series of speeches, Bridge View went to work. They created platforms for each speech and developed messages for each platform. They then created a content data base for the messages and wrote 25 different keynotes and presentations using those messages. They worked with the executive to develop stories to be used in the speeches, and built the key messages into the stories.
Barry started Bridge View Media in November of 2016 with Michael Adams. “With executive communications, speech writing and all that’s entailed in the events field, I couldn’t find more hours in the day,” she says. “I was overwhelmed with events. Going into business with Michael allows us to focus on strategic marketing communications and message development as well as the executive communications side.”
Bridge View Media serves a client profile that includes Fortune 500 and 1,000 companies, with a focus in health care and technology. “What sets us apart from other agencies is that we are a creative agency run by a strategy. We’re grounded in messaging, and we develop our clients’ stories to be sure there’s always clarity moving forward.”