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Vote for “Gene Editing and The Future of Food and Agriculture” panel at the 2019 SXSW Conference and Festival in Austin, TX, March 8-17, 2019!

It seems like every where you turn, somehow, someway, gene editing is being talked about. Just recently, 60 minutes ran a piece about the tremendous promise gene editing tools like CRISPR hold in human health. For the first time ever, CRISPR is being licensed to agricultural companies like J.R. Simplot Company to sustainably produce enough food to feed a growing planet, keep food fresh longer and reduce food waste. Not to mention, gene editing is being studied as a solution to some of the world’s toughest, most urgent challenges, like the citrus-greening disease that is wiping out Florida’s orange groves.

So, it makes since that at the 2019 SXSW Conference and Festival in Austin, TX, gene editing take center stage. The world’s largest gathering of creative professionals, SXSW has evolved from a music and film festival to an expansive display of innovations happening across industries. From Health & MedTech, to Social & Global Impact, to Media & Journalism, SXSW covers it all.

To ensure the innovation of gene editing takes center stage, BIO has teamed up with the American Seed Trade Association (ASTA) to put together a panel on “Gene Editing and The Future of Food & Agriculture.” Representing academia and farmers, the panel will use case studies to discuss some of the biggest challenges facing modern ag today and explore how science (gene editing) will shape our future. Additionally, the panel will provide unparalleled insights into gene editing innovations coming down the pipeline and the social conversation around gene editing.

Panelists include:

• Brandon McFadden, Asst. Professor, Department of Applied Economics & Statistics, University of Delaware
• Randy Spronk, Farmer, Spronk Brothers III LLP and Ranger Farms LLP
• Fred Gmitter, Professor, University of Florida Citrus Research and Extension Center

Vote and learn more about the “Gene Editing and The Future of Food & Agriculture” here. Voting for the 2019 SXSW panels is open now until Thursday, August 30 – click here to create an Outlook reminder to vote before it ends! To vote, you’ll need to create a free SXSW account first (takes less than one minute), then you’re all set. Each account is allowed one vote during the voting period, so be sure you vote correctly.

For more information about the 2019 SXSW Festival and Conference, and to register to attend, click here.

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The food and agriculture industry is on the verge of unleashing the potential that the convergence of biotechnology and data science can hold for the sector. Advances in genome editing, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing hold enormous potential to enhance human, animal, and environmental health, and enabling this progress will require dialogue and collaboration between different segments of industry, government, and civil society.

BIO Latin America, taking place on September 4-5, in São Paulo, will convene thought leaders from the region and around the world to discuss advances in health, agricultural, and environmental technologies, and the policy environment needed  to enable the commercialization of these technologies. Panel discussion topics will include the convergence of technologies, intellectual property protection, and biotech entrepreneurship.

In addition to the panel discussions, the conference, hosted by BIO and Biominas Brazil, will bring together high-level executives, industry leaders, policy makers, entrepreneurs, academics and investors from around the globe to debate trends, navigate industry challenges, access innovative companies, conduct 1×1 partnering meetings and discover new collaboration and deal making opportunities.

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A great content marketing program can no longer be maintained with good writing alone. 

Content shock has created a glut of content that is outpacing demand. Content marketers have to work harder than ever to keep an edge over the competition, or risk starving while a more savvy competitor eats their lunch. 

To keep competitors at bay, or to surpass the competition, organizations sometimes forgo the fundamentals of a great content marketing program, and instead focus on new best practices and growth hacks. After all, they don’t want to wait for results. They want them now!

While the latest growth hack may sound like the future of content marketing, more often than not it’s a short-term fix to a long-term problem. Organizations latch onto a hack or a shortcut, only to find their content marketing program in disarray a few months later. It’s something we’ve seen over and over.

Here are just a few signs that a content marketing program is in trouble:

• Content marketers struggle to prove the business value of their efforts
• No one understands how new visitors move down the marketing funnel to a conversion
• The executive team is considering reallocating content marketing budgets
• User engagement on content is very poor

All of these signs lead back to a common cause: the fundamentals of the content marketing program are not in place.

Like any activity or profession, understanding the fundamentals is essential to success. If the underlying fundamentals of your content marketing program are not in place, there’s little chance of growth-hacking your way to success.

Here are the seven fundamentals that are essential to any successful content marketing program.

1. Understand Your Business Objectives

You’re not creating a content marketing program for fun. You’re creating it to accomplish a business objective.

The first fundamental of a great content marketing program is to define the business objectives you want your program to accomplish. 

These objectives can include:

• Brand Health
• Marketing Optimization
• Revenue Generation
• Operational Efficiency
• Customer Experience
• Innovation

Once you’ve identified the business objectives of your content marketing efforts, you need to get buy-in from the c-suite to make it a reality.

2. Get Executive Buy-In

Your executives hold the keys to the resources your content marketing program needs. If you can’t get your executive’s buy-in and keep it over the years, your program is toast.

To get executive buy-in, focus on these six points:

1. Why your organization needs content marketing-what is more appealing about it than other means of advertising/communication? 
2. Don’t lead with creatives when talking to executives. Your executives may like to see pretty mock-ups, but those don’t sell a program.
3. Instead of creatives, lead with dollars and cents. This is the language of the c-suite.
4. Tie the program to business objectives. How will the program be better than other programs at achieving specific objectives?
5. Show how you will measure the strategy (this will be discussed in the fifth fundamental.)
6. Lay out the budget and the expected return the c-suite should see as a result of the program. If you can’t demonstrate this, your content marketing budget will quickly get reallocated to projects that can.

3. Understand Your Audience’s Pain Points

The point of your content should be to solve your audience’s problems, not to serve as an ad for your products and services. 

 

To understand your audience’s pain points, you need to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What things keep them up at night? What are they worried about? What content can you provide that would make their lives easier?

Pain points come in all shapes and sizes. A pain point might be an annoyance, like gnats getting through a screen in a window. Or a pain point could be significant, like understanding how to best take care of a parent who needs additional care. Both of these examples can utilize content to give some relief to those pain points-perhaps a homemade gnat trap for the first example, and an article detailing all of the essentials someone should get in order to get their parent the best care possible.

Content intelligence utilizes massive amounts of data to identify the pain points your audience has across your site and the sites of your competitors and industry publications. This approach goes hand-in-hand with qualitative feedback such as customer focus groups, to identify the true pain points your audience has.

Another essential in determining pain points is to understand the user’s intent when they search for a solution.

If someone is searching to know the answer to something, don’t hit them over the head with calls to action to buy something. If they are looking to take an action, like get help, you should be more aggressive in getting them to take the next step with you.

If the user’s pain point is to go somewhere, like a website, or a physical location, make sure your business is easily findable online or in local search. 

4. Create a Documented Content Strategy

If your content strategy is in your head, but not on paper, you may be in a lot of trouble.

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Less than 40% of content marketers have a documented content strategy. As a result, only 35% of content marketers can actually demonstrate the ROI of their content marketing efforts.
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Selling your executives is essential to acquiring and maintaining resources for content marketing. If you can’t point to a documented content strategy, and thus prove the ROI of your content marketing efforts, your budget will be quickly reallocated.

It takes time and effort to create a great content marketing strategy. But it’s essential, as your entire content marketing program depends on it to succeed. 

It also gives your entire content team a single source of truth when creating future content marketing campaigns. 

5. Identify the Methods and Metrics for Measurement

To prove your content marketing program’s value, you need to identify the methods and metrics you will use before you create a single piece of content.

These metrics should tie back to the first fundamental of content marketing programs: Understand Your Business Objectives.

The metrics you use should be identified within your content marketing strategy, as well as each content marketing campaign. 

Companies that delay this step until the end of their campaign end up scrambling to show the success of the campaign. Without having a clear method for measurement set up at the beginning, they are left with vanity metrics like total inbound traffic or social shares instead of solid metrics that prove the content campaign drove an actual business outcome. 

This leads to some really awkward conversations with the c-suite.

6. Identify the Most Effective Distribution Channels

How does your audience get content that helps them solve their problems? 

Do they rely solely on search? Then a focus on SEO is probably a place for you to start.

Is your audience mostly on social media? It might be time to create social-friendly articles that will pique their curiosity.

Do they regularly read a certain industry publication? Perhaps utilizing sponsored content on that publication is a good channel.

Do they prefer to have a physical paper? Then it might be time to look at printing and shipping a magazine (yes, they are still around). 

Figure out where your audience is currently getting the solutions to their problems. A lot of the time we see organizations jump into new channels just because they are new. But they never did the research to see if their audience is in that channel. 

It’s easier to get the attention of an audience in their normal channels than trying to get them to join you in a new channel.

7. Create Amazing, User-centric Content

Yep, we’re at fundamental 7 of 7, and we’re just now talking about creating content. That’s because the legwork that leads up to the content is the most important factor in the content’s success at the business level.

Writing amazing, engaging content is essential to any content marketing campaign. That content needs to be user-centric, making your audience the hero of the story. 

You’re not writing creating content to talk about you. You’re creating content to solve the user’s problem. 

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You’re not creating content to talk about you. You’re creating content to solve the user’s problem.
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This is one of the biggest mistakes we see from organizations. They think content marketing is simply a way to write long-form advertisements. Check your organization’s ego at the door.

However, that doesn’t mean that you forgo trying to get your audience to take ta next step.

Logical next steps, such as offering a free trial, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading something of even more value in return for an email address, can push audiences further down the marketing funnel organically. 

From there, you can nurture and build trust with them until they’re ready to make the next step with your organization.

Wrapping It Up

Content marketing is hard. There are hacks and shortcuts galore out there, but without having a foundation of the fundamentals, your content marketing program won’t have a solid foundation on which to grow. 

Hopefully, you’re currently practicing all of these fundamentals. But if you aren’t, it’s not too late to start.

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On July 25, when the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the European Union’s highest court, issued its ruling on directed mutagenesis, stakeholders and observers in the industry, academic, science and government arenas responded with a combination of shock and confusion.

In short, the ECJ ruled that organisms obtained by directed mutagenesis – a set of genome editing techniques, such as CRISPR, which make it possible to alter the genome of a living species without the insertion of foreign DNA – are GMOs and are subject to the obligations laid down by the GMO directive.

The Court’s decision runs counter to the preliminary opinion of the ECJ’s own Advocate General issued earlier this year. It is also contrary to the views taken by scientists and most regulatory bodies outside of Europe. Ultimately this action represents a severe obstacle to research and development of innovative food, agricultural and environmentally beneficial products derived from genome editing techniques.

“It is now likely that much of the potential of these innovative methods will be lost for Europe – with significant negative economic and environmental consequences. That strikes a serious blow to European agriculture and plant science.”, says Garlich von Essen, European Seed Association Secretary General.

If there was any doubt about whether this ruling will have a chilling effect on future research, one only has to look at the reaction from more than a dozen EU-based scientists. Among them:

“This decision may negatively impact our ability to respond to the challenge of securing sufficient food for our growing population in a changing climate.  It may also hinder the competitiveness of the EU’s biotechnology sector.” – Dr Nicola Patron, Head of Synthetic Biology, Earlham Institute.

“This will potentially impose highly onerous burdens on the use of genome editing both in agriculture and even in medicine, where the method has recently shown great promise for improving human health and well being.” – Prof Denis Murphy, Professor of Biotechnology, University of South Wales.

Scientists here in the United States were also scratching their heads and dreading the global impact of such a ruling. Carl Zimmer quotes two in his New York Times article, “What Is a Genetically Modified Crop? A European Ruling Sows Confusion” i:

“You’re not just affecting Europe, you’re affecting the world with this decision.” – Matthew Willmann, director of the Plant Transformation Facility at Cornell University

“I don’t know why they are doing that…I was thinking, ‘Do they have the right science advice?’” – Jennifer Kuzma, co-director of the Genetic Engineering and Society (GES) Center at North Carolina State University

Mark Lynas has more reaction from the science community in his blog, “Scientific community defeated by green groups in European court ruling on gene edited crops” beginning with that of Dr. Sarah Schmidt at the Institute for Molecular Physiology, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, who described the ECJ ruling as “the deathblow for plant biotech in Europe.”

Aside from a major blow to the research sector, for industry groups, the ruling could discourage investment in future technology development and deprive society of the tools needed to sustainably provide for our world.

Neal Gutterson is Chief Technology Officer, Corteva Agriscience, Agriculture Division of DowDuPont, explains in this post in Euractive:

“Subjecting all new breeding advances to regulatory review will stifle innovation and deprive European farmers and consumers of a range of important benefits. These include healthier vegetables, disease- and drought-resistant crops and locally produced replacements for palm oil, just to name a few.”

United States Government officials are worried about how the ruling could impede trade.

“The global regulatory treatment of genome-edited agricultural products has strategic innovation and trade implications for U.S. agriculture,” said U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue in a statement on the ruling. “For this reason, USDA has clear science- and risk-based policies that enable needed innovation while continuing to ensure these products are safe. In light of the ECJ ruling, USDA will re-double its efforts to work with partners globally towards science- and risk-based regulatory approaches.”

Questions remain about how the ruling will ultimately be interpreted and how the ruling will translate into policy. While science and innovation have taken a hit this time, there is hope that continued dialogue might yield some more positive results.

Secretary Perdue said, “We encourage the European Union to seek input from the scientific and agricultural communities, as well as its trading partners, in determining the appropriate implementation of the ruling.”

EuropaBIO‘s Secretary General John Brennan agrees that more discussion is desperately needed:

“Looking forward, EuropaBio believes that the next step, for the EU and its Member States, is to engage citizens in an inclusive and fact-based dialogue on what genome editing is, and what it will or will not be used for. It will be important to build knowledge, develop understanding and deliver risk-proportionate policy approaches, allowing innovation, which is already taking place in other parts of the world, to also benefit the EU’s society, economy and the environment.”

 

This week, Representative Comstock introduced the Study of Underrepresented Classes Chasing Engineering and Science Success Act of 2018, also known as the SUCCESS Act, which seeks to advance the cause of greater diversity in innovation and patenting.

BIO strongly support this and similarly focused legislative initiatives, and has long worked to expand participation in STEM education and biotechnology professions. Our member companies, as part of our Workforce Development, Diversity, & Inclusion (WWDI) Initiatives, have set as a goal “as an industry, [to] achieve significant increase in racial diversity, increase LGBTQ representation and achieve 50 percent representation of women at functional leader and C-Suite by 2025, (gender diversity improving from ~25 percent currently).”

We have also set as a goal, “as an industry, [to] achieve improved racial diversity, LGBTQ representation and achieve 30 percent female Board membership in Biotech by 2025 (gender diversity improving from 10 percent currently).” We believe these goals are achievable if we all work together.

Passage of the SUCCESS Act will help provide BIO data needed to make this industry more inclusive. BIO applauds Representative Comstock’s efforts to advance the cause of greater diversity in innovation and patenting.

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