Jamie Garantziotis on the importance of storytelling and why brands should flip the dynamic and listen to the stories of their communities.
I was catching up on emails recently when a message caught my eye from one of my favorite brands: Rapha.
As a bike geek and cycling lover, I love Rapha’s comfortable and beautifully designed cycling wear, and admire its use of content (particularly video) to tell its story.
Story and Narrative
In evolutionary science, storytelling is suspect. This is due, in large part, to the proliferation of “just so” stories which explain all traits and behaviors as optimal adaptations. When nothing can happen by chance or constraint and selection hones everything toward utility, the inevitable result is a kind of storytelling in which the current function of something is explained by its imagined usefulness in the evolutionary past. Not all evolutionary stories, however, are just so. 
Thursday morning I received and read the text for article, did some research, and started sketching. The rough sketches went out at 1:00pm. It doesn't take that long to actually generate the sketches, but it does take a little time for the ideas to "bake in", so to speak. You really need to get to know the character, his environment, how he might carry himself, how he would dress, etc. If this were an established character I'd only need to worry about conveying his story of the day - but here I need to first establish the character for the audience, and then also tell his current story. 
Although only half of the post is about a movie. The other half is about a book I'm reading right now. And these two stories--one a book, one a movie--both break a lot of storytelling conventions/rules. For me, breaking the rules worked in the movie but not in the book. And in this case I'll bet the book is actually more popular than the movie, although I don't have any stats to back that up. 
The first time I encountered the idea of the multiverse was reading a Flash comic book. I was a kid in school and a recent graduate to superhero comics, which were more challenging reading than the Harvey and Archie comics that I was used to. It was also my first step away from the Batman and Superman comic books I was already reading, which were easier to read because they featured characters that were familiar to me from television 
First off, since there’s a lot of confusion about the term “transmedia” itself, let me be clear what I mean when I use it: To me, transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling stories across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies. It is not to be confused with traditional cross-platform media franchises, sequels or adaptations, as it’s all about telling one story where all the story parts are linked together and in sync with each other, even though they may be in different places. 
Andrew focused on a number of points that have a particular resonance with me. He noted, for example, that NASA has lost the ability to start small and iteratively build up technological capabilities - "If you can't iterate, you can't innovate". Instead, ever since Apollo NASA has repeatedly put forward plans for a huge project like the Shuttle, gotten far less funding than it requested, yet continued on regardless. 
If you're using Excel to try to tell a story with data, plotting the data in this application should be the first step in your data visualization process, not your last. It takes time, iterations, and sometimes some brute force to get from the graphing application's defaults to a visual that you're proud to present. 
To some, the notion of using “story” or the act of “storytelling” as a tool for organizational change may seem new or even novel. But humankind has been using stories to communicate within and across organizations for thousands of years. In many ways, “story” is the original tool of transformation. 
Stories are all around us. Our minds are just WAITING for stories we want to hear. We tell ourselves stories to align to our worldviews. If we walk around a small town and see a bookstore that is closing, we may immediately say to ourselves “Amazon just killed another indie bookstore.” But that is just a story. Perhaps the reality of that indie bookstore is that they are moving, or the owner is retiring, or the landlord raised the rent 1,000%, or it was grossly mismanaged for a decade, or a combination of other reasons. But we wanted to hear the story of the evil behemoth (Amazon) crushing the little guy (the indie bookstore) because it aligns with a story we tell ourselves about the world, and our place within it. Perhaps we see ourselves as “the little guy,” which is why we immediate jump to blame Amazon if a small bookstore closes. ![The History of Content Marketing [Infographic] - Corporate Storytelling is Not New | Story and Narrative | Scoop.it](http://img.scoop.it/meB8U4ySI-dNgQGx4JnP_Tl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVaiQDB_Rd1H6kmuBWtceBJ)
An infographic detailing the history of content marketing in timeline form.
Brands have been telling stories to attract and retain customers for hundreds of years. The difference today is that the barriers to entry (content acceptance, talent and technology) no longer exist for brands to get into the publishing arena.
From John Deere to Coca-Cola, the power of story has never been stronger, or more important for brands and its customers. 
[Hat tip to @timlav (Tim Lavallee) for the heads up on this one. Thanks Tim!]
UK grocery chain has given into a campaign, triggered by a 3-year-old girl, to change the name of its Tiger bread to Giraffe bread.
The saying,”The customer is always right!” has been proven by UK supermarket chain, Sainsbury’s. Thanks to an online campaign, the grocery king has announced it will change the name of its Tiger Bread to Giraffe Bread. Last year, 3½-year-old, Lily Robinson wrote a pointed letter to Sainsbury’s after being confused by the product in her mother’s shopping cart. She asked: “Why is Tiger Bread called Tiger Bread? It should be called Giraffe Bread” because the patterns looked closer to the spots on a giraffe, than the stripes of a tiger. 
I had the privilege last night of attending a talk given by Hollywood veteran and long-time Seattle resident Tom Skerritt (Profile, Filmography) at a monthly meeting of The Executive Network of Seattle (see TENS). The theme of his talk was about “storytelling”, and during the evening he had some very relevant lessons to share. 
[Back to back with Erik.]
The Hero’s Journey (or Monomyth, as Joseph Campbell anointed it) and its use in advertising generated more mail than any other topic recently. Many of you were intrigued, confused, or simply wanted to know more. So let’s revisit the topic with a specific example. |
Retail has a new tale to tell, and its name is . . . STORY. A 2000 square foot store located in Manhattan’s burgeoning new retail corridor of 10th avenue, STORY is a retail space that has the point of view of a magazine, changes like a gallery and sells things like a store. Every four to six weeks, STORY will change out all its merchandise, design, fixtures and reinvent the store around a different story-based theme. 
Instead, I’d like to step back and make some observations on the place of fiction in our culture today, a.d. 2012. It is very different from the place it occupied in the 19th century, or even the place it occupied up through the middle of the last century. 
Lance Weiler interviews Sparrow Hall for DIY Days: On dancing to 80s music, creative career paths, and developing stories for today's biggest brands. Without conflict, you don’t have a story. But it’s not just any conflict. It’s a struggle between a hero and a villain, to put it as simply as possible. The conflict can be as big as World War III or as small as who will win the flower show. The hero can be flawed, and the villain can – and should – have his good points. But it’s all about the struggle between the protagonist and antagonist. Without that, you have an anecdote: We were in New York City. We spotted Stanley Tucci coming out of a drugstore. We asked for his autograph. He obliged. That’s a fine celebrity-spotting anecdote, but it’s not a story. 
A good analogy is priceless–it helps us understand the new by connecting it to the familiar. A bad analogy is like an empty tin can at the bottom of a well, it isn’t good to drink from.
Good data visualizations are like storytelling. Where does this analogy lie?
For practitioners of the craft, connecting our work to stories feels satisfying — it is a call to raise our standards and an opportunity to enhance the influence of our field. Stories evoke images of rapt audiences, dramatic arcs, and unexpected plot twists.
Unfortunately this analogy is a stretch. 
Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games… I’m really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly — I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don’t like tactics, I don’t like fighting, I don’t like keeping track of inventory, and I can’t read a game map to save my life. 
"When you can't create you can work."
After David Ogilvy’s wildly popular 10 tips on writing and a selection of advice from modernity’s greatest writers, here comes some from iconic writer and painter Henry Miller. 
One of the things you learn writing fiction is to think in metaphors.
The first draft of any novel or screenplay usually spills forth in blissful cluelessness. You tell yourself, I’m writing a detective story, or a Western, or some crazy genre that I don’t even know the name of. Then comes Draft #2 and you have to ask yourself, “What the hell is this thing about?”
That’s when metaphor comes in. 
One of Jeff Skoll’s passions is storytelling. It stems from his youth, when he hoped to be a writer and inspire people to help solve the world’s biggest problems. Skoll took a detour on that path—moving from Toronto to Silicon Valley, where he met Pierre Omidyar and became eBay’s first employee and president. That detour, however, was fortunate, because it has enabled him to tackle his early passions on a scale that he could 
When I first learned about the importance of archetypes, I was amazed at how quickly everything seemed to click. My interest in mythology was now applicable to my work in branding and marketing. I began to understand the wisdom these universal, iconic figures held and wanted to find a way to tap into that power by using archetypes as a way of explaining ideas and defining brands. 
[Absolutely fascinating!]
MINUTE 1: AT-TENSION!
MINUTE 2: THE BUILD
MINUTE 3: THE RATCHET |
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