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If a 150-million-year-old Brachiosaurus could talk, what would it say?You can find out at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, where many of the exhibits will soon tell their own stories using local voices, thanks to an initiative from local museum advertising specialist Leo Burnett. The agency wrote more than 100 short scripts, each a paragraph or two long, designed to capture the “voice” of various plants, animals and minerals in the museum’s permanent collection. The write-ups combine history and humor. For example, the Brachiosaurus bemoans its girth while also discussing the contributions of paleontologist Elmer Riggs. Everyday Chicagoans are invited to record the first-person monologues in a special pop-up audio booth that is traveling around the city this summer. (It visited Chinatown this weekend.) Ultimately, the best voiceovers will be accessible via smartphone for Field visitors to enjoy on audio tours....
An ad is an ad is an ad. Or is it? Millennials have grown up with a media diet far different than the generations that came before them. Has that changed their media taste? Do brands need different types of ads to reach people of different ages? Google partnered with L'Oréal Paris to find out....
You can primp and polish almost anything to make it gleam and glimmer, but making something beautiful doesn’t make it unique and doesn’t make it effective.
The same can be said with advertising and PR. You can devise the most astounding campaign that implements every creative tool in the book and then some, but if your message doesn’t resonate with people, you have lost.
This summer I had the privilege of attending the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where I absorbed the knowledge and advice advertising and PR professionals had to give about the ever-changing field in which they work. In the seminar “Nailing Jelly to a Tree & Other Wild Goose Chases” Dr. Itiel Dror joined Nir Wegrzyn to discuss how to make your advertising messages stick with your audience and have the effect that you desire.
Dr. Dror, a cognitive neuroscientist, stressed three points: making your messages into memories, encode those messages in the appropriate parts of the brain, tell a relevant story and tell it well. All of these components combined make it possible for us as advertisers (or aspiring advertisers) to divulge into human insight and to connect with our audience in a transparent and effective way....
No, we're not talking about Apple or Amazon or Big Data or the Marketing Cloud or Programmatic Buying.
Chevy’s Rikk Wilde “looked down at his notes often, spoke haltingly and explained to the pitcher that he'd like the Colorado” —Marketing Daily’s Karl Greenberg has the skinny today on its new “inner truck guy” conventional campaign — “because it has ‘class-winning and leading, you know, technology and stuff,’” James R. Healey reports in USA Today.
“The nervous Wilde was assured this morning he still has a job,” Greg Gardner and Alisa Priddle reported in the Detroit Free Press last evening. “And in fact he appears to have garnered millions in free publicity for the Chevrolet brand, which has received at least $2.4 million in media exposure from the unconventional presentation, according to Front Row Analytics. Bloomberg reports that is six times more than the $392,000 it would have brought in with a more polished performance.
”It did not take long for #technologyandstuff to pop up on Twitter with GM president North America Mark Reuss (@GMdudeinNA posting, “It's what I've been saying for years.....#technologyandstuff,” Gardner and Priddle report....
...Sher has uncovered a paradox: Journalists, who are in the business of telling stories, have actually ruined age-old narrative traditions through their approaches.
For Sher, the inverted pyramid writing style is one of the worst offenders, because it often reveals the juiciest part of a story in the first paragraph. So, why read on? Sher’s revelation was unsettling for his audience, a room full of journalists at this year’s Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) conference in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Thankfully, Sher has a remedy. He offered some tips that he promised will help reporters tell a more engaging tale, whether they are shooting 60-minute TV documentaries or writing short Web hits. The following tips can also be used to tell your brand’s ongoing story in a press release. After all, your goal in PR is to appeal to the storyteller inside every journalist....
Find out how telling visual stories with images or video on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and YouTube will help you reach connect with your audience.
Are you sharing your stories with your fans?
Do you use pictures in your social marketing?
People want pictures in their social channels.
When done right, these pictures become visual stories.
In this article, I’ll show you how five brands are using pictures to share their stories and why that’s important....
Twice this week I've been asked for alternatives to iBooks Author that students can use to create multimedia books. This is probably a good time to share the three options that I usually recommend. These are listed in the order in which I typically recommend them...
Many entertainment brands have begun experimenting with transmedia, an academic term for extended storytelling across diverse social and traditional media forms. Since I am publishing a novel this year, I decided to experiment a little with transmedia.
From the extended Star Wars Universe to the X Factor, Hollywood is mixing in extended online media to build comprehensive experiences. Perhaps even more innovative are new projects like the City of Conspiracy in London, which combines rap music, a novel, events, photos and of course, web postings. Here are some of the ways I am experimenting...
Somewhere between a PowerPoint presentation and a full-fledged video is the audio slideshow. Creating audio slideshows can be a good way to add meaning to slides that otherwise might not mean much without a presenter. Here are some ways that students can create audio slideshows....
Why are you wasting everyone's time telling your company's story?...
This "look at us! we're so smart!" style of marketing has become woefully common in the post-Facebook era. People--particularly young people, I note--seem convinced that business communication consists of telling people about YOU.But in business, it's never about you. It's always about the customer....
Referencing his book The Dangerous Animals Club, Tobolowsky said, "True trumps clever any day of the week. So I really try to make sure that all of my stories in the book are (1) true, and (2) that they happened to me. It's far more important to tell a true story even if it's not perfect in all the details than to make up a clever lie." Although many see content marketing as just that—marketing—smart marketers know that what they're delivering is a great story. At the heart of that is truth, education, and personality—however imperfect it all may be. Small business owners are directly involved in all aspects of their business and have personal connections with customers. It stands to reason, then, that they have a wealth of powerful stories at their disposal. Want to become a content marketing rock star? Grab attention and connect with potential customers through those stories. Here's how to do it authentically....
Not every newsroom or journalist has the resources to take on projects like the New York Times’ Snow Fall or the National Film Board’s Pine Point. Whether you want add a multimedia extra to your text post or create a web documentary, digital storytelling tool Zeega makes it simple to create immersive, interactive stories with a slew of multimedia features and a professional feel. The tool aims to “democratize the web as an interactive audio-visual medium,” said Ahmed Kabil, Zeega’s community manager, during a NewsU webinar that gave a step-by-step tutorial on using the platform. Here are some key features and how journalists can use them....
Our goal as savvy email marketers is to look beyond the lure of the one-time conversion and strive to build an ongoing relationship between consumers and our brands. Why is this goal so important? Because it’s been proven through many a marketing study that engaged customers become loyal customers and loyal customers are the most valuable segment in any list or database. This type of highly engaged, loyal customer typically has higher overall lifetime value than the casual consumer. They’re also more likely to be an evangelist, introducing new customers to your brand in a very personal way and building the next layer of loyal customers. But, how can you help to build a stronger bond with your customer base? In my last article, I outlined ways to stimulate an unengaged audience by increasing the relevancy of your email creative by including more dynamic content. Sharing relevant content demonstrates to customers that we know them as individuals and are dedicated to providing them with useful information, products or services. Using historical and behavior data is a great way to present content that’s tailored to their individual needs and preferences, but you also need to engage with your audience on an emotional level in order to achieve the goal of creating a true brand-loyal customer.... Let’s explore four creative ways in which email marketers have used data as a platform to build creative that forms a bond between their customers and their brand....
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In addition to the Discover, Create and Engage modules, we have included a guide for journalists that will explain how to get started on Facebook or simply grow your presence. We’ve heard from journalists that they need more information when deciding between setting up a Page or a profile and about how to manage privacy settings. The “Getting Started” course seeks to answer all of those questions and covers key steps for building out a professional journalistic voice on the platform, including how to apply for the Facebook blue badge that indicates verification.
In the coming weeks, we will also commence a series of webinars on the site which will be tailored to journalists who are both new and old to Facebook. These webinars will be organized according to new products and features, a person’s level of experience using Facebook as a journalist, and their role (newsgatherer, content creator, or audience engagement specialist)....
People are instinctively drawn to brands that are considered more authentic than their competitors. How can your brand win?Authentic stories help you build emotional connections with customers. But how can you relate your stories back to the target audience?Below are four tactics that can help add a layer of authenticity to your content marketing....
In the age of social media democratization, news distribution is no exception. Nowadays journalists are competing head-to-head with brands and publishers for the most sharable content. The changing landscape of interconnected social news distribution and consumption also means that PR communicators need to strengthen their storytelling abilities and social angles to support their chances of media coverage in this competitive environment.
A recent survey by Edelman, NewsWhip and Muck Rack with an infographic sheds light on how PR folks can exploit these changes to get the most coverage possible. Here are 4 takeaways for PR profs....
...When it comes to organic search, Google and other search engines place a premium on backlinks. They interpret backlinks as “votes” for the content.Of course, to generate backlinks, you must create content that prompts other digital properties to share your content with their audiences.
For the type of content that grades out as shareable, it’s typically not product information or a personnel announcement or an industry award — information we characterize as company-centric. Instead, it’s the type of business storytelling that’s useful or informative and ultimately helps people in their jobs.In short, thought leadership plays at the industry level, not the company level, ideally offering takes that can’t be found elsewhere.
Such dot-connecting points to blogging as one of the best platforms for thought leadership....
There’s a lot of talk about storytelling today amongst communicators, and for good reason. In our frenetic, always-on, socially-connected, information fueled environments, information is continually washing over us. A few things stick, and those are generally stories. The key to a good story is found in the audience’s ability to relate strongly to something in the story, which naturally builds affinity. And affinity is important to brands.
A good narrative can also spur the audience to act. The best social media campaigns are all underpinned with strong stories....
The Aesop Story Engine is one of the most beautiful tools for WordPress that I’ve seen in a long time. Named for Aesop, the master story teller whose fables are woven into our cultural consciousness, this engine provides a powerful suite of multimedia storytelling tools. The Aesop Story Engine plugin was created to be a foundation for building feature-rich, interactive, long-form storytelling themes for WordPress.
The engine powers the Aesop Hosted Storytelling site where users can create stories for free. The Aesop development team has released it as an open source WordPress plugin, making it possible for you to add the same storytelling capabilities to your own website....
We are all hopelessly distracted. It’s not a disorder -- it’s the new world order. Can I have your attention, please?
Whichever methods we put in play with our marketing, we’re powerless unless we’re able to get a prospect to pay attention. It doesn’t come easy. As long as we’re online, on earth, and in a media-centric society, there will always be a shiny object scattering, shattering, and battering our focus.
Okay, when you practice inbound marketing for a while, you start getting good. You figure out how to write a headline cursors and fingers are magnetically attracted to. But a click is nothing more than a click until you, the messenger, truly click with your customer....
Create Epic Stories with Shorthand...
New storytelling tool for journalists, writers and creative people looks very promising. It's in beta and is definitely worth exploring.
... When most people think about the word story, they think about a narrative like “ Jack and Jill went up the hill.” Most of us have been taught that there are two basic kinds of story: fiction and nonfiction.
Metastory is actually a third kind of story. Metastory is story that is told through action. It is not a story that you say, it’s a story that you do. Every individual has one. And every company has one too.
The reason this is so important is that people are already innate storydoers themselves. They use the story of your brand or business to tell part of their own personal metastory. Put another way, people don’t buy products; they take actions that help advance their own personal metastory. As we grow up, all of us learn to manage our own metastory through our actions — the car we drive, the clothes we wear. All of these choices are components that we know people around us will use to piece our metastory together....
Three quick takes on the intersection of storytelling, digital and communications.
To SEO or Not SEO in the Headline
Actually, it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
We can learn from media properties like Business Insider that have mastered the art of headline eye candy.
Take the BI story that bashed Atomic PR with one of my all-time favorite headlines: “Dear PR Lady: Here’s Why I Didn’t Open Any Of Your 3 Email Pitches”
Few search on “PR Lady.”
But look at how the publication tunes the URL...
I believe in the premise of amazing, interesting, human, wacky, irreverent, or timely so much that I co-wrote a book in 2010 that is partially devoted to it—especially the human and timely components. But here’s the truth: I’ve worked with more than seven hundred companies as a marketing consultant, and I’ve come to realize that while “be amazing” can work, it’s also extraordinarily difficult. Telling someone to be amazing is like telling someone to make a viral video. There’s no such thing as a “viral video.” There are videos that become viral, but they are few and far between. The marketing of “be amazing” is the marketing of the swing-for-the-fences home run hitter. There are two by-products of that approach: an occasional home run, and many strikeouts. You can do better. You can break through the noise and the clutter and grab the attention of your customers by employing a different approach that is reliable, scalable, functional, and effective. It’s simply this: stop trying to be amazing and start being useful....
When a veteran stand-up comic is also funny on Twitter, it doesn’t exactly come as a shock. When an unknown phenom makes you physically choke on guffaws, though, it’s a revelation and also something of an extended audition. ...After catching the attention of the comedy cognoscenti in 2010, the then recent Harvard graduate soon got jobs writing on the Oscars and Disney’sA.N.T. Farm., before moving to a staff writer position at NBC’s ensemble sitcom Parks and Recreation. (The show was just renewed for a sixth season.) The in-demand writer is also an accomplished poet who’s writing asatirical guide to science for ladies. Megan Amram’s frothy blend of dark humor and smart, surreal silliness has found more than 356,000 followers on Twitter so far. Although not everybody trying to generate laughs online is doing so for the same reasons, or with the same twisted flair, Amram’s consistent comedic quality is enviable for anyone trying to make their mark with brief bursts of humor. The multidiscipline writer recently spoke with Co.Create about puns, poetry, and how to be funny on Twitter altogether....
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Storytelling on a historic scale for Chicago’s Field Museum.