Mike Summers | Geoff McHenry | Ryan Chappell | Yesenia Bello | Stewart Cornelius

On this Episode, the crew discusses a bit of their lack of excitement for CES and Yesenia’s experience visiting. And then we spend a bit more time discussing thoughts on Mike’s takeaways from the Brand Storytelling Conferences at Sundance Film Festival.

In January 2020 I had the pleasure of visiting the Brand Storytelling Conference as a part of Sundance Film Festival. Coming off the heels of it, I wanted to share a few takeaways with a random assortment of my larger team, friends and family.  It was an amazing conference that I would highly recommend focusing on longform content. 

There are a few reasons I would suggest going:

• Creative inspiration
• Understanding value of long form content
• Exposure to new creative partners
• Exposure to differentiated content development approaches from brands

This is of course a tip of the iceberg, but I’ve attempted to summarize some key takeaways that really stuck out for me. If you have any questions, please let me know and happy to continue the discussion!

There has been a consumer shift from gaining attention to garnering emotion.

Agency: Twitter

Mike’s 2 Cents: We have become hyper focused on short attention spans and how to communicate a message in 2 seconds. However, as we see behaviors emerging like IGTV and binge watching on streaming platforms—there becomes the question of how you can evoke enough emotion in consumers to incent them to watch a 2-minute video instead. Twitter positioned two key ways of doing this are to humanize your voice and/or exchange value.  Disney+ executed this on twitter creating a super thread of nearly every Disney property interacting with Disney+ after announcing their launch. Consumer interaction with use of the word “nostalgia” or “childhood” went through the roof.

Begin with ideas and content over brand?

Agency: The Marketing Arm

Mike’s 2 Cents: As marketers we can consistently be so focused on building a message that we want to communicate—that we can at times miss the plethora of amazing stories and ideas already in existence that consumers are looking for. In addition, the industry’s agency model has fallen out of whack in many ways as we have cut costs and are asking huge agencies/companies driven by profitability to stretch creativity—which in many ways are contradictory goals. A differentiated way of approaching this is to explore creators with an excellent idea and explore how we can use our funding and branding to be a catalyst to this. An excellent example of this is the 5B documentary series executed by our J&J corporate equity team in collaboration with UM Studios, Highway 61 films and Saville where J&J corporate commissioned a project to speak about the heroic nurses taking on AIDS in it’s earliest days. The film went on to win the Entertainment Lions Grand Prix at Cannes and was sold to RYOT netting out for no cost.

There are many ways of executing affective longform media.

Agency: Warner Media

Mike’s 2 Cents: As brand owners we can struggle at times with discussing long form content. The reason is because the approach can at time seem daunting (what should it look like?) and we struggle with understanding how to measure ROI when short form content seems more effective and efficient to create in our measurement approaches. Here are some examples of different approaches to long form content that were successful as judged by different success metrics:

• Documentary Style:  Invesco QQQ funded a project to share the story of a 13-year-old entrepreneur who developed his own clothing line. 
• Results: The success of this campaign led to an organic interview on Fox News (a competitor of Warner) and much more earned media.
• Experiential: Hulu developed content promoting the 3rd season of The Handmaids Tail by taking on NYC statue inequities. Acknowledging that of the 150 statues erected in NYC only 5 represented women—Hulu created an experiential activation leveraging 140 mirrors in the style of women silhouettes. This allowed women to visually see themselves through this interpretation.
• Success: I have not located the results online, but it was touted that this led to the erection of a new woman statue in Central Park and replication of this activation nationwide.
• Sales Driving: ASICS developed a long form piece of content focused on a consumer experience of preparing for a marathon with their gear and then made every piece of clothing available for purchase through the content at the end. (unable to locate video online)
• Success: Sales driving

Leverage talent and influencers as a central piece of your product offering to maximize effectiveness.

Agency: Fullscreen

Mike’s 2 Cents: It can be very easy for us to think of leveraging influencers or talent as a way to amplify our messages—however there can be tremendous value in integrating talent as an upfront piece of the content development and even product development process. This was the approach Hot Wheels took when leveraging their partnership with YouTube influencer and teenage car enthusiast Tanner Fox including the execution of custom merch, custom Hot Wheels cars, YouTube content and even TV. With this, they were forced to relinquish a lot of creative freedom and collaborate with their legal team in a very different way. 

• Success: This has led to Hot Wheels YouTube channel being their #1 driver of sales of all media tactics.

VR has provided new unknown opportunities for long-form content.

Agency: RYOT at Verizon Media 

Mike’s 2 cents: Leveraging technological advancements in VR and AR can be a method of elevating the emotional effectiveness of content in new ways:

• P&G: Expands their “The Look” campaign by putting consumers into a music video that continues to become more exciting as it becomes more diverse.
• Lil Dicky: Quickly created his “Earth” music video by leveraging technology to scan his body movements and place him in a CG world instead of developing all animation from scratch.
• The March will offer audiences an unprecedented opportunity to experience the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech in groundbreaking room-scale, interactive virtual reality.

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