It’s easy to tell a story, watch:
Steve Martin walks into a room. He sits down in front of a vintage typewriter, looks pensively at the clock and begins, slowly to type. As his fingers move from key to key, a single word is stamped onto the page…
You want to know what the word is, don’t you? Is it a happy word? Is it a suicide note? Is that the actual Steve Martin, from Father of the Bride, or just some guy called Steve Martin?
Storytelling gives you the power to change a world – a world of your own creation. If you get the world right, like JK Rowling or JRR Tolkien, you can bring billions of people into it with you, eager to find out what the next word is.
Storytelling doesn’t have to be about creating fantastic universes, either. You could tell a story about the most banal interactions of daily life, and if it resonates with people then it will find an audience.
At 72Point, storytelling is in the essence of everything we do. We’re looking to find stories that will evoke a reaction in as many people as possible, who may then share that story online, in their workplace or at home, starting conversations and debates.
A lot of our work starts with a very small survey – in a meeting or brainstorm, someone will toss out a statement like ‘I realised this morning I’ve been singing Blank Space by Taylor Swift wrong for months’ and that will start a conversation about your hearing going in old age, or the differences between women and men, or how often misheard lyrics replace the real ones in your mind. If it gets us talking, we think it will get the general public talking, and so we’ll then take that idea, create a big survey around it then we’ll have a new story – like the song lyrics that everyone gets wrong.
That story worked because it’s a conversation that millions of people might not think to have, without a little push from us. But once they do, they realise that actually this is a topic that everyone has an opinion on – and if it raises a little awareness of hearing aids, then that’s our work done.
Storytelling isn’t simply about words, either. We’re increasingly using other methods to get across our ideas, from 360-degree videos where online users can explore a new space, to interactive puzzles as well as our in-house-produced video content. We’re covering all the bases when it comes to getting messages and stories into the press.
For crystal-clear visual representation of a story, our talented designers are on hand to create infographics and animations that can bring a static story to life. The best examples of our work are the ones that bring together elements of everything we can do, to deliver a story that everyone can take something from – like this example about debt levels.
Personally, my opinion on telling a story is simple – just keep people reading, one word after the next. If your content is engaging then you’ll do exactly that.
And hey, you made it down this far, didn’t you?