Changing oral financial genres: From earnings conference calls to videocast strategy presentations

This article investigates the changes that oral financial genres have undergone since the 1990s when they began to be widely used by the global financial community. In more recent years, thanks to increasingly advanced digital technologies, there has been some shift towards using more multimedia and multimodal resources to communicate with financial stakeholders. The aim of this research was to explore this trend by means of a case study focusing on a large multinational company’s oral financial communications. Specifically, it compares a recent videocast strategy presentation with an earlier audio earnings conference call as a well-consolidated but less semiotically rich oral financial genre. Like earnings conference calls, strategy presentations are voluntary forms of financial disclosure undertaken by companies to engage proactively with potential investors, but they are less widely adopted and more oriented towards impression and reputation management. The study found that, with respect to the earnings conference call, the videocast strategy presentation was characterised by a wider range of digital affordances and had a stronger rhetorical dimension both verbally (intensifying expressions) and non-verbally (visuals and co-speech gestures). The results are discussed in relation to best practices for companies and the training of aspiring corporate professionals.