THE POWER OF STORYTELLING

If you are going to go to all the effort of making a video, whether it is a news story, a documentary or a video to promote either your product or yourself, there is no point in doing it if no one wants to watch it.

My emphasis here is on wants to watch it.

I know far too many people who take enormous time, and often enormous expense, to create videos that are filled with important information, but are frankly difficult to want to watch. They are just not compelling, even if they are good for you.

I tell these people that they should open a fast food chain called McBroccolis.

So, how do you create videos that people actually want to watch?

The answer is, as with most things in life, right in front of us.

NBC Nightly News, made at considerable expense and chock full of ‘important’ and highly researched information, gets 5 million viewers a night, in a nation of 340 million people. That is, their news stories, despite all their work and effort, are only reaching 1.5% of the population.  Just a few channels away (so to speak) is Netflix, which gets 280 million paid subscribers.

What is the difference?

NBC delivers ‘information’; Netflix delivers stories.

As human beings, we are wired to be receptive to stories.  We have been telling one another stories for, quite literally, thousands of years.  Stories connect with us in a fundamental and emotional way that ‘information’ simply does not. Throughout history, stories have been used to impart information.  The Book of Exodus is a story, but it also imparts important information.  Roman mythologies were stories, but they imparted important information. The Parables of Jesus are stories, but they are used to impart information.

What we do, and what we teach our clients to do, is to package the information and the facts that they want to deliver in classic storytelling formats and architecture.  A character, an arc of story, a journey, a transformative experience and a conclusion.  Pretty much every movie, you have ever seen, every Netflix series, every HBO, Amazon, Apple or Hollywood film is structured in the same way.

What happens when you marry Hollywood and Netflix storytelling techniques to news, facts and information?

You get incredible audience engagement. You create videos that people actually want to watch – as opposed to have to.  You create a deep emotional experience and bond between the viewer and the subject of the story you are telling.

Does it work?

Almost every client we have worked with, anywhere in the world, has experienced a spike in their ratings, and more importantly, a spike in the time that viewers will stay with a story, or a network.

Good enough for Hollywood, good enough for Shakespeare, good enough for us.