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Designers: Michael Helble and Andrea Hüls, C3 Creative Code and Content GmbH., Munich, Germany
Client: Allianz SE., Munich, Germany

C3 Creative Code & Content GmbH

Strategic goals

Allianz International Pensions is the think tank of the Allianz Group on subjects relating to retirement provision and demographic change. As the publisher of the magazine PROJECT M, the department promotes the perception of the Allianz Group as leading experts in the field of pensions. PROJECT M acts as a key platform for expert knowledge in the field of asset management, life insurance and retirement provision, and serves as a tool in promoting customer loyalty among existing and new institutional clients. 

Readers / target group

With PROJECT M, Allianz engages in dialogue with top decision-makers and opinion-leaders in the global asset management, life insurance and pensions industry. These include international specialists and managers from important institutional clients and analysts, media and academics, as well as the regulatory authorities and institutions that frame the regulatory environment of the pensions business.

Content concept

PROJECT M emphasises first-class financial journalism. It examines relevant business subjects from "micro", "macro" and "meta" perspectives – in articles written by authors including famous journalists, academics and experts. These partly external perspectives are underpinned by their own investigations of international pensions. The magazine also looks beyond the horizon: contributions with considerable specialist depth are integrated within a social context, an approach that requires courage and also shows that the finance industry accepts its social responsibility. 

Linguistic concept

PROJECT M appears in English because of its global readership. The first-class contributions in the magazine come from experts and well-known business and finance journalists; they consistently focus on finance and economic journalism from key periodicals such as The Economist or the Financial Times. PROJECT M's writers create a linguistic world that meets readers in their industry while approaching subjects in an exciting, interesting and lively way. 

“A magazine that for the judges stands at the same level as The Economist, the Financial Times and Forbes magazine.”

Design concept

High-quality design, classic typography and creative imagery make PROJECT M unique in its field. Well-designed elements such as Q&As, quotes, charts and infographics ensure a lightness of touch. Intelligent visual imagery interprets subjects with subtlety. The cover itself is art: financial input creates computer-generated works of art. In Project M issue no. 25, the cover art was created using special software that transforms raw data into aesthetic clusters.

Picture concept

With the computer-generated artwork on every cover, the magazine gets to the heart of the matter: it translates figures from studies and the worlds of finance into something tangible. It gives them an aesthetic form, and over the various editions they create an exclusive series of artworks that can form part of a collection. 

Special features

Since its first edition at the end of 2008, PROJECT M has succeeded in being accepted by its target readership as an important channel of information and debate. Non-Allianz experts in the industry now look for the opportunity of using PROJECT M to convey their ideas among their peers. PROJECT M demonstrates how responsible financial communications will look in the future.