Winning The Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell -- and Live -- the Best St…

Today, I want to talk to you about the crisis marketers face in reaching audiences that are fragmented, over-messaged, and most importantly in control. I want to show you how STORYTELLING is the solution to this crisis not only for communicators, but for a public in deep need of a more respectful, inspiring and empowering media landscape.And I want to show you how to put that solution into practiceBut before I do that let me tell you a story

Herein lies the source of our crisis. We’ve all been trained in the broadcast model and we’re totally unprepared for the survival of the fittest landscape of the Digitoral Era. So, if we’re returning to an oral tradition battlefield, we should ask ourselves…

This is Annie Leonard. And through her story, I want to talk to you about the absolute necessity that everyone in this room learn to tell great stories. The moral of the story is: we all can.nie Leonard. And this is a story about the absolute necessity for our planet that we all learn to tell great stories. The moral of this story is that we all can do it. Annie spent 10 years worrying about the problems of too much stuff. She spent ten years with the data and the trash and the people behind the problem and then she decided it was time to tell the world about it. So she tried, and found nobody wanted to listen to the problems with the “Materials Economy”. And then she decided to turn it into a story, The Story of Stuff. She started forcing herself to talk about every fact, figure and problem as if it were a situation that an individual could experience – could feel and touch. She brought it down to the human scale and suddenly everyone liked it. Funders said “You should bring this to the web so everyone can see it!”:45 (:45)

From all societies what has survived is their storiesAs containers for values, they are SO important to gluing a society togetherIn fact the most important stories, myths, are cultural DNA. Here’s how they work:

Joseph Campbell studied myths from all times and across all cultures. And he saw a pattern in the ones that survived and truly resonated with peopleThe patterns he found looked very different than your traditional consumption myths. All myths are about creating better world.And left a clear picture of the future myths He said that the stories that survive that really matter are all about one thing: creating a better world. When Bill Moyers asked him what the next great myths would be about, just before he died, he left a pretty clear picture:

If we love stories about people maturing, what does it mean to mature?

> Movie makers, fiction writers, TV producers love stories but they don’t take responsibility for much more.Some notable exceptions but most just want to provide amusementWhere are our mythmakers?

Designers of products and ads have been comfortable in that roleSell explanation of ways to live through products they pushImbue products with meaningAnd love to live in that gap between reality and fictionThis is why this country has consumed more resource in last 50 years than all of humanity before Builders of consumer culture have dominated. But people are becoming deeply uncomfortable with the myths they’ve created. And this is our opportunity.Now designers of products and the designers who market those products have been comfortable for decades filling the myth gap. This is why our society, once based on the puritan values of thrift and modesty has come to consume more resources in the last 50 years than all of humanity that ever came before. Our crisis of unsustainability comes from the fact that the evangelists of consumerism have mastered mythmaking. Now I know they have more money than we do, but the man who studied myth and probably knew more about them than anyone else said that we sustainability evangelists actually have a more powerful advantage.

Based on core Freudian valuesThe audience is the damsel in distressThe brand becomes the hero

Don’t have deficiency needs, we feel inadequate

This is Annie Leonard. And through her story, I want to talk to you about the absolute necessity that everyone in this room learn to tell great stories. The moral of the story is: we all can.nie Leonard. And this is a story about the absolute necessity for our planet that we all learn to tell great stories. The moral of this story is that we all can do it. Annie spent 10 years worrying about the problems of too much stuff. She spent ten years with the data and the trash and the people behind the problem and then she decided it was time to tell the world about it. So she tried, and found nobody wanted to listen to the problems with the “Materials Economy”. And then she decided to turn it into a story, The Story of Stuff. She started forcing herself to talk about every fact, figure and problem as if it were a situation that an individual could experience – could feel and touch. She brought it down to the human scale and suddenly everyone liked it. Funders said “You should bring this to the web so everyone can see it!”:45 (:45)

Based on core Freudian valuesThe audience is the damsel in distressThe brand becomes the hero

This is Annie Leonard. And through her story, I want to talk to you about the absolute necessity that everyone in this room learn to tell great stories. The moral of the story is: we all can.nie Leonard. And this is a story about the absolute necessity for our planet that we all learn to tell great stories. The moral of this story is that we all can do it. Annie spent 10 years worrying about the problems of too much stuff. She spent ten years with the data and the trash and the people behind the problem and then she decided it was time to tell the world about it. So she tried, and found nobody wanted to listen to the problems with the “Materials Economy”. And then she decided to turn it into a story, The Story of Stuff. She started forcing herself to talk about every fact, figure and problem as if it were a situation that an individual could experience – could feel and touch. She brought it down to the human scale and suddenly everyone liked it. Funders said “You should bring this to the web so everyone can see it!”:45 (:45)

If we love stories about people maturing, what does it mean to mature?

Describe the hero

This is Annie Leonard. And through her story, I want to talk to you about the absolute necessity that everyone in this room learn to tell great stories. The moral of the story is: we all can.nie Leonard. And this is a story about the absolute necessity for our planet that we all learn to tell great stories. The moral of this story is that we all can do it. Annie spent 10 years worrying about the problems of too much stuff. She spent ten years with the data and the trash and the people behind the problem and then she decided it was time to tell the world about it. So she tried, and found nobody wanted to listen to the problems with the “Materials Economy”. And then she decided to turn it into a story, The Story of Stuff. She started forcing herself to talk about every fact, figure and problem as if it were a situation that an individual could experience – could feel and touch. She brought it down to the human scale and suddenly everyone liked it. Funders said “You should bring this to the web so everyone can see it!”:45 (:45)

We can go deeper in finding winning formulas though when we realized how our landscape has changed.Lazy in the broadcast traditionTypical formula of character, conflict and plotShort attention spans, info overloadNeed new insight, mine is that brains not evolved much in 70,000 yearsLess variation between two people across the world than two chimps in a forest.We’ve evolved very little since we left Africa. And our brain structure is very much the same.What got our attention then gets it now.Oral tradition has created stories that evolve through survival of the fittestIn the broadcast tradition, we got a little lazy with our stories because audiences were captive, and we got a little stuck in the idea of the simple model of character, conflict and plot. But in the frenetic world of the Digitoral tradttion where stories are everywhere, attention spans are short we have a much higher bar. And we need a deeper insight into stories. My insight is that the human brain has not evolved much at all in 70,000 years and what we found worthy of our attention then, we’ll find worthy of our attention now.

If we love stories about people maturing, what does it mean to mature?

Spare you the gruesome imagery usually associated with factory farm campaignsNeedless to say, it wasn’t breaking through any more than annie’s garbage rants.

FreaksBrains devoted to recognizing other humansMost important to take note of is those we don’t recognize, who break the pattern of our expectations.This is why gods and heroes often look like this. We love these stories.Thumbnail obsessed culture, more important than ever that we find characters that break our patterns of expectation.Freaks. As social animals a huge portion of our brains are taken up with recognizing and interpreting other human faces. We notice other people much more than we can grasp facts or situations or arguments. But the kind of people that most grab our attention, that provide the most danger and opportunity are what I call Freaks. People who break our expectations. Our ancestors rarely met others from outside their tribes, when they did, they perked up and took notice insitictively. This is why all myths contain not just human like characters, but freakish human like characters. We need characters that instantly stand out to grab our attention.

Brought the issue of factory farming to human scaleHad the issue play out in the lives of iconic charactersLeo, Moopheus, ChicketyMade them human, but freakish humans. Anthropomorphic animals are one of storytellers’ favorite kinds of freaks.But characters who break our expectations in any way can work

People love stories of rebellion and punishmentNeeded to insure altruism works. Natural selection and altruism is a paradoxShare the kill can only be held together if people feel assured that cheaters will be punishedStories build that trust and become self fulfilling prophesies. Some say the whole idea of God comes from this need for reassurance.Sisyphus punished for breaking norms about reciprocation and hospitalityBreak norms we like and you’re a villainBreak norms we don’t and you’re a rebelPeople love stories about cheats/Cheats. Another theme that makes stories irresistible to people is the theme of rebellion and punishment. Social groups that can cooperate have an evolutionary advantage over those who don’t. But cooperation is a bit of a Darwinian paradox. It’s not natural. To share the kill, we need to assure each other that rules will be upheld by all. So we tell stories that convince us and ourselves not to cheat. Why is Sisyphus pushing this boulder? Because he didn’t follow the norms about hospitality. We love stories about villians who challenge norms we like being punished and stories of rebels who challenge norms we don’t being successful.

> Made the metaphor of factory farming as a hated norm and our heroes as rebels.That’s why calling out factory farming as a hated cultural norm and casting our iconic characters as rebels made the story instantly engaging and seemingly important to people.

Even though we revel in the novelty of freaks…Our brains wants to know a given story is designed for our tribe, we can transpose it onto our lives as we know them.The freaks we love have analogs to our experience. Why all cultures have gods as forces of natures. Makes that bridgeOur stories must make a bridge between the familiar and the unknown.Here we made the story feel like an inside joke with a huge swath of culture who were familiar and loved the iconic Matrix series.Finally, the human brain seeks a counterbalance to its love of freaks. While we love novelty, we also desire to know that stories are designed specifically for us, for our own tribe and that they provide explanation for life as we experience it. This is why we love to hear about Gods who inhabit the heavens but also the world of our perception, like fire gods, lightning gods or sea gods. But connecting our factory farming story to a major cultural icon, we added powerful familiars that made the message comfortable to everyone and, critically, an inside joke t a smaller but significant subset of the population. The result? Over 20 million views and more than $5 million dollars worth of earned media.

This is Annie Leonard. And through her story, I want to talk to you about the absolute necessity that everyone in this room learn to tell great stories. The moral of the story is: we all can.nie Leonard. And this is a story about the absolute necessity for our planet that we all learn to tell great stories. The moral of this story is that we all can do it. Annie spent 10 years worrying about the problems of too much stuff. She spent ten years with the data and the trash and the people behind the problem and then she decided it was time to tell the world about it. So she tried, and found nobody wanted to listen to the problems with the “Materials Economy”. And then she decided to turn it into a story, The Story of Stuff. She started forcing herself to talk about every fact, figure and problem as if it were a situation that an individual could experience – could feel and touch. She brought it down to the human scale and suddenly everyone liked it. Funders said “You should bring this to the web so everyone can see it!”:45 (:45)

No choice but to embrace the role of mythmaker and change the storyThis is the formula for getting startedTo bring about a more sustainable future, we have no choice but to write new myths. We now have the communications tools and the potential to tell the kinds of stories people are dying to hear. We now need to embrace our role as mythmakers and infuse every communications strategy with Explanation, meaning and Story, Freaks, Cheats and Familiars. We can re-create the successes of my friend Annie and shift the conversation a few million people at a time.

Annie, by turning her passion for garbage into a compelling narrative, had entered what I call the Story Wars, the hidden battle for myth and meaning that, I believe, will determine our planet’s future. As sustainability designers, we need to master the skills that will gain us entrance to these wars. Our challenge is huge because we need not only grab attention in an incredibly media saturated world, but we also need to shift the deep stories people carry with them. We need to be savvy entertainers and master myth makers. So why are these story wars happening? Well human beings have always shared stories, or myths. to make sense of their world. Creation myths, hero stories, gods, demons. Myths make cooperation possible by creating a sense of “us”. When you share the same stories with someone, you’re likely to share the same values and identity. And myths make war possible by creating a sense of “them”. So stories are powerful. And where there’s power there’s struggle for it.:30 (3:30)

No choice but to embrace the role of mythmaker and change the storyThis is the formula for getting startedTo bring about a more sustainable future, we have no choice but to write new myths. We now have the communications tools and the potential to tell the kinds of stories people are dying to hear. We now need to embrace our role as mythmakers and infuse every communications strategy with Explanation, meaning and Story, Freaks, Cheats and Familiars. We can re-create the successes of my friend Annie and shift the conversation a few million people at a time.

Winning The Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell -- and Live -- the Best Stories Will Rule the Future

Care2Team

Winning The Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell -- and Live -- the Best Stories Will Rule the Future