As long as the roots are not severed, all is well in the garden. Peter Sellars makes sense of the world to Jack Warden playing the President.
Archive for the ‘Stories Well Told’ Category
Inspiring and Igniting a New Consumer Revolution
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011I think it’s a very good sign when Alex Bogusky, Adweek’s Creative Director of the decade decides to stop selling products like KFC for for famed agency Crispin Porter Bogusky and sets out to create an incubator-slash-brand called “Common” to “Design a capitalism that spreads love and prosperity to all stakeholders.” Their goal is to create hundreds or thousands of locally grown businesses working together. From “competitive advantage to collaborative advantage.”
How? Seems like one part open source one part franchise one part mad brand skills. Frankly I think only good can come from this. But the real how we’re just going to have to stay tuned for.
If you want to see a great departure from classic branding, give a glance at their slideshow on Fearless Revolution.
Story about Transcending HIV/AIDS Stigma in the Workplace
Thursday, December 2nd, 2010Check out our recent project for Free Range Studios and Levi Strauss.
It’s a moving comic book that tells the story of an HIV-infected employee and the challenges she faces. In my research around the web I found so little media about stigma in the workplace, and I come away from the project really impressed with the work Levi’s is doing on the issue. We dove deeply into complex information and various presentations they had in order to come out with a narrative that reflects the issue, the personal journey, and the policy.
Addressing stigma through story
Toyota’s Crowdsourced Storytelling Campaign
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010
I’ve always thought Toyota was a great brand. I’ve had two Toyotas, both used little guys that seemed to last forever…just add a little oil. Now Toyota’s hit the skids a bit, and though I switched to biodiesel-ready Mercedes almost a decade ago, it’s still a brand I believe in. They sense there are a lot more people like me out there, and have launched an interesting crowdsourced story platform on Facebook, the type of which we’re going to see A LOT more of. The campaign is called “Auto-Biography” and features something I call storysourcing, which combines written stories, videoed stories, and in the future, animation.
People love to tell stories about things they love. Storysourcing is the method of leveraging that that passion through audience-created written, photographed, or videoed stories of experiences that clearly support an an organization’s brand.
Nobody can tell those stories better than your audience. No agency, no famous commercial director. Toyota (and Saatchi, who created the campaign) has found a good structure here; since July 2, they’ve supposedly collected 5,400 stories on Facebook. It shows Toyota’s belief in the power of story, the power of social media and the power of their audience’s voice. It’s a good number considering they’re not even giving out prizes. Really small barrier to story entry: just choose your car and type in your little story, and maybe they’ll show up with a camera and film you. Very smart.
The campaign does the following:
- strengthens Toyota’s audience engagement
- heightens (and helps repair) their brand authenticity
- gives Toyota serious fodder to expand their social media presence
The content is a wide variety of compelling, highly targeted and inspiring stories to be posted and reposted with a dash of branding, and evoking a high level of audience trust. I saw one cool video called the “Boller Camry Tree” about a family that have been driving Toyota for years. The 14 year old kid is hoping to get the Camry hybrid for college; the mom doubts it.
Toyota is culling a small selection of the best stories to market more widely, has used eight of them in commercials…and supposedly they’re going to animate them. I’m looking forward to seeing this.
Compare Toyota’s campaign to Thermos’ recent ‘story’ project. Looks like actors telling stories that aren’t really stories, and aren’t really interesting…too bad.
Toyota shows once again that they get it.
Tsunami Stories Help Make it Real
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010Part of modern life is having access to the tragedies all around us on what seems like a daily basis. And yet how do we connect with them, the hurricanes, the earthquakes, the fires…how do we feel them and empathize with those that are suffering? It’s a question that seems to hit me with every tragedy: how to make it real?
Maybe it just does take five years to collect them. Here’s an amazing set of first person stories from the tsunamis that do just that. I also really like the combination of still image, b-roll footage, personal footage, and interviews. Also includes an interesting interactive map.
Created in part by the folks from MediaStorm.
Real Stories from the Tsunami