Expo 2015 has finally started and it is an extraordinary opportunity for institutional communication. In the end, institutions are main characters of this long expected experience, in their official role of States, Regions and in some cases macro-regions – the real cornerstones of the new cross-national balances.

Among them, most definitely sitting in the front-row seats, there’s also the European Union, that considers this stage as the opportunity to re-present itself to the world – namely: to the citizens of the world – by renewing its 60-year-old promise to build a community first of all made of values, which demand to be communicated in new ways and a new shape.

These issues have been discussed during the first edition of the Philip Kotler Marketing Forum last May in Milan, which focused particularly on institutional marketing.

An event during which many stimulating and important ideas emerged, but one in particular deserves to be kept in mind: the awareness that the new challenge of public communication is called engagement and its nature is more than ever relational and social.

We believe the answer to this new challenge lies in a different method of shared building of values, rather than in finding new tools to communicate them. In such a way that we could say – and this applies even more to Expo 2015, which risks resulting in a fair for its own sake – that today, after all, no longer the medium, but the method is the message.