Vision is an industry mixing pot

As you read the first edition of Vision, think of it as a digital publication that ties together so many facets of our economy and infrastructure.

Different industries are shown to be similar; occupations long held separately are shown for their likeness; philosophies thought to be dissonant are depicted through their commonalities.

To paint the picture, consider the variety of stories in the first spread.

One story: Shan Bhati and Peter Petros are the heavy-hitting duo that gives legal and business guidance to the world’s largest private communications and marketing firm, Edelman. Profiled through Vision, they share their “sink or swim” experience of rising to the occasion to transcend the traditional roles of attorneys.

Vision is a place for cross pollination. From the standpoint of internal operations, businesses are great melting pots.

Another one: Brenna Berman, the forward-thinking chief information officer for Chicago, tells how America’s third largest city is vacuuming up data on everything from air quality to traffic patterns through futuristic pods placed on traffic lights. Among the broad implications, the Windy City will collect temperature data on a block-by-block basis to understand the Lake Effect and, as a result, better estimate where to apply salt before snow storms.

And another one: Adam Bruckman, cofounder of OneDigital, a disruptor in the healthcare brokerage market, tells how his business burgeoned using a smart, digital first approach to offer tailored healthcare plans to companies. Today, 35,000 such companies rely on OneDigital.

All of which is great.

But you might wonder, how does healthcare brokerage relate to attorneys, and how does that connect to Chicago’s chief technology whiz? It doesn’t, or not directly.

That’s what we want.

Vision is a place for cross pollination. From the standpoint of internal operations, businesses are great melting pots. Attorneys mingle with business people and IT professionals, and so on and so forth. And the sum of this collaboration between people of different backgrounds and educations is that no two businesses are alike.

Yet when these businesses are depicted in trade publications, they are typically crammed into categories—single industries—and made to seem the same.

Not only does this force likeness where it doesn’t always fit; it presumes opposites don’t attract, that manufacturers, for instance, don’t want to read about trends and opinions from the construction world, or that technology companies don’t want to hear about marketing firms. Not so, or at least that is our view.

Vision is not a trade publication in the traditional sense.

That’s true both in the breadth of topics it covers as well as the nature of its distribution model. Stories in Vision are emailed out to a robust base of subscribers. They are hosted on a website. Yet they are also spread organically through social media and word of mouth. LinkedIn, Facebook, Google optimization, email signatures, as well as working individually with companies to expand their coverage—these are a few of ways our stories spread.

The result is a wholly modern publication, which, in a sense, is the sum of its ever changing personal connections rather the headcount of its readers.

Even our advertising model is different.

Our advertisers are the business partners of the companies we write about. For the advertisers, it ensures exposure, while also supporting a message that resonates with them. So not only are they getting their names out; they promoting a narrative they’re part of.

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