by Jacqueline Koch | Sep 6, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
In today’s fast moving data-driven economy, being “scared of numbers” is becoming a major liability for both readers and writers. However, data also provides a great opportunity to uncover insights, discover connections and move knowledge forward. The challenge then is how to empower writers to tell the stories revealed by data in such a way that an average maths-averse reader can understand and embrace.
Maths-anxiety is “a thing”
Maths anxiety has been defined as feelings of “tension and anxiety that interfere with the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in a wide variety of ordinary life and academic situations.” According to a study by researchers at the University of Granada, tension, nervousness, concern, worry, edginess, impatience, confusion, fear and mental block are some of the symptoms of this disorder. For the average person, this means that the very thought of having to interact with numbers makes them queasy.
The power of data
More and more magazines and newspapers, as well as their branded content studios, are recognising the power of using data to identify and tell stories. According to Virtualization and Cloud News, approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. This number will continue to grow as smartphones, tablets, wearable technology and connected homes produce more and more data.
But for journalists and other writers, the data they really want to access is called “open data.” According to the Open Data Handbook, open data is data that can be freely used, re-used and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute. But it’s not just for journalists. In March this year, as part of the 2016 International Open Data Day, cities, states and federal agencies tackled some of their biggest issues using data. From school enrolment to international aid distribution to tracking terrorism, the open data community tackled some of the world’s most pressing issues.
Portland, OR-based journalist Lee Van der Voo who is also the managing director of the non-profit journalism organisation InvestigateWest, told The New School’s, Ashawnta Jackson that journalists have come to see data work as an opportunity to do more with less. “Using open data makes us incredibly more efficient in analysing trends. It helps us look for newsworthy patterns in everything from contract spending in state government to budget analysis, and enables us to look very closely at particular data sets, for example traffic stops made by police or accidents on state highway.”
Bringing meaning to data with storytelling
For the many people afflicted with math anxiety, the growth of data-driven journalism may not be music to their ears. What’s more, according to Jennifer Aaker, Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, studies show that we are wired to remember stories much more than data, facts and figures. However, when data and story are used together, she said, audiences are moved both emotionally and intellectually.
In his book, Facts Are Sacred, Simon Rogers suggests that data analysis isn’t about graphics and visualisations; it’s about telling a story. “Look at data the way a detective examines a crime scene. Try to understand what happened and what evidence needs to be collected.” According to Rogers, the visualisation will come naturally once the mystery is solved. The focus is the story.
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Jim Stikeleather cautions that done well, a visualisation should tell a story through the graphical depiction of statistical information. “The visualisation needs to tell a story to the audience. Storytelling helps the viewer gain insight from the data,” he said.
Data-driven storytelling done well
During the final week of last November, The Wall Street Journal published an article each day under the title: Our Demographic Destiny. The seven-part series tries to answer the question: What will the world be like in 2050?
Topics covered included “The end of cheap labor,” “Gender gap” and “Tastes like chicken,” which explored the challenges food producers face in satisfying the world’s appetite for meat. In addition to a rich narrative describing each trend and the people who are impacted, each article included photographs and visualisations of demographics along with companion anecdotes. Put together, the series helped readers envision how we will work, age and live. Readers who have virtual reality (VR) headsets could even watch embedded VR movies or interact with the content using their keyboard, game-board or mobile device.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Aug 23, 2016 |
By Christopher Ross
It may be surprising to know that there is a powerful connection between the hormone oxytocin and the bread and butter work of the publishing industry – storytelling.
While oxytocin was discovered nearly 70 years ago, it has only recently been proven to produce reactions that tend to make us become more trusting, compassionate, even charitable and generous. It creates a signal in the brain which is referred to as “it’s safe to approach others,” and dubbed the moral molecule, cuddle hormone, the holiday hormone. Some have even called it the love hormone. As the research and the naming continues to evolve, one thing is undisputed, oxytocin makes us more sensitive to the social cues around us and facilitates narrative bonding with stories.
The reason this hormone is interesting to publishers is that it is what the brain generates when activated through engaging narratives, images, music and more. The movie industry figured this out early on and leveraged this emotional response to sell films. Writers know the art and arch of a compelling narrative with or without action. This is one of the key physiological reasons that while watching a fight scene happening on the ledge of a building, one might get sweaty palms or experience an emotional tug watching while a scene with a soft piano music playing while a young child on crutches struggles to walk up a grassy field. Because narratives activate oxytocin, storytellers have the power to grab the audience, and keep them coming back for more, and more.
The medium matters
The form in which a narrative is told absolutely matters. Marshall McLuhan a narrative theorist famously wrote back in the 1960s that “the medium is the message,” This has been found to be neurologically true. Whether the story is told in print, online, interactive, in videos, pictures, content marketing, editorials or shoppable content, they are all mediums that have the ability to generate oxytocin and elicit empathy, compassion and more.
Prior to these revelations, researchers have long known that two regions of the brain known as the Broca and Wernicke areas, light up when language is being shared. But recent research has demonstrated that when stories and analogies using colourful, narrative and sticky language are applied, many more cortexes in the brain light up. As an example, if a story teller describes a noisy and smelly kitchen, they would only activate one cortex in their audience’s brain. But when the author describes walking through a crowded kitchen, with its loudbanging of the pots and pans and the aromaof nutmeg and cinnamon wafting through the air, the audience fires their cortexes that relate to smell, sounds and even movement. It has proven that stories activate 3 timesmore cortexes of the brain than facts and numbers alone as explained in The neuroscience behind storytelling.
Jennifer Aaker, General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business found stories are remembered up to 22 times more than facts alone. What’s more, she found audiences reported more positive reactions to advertisements that were told as narratives verses those using only facts.
Don’t tell them. Show them…
For marketing and messaging it is no longer enough to tell consumers what your product or opinions are. You need to show why it is important for them. It’s not new, but it should be adopted more broadly. According to Onespot, 92 percent of consumers want brands to make ads that feel like a story. They want content that is compelling, expressive and that they can relate to.
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by Jacqueline Koch | Aug 18, 2016 |
By Estelle Pin, Boost! Collective’s Millennial-in-chief
This is the first in a two-part series about the increasing trend of ethical consumerism in millennials. Part two will explore storytelling in ethical consumerism and who’s doing it well.
Think about your 20s.
Whether you’re experiencing them right now, or remembering days behind you, some things are universally true. For instance: chances are, you thought of positive things when prompted to think about this time in your life. You also probably thought of self-defining moments. That could be the moment you got your first real job, or that really fantastic date you’ll never forget. Or it could be the single strange moment when you tried something new and you decided this was now going to be something you did.
That’s the thing about identify formation. It’s sort of a trick question. “Who are you?” Um, a cellist, a writer, a skier, a runner? “No, no, that’s what you do—but who ARE you?” I’m … a French immigrant. “No, not where you’re from—WHO ARE YOU?”
When the date who thinks they’re tricky asks this, the answer will be: What I do is who I am. As is what I think. And what I like. And where I shop. All of these things are who I am. Because identify formation happens when we make decisions, and when we see our values or traits reflected in our actions.
Making the “right” decisions
Shopping according to your values and making consumer decisions based off ethical concerns is a quantifiably shared trait in today’s millennial generation. And the fact that this generation is undergoing so much identity formation now, is part of why ethical consumerism exists and is so popular among a generation still in its formative years.
Ethical consumerism is “the practice of purchasing products and services produced in a way that minimizes social and/or environmental damage, while avoiding products and services deemed to have a negative impact on society or the environment.” It’s generally much more expensive than price shopping, because of the increased standards for production, or because you’re paying for higher wages, or because your money also goes to donating a pair of those shoes for someone in need.
So, is that something you do?
Nowadays, for people born roughly between 1980 and 2000, the answer is more often yes than for any previous generation. In their article “Examining Overconsumption, Competitive Consumption, and Conscious Consumption from 1994 to 2004”, Carr, Gotleib, Lee and Shah posit that members of Generation X over-consume, at the lowest cost, and with the lowest rates of ethical consumption, instead opting to shop for status signifiers; traits which shaped the direction of our economy and global leading into the 2000s.
Millennials, both exuberant to be coming of an age where their actions form change in the world, and reactionary to the generation that preceded them, are hoping to reverse these trends. In a 2014 Forbes report, 40 to 60 percent of millennials (depending on location) responded that they would pay more for socially conscious or eco-friendly brands.
Why pay the price?
It could be that part of this trend is due to increasing stress over the state of our world and society. Global warming is finally too obvious to reasonably refute. Global productivity per capita has been growing for decades—while personal income and wages have not been increasing to match. Human rights violations are frequent news, refugee numbers are at a high all across the world, and sexual assault happens to one in every four women you know. So of course, a company which touts positive environmental impact, or fair wages, or charitable donations to people in need, will speak to people who want to make a difference with their purchases.
The other reason ethical companies are attracting so many loyal millennial consumers willing to pay more for their products is simply, that’s what we do. Because it’s a part of who we are—or who we think we are. In a survey by Boston Consulting Group, half of millennials surveyed said that the brands that they shop and the choices they make say something about who they are as people.
A trend with no sign of stopping
While the kind of identity formation that happens in a person’s twenties seems conveniently timed with these pressing global issues, the trend of ethical consumerism isn’t just going to stop when millennials hit their 40s.
Think about the peanut butter you bought in your 20s. The dish soap? The toothpaste? Are they the same brands you buy now? Again, the likelihood that you said yes is disproportionate. And according to Jon F. Sherry’s “Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior”, it’s even more likely that your kids will buy the same brand, simply because you do. Which means, if you are shopping ethically now, your children will probably continue your ethical consumer habits, even if they don’t know that’s why they do it.
This means for companies getting on board with ethical and environmentally-friendly production, the consumer returns aren’t just a passing trend. Furthermore, these companies reap the benefits of the better world they contribute to.
Tune in next time for more on whose doing this well, and how we can learn from them…
by Jacqueline Koch | Aug 3, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
“The lying started at 7:27 a.m. and did not stop until after dark. Even for Donald Trump, Monday, Aug. 1, was a banner day for bullshit.” So starts a recent article by Olivia Nuzzi, who covers politics for The Daily Beast.
In today’s highly competitive news environment, how is it that The Daily Beast is growing 25 percent each year to reach more than 20 million readers per month? According to editor-in-chief, John Avlon, while there are a number of factors driving this growth, one of the most important is the publication’s unique voice—as is evidenced by the opening line of the Trump story.
A unique voice at the Daily Beast
“We focus on dictators, dissidents and terrorists,” he said. “Our job is to make important stories interesting and entertaining as well as educational. To do this, we have to be willing to call BS.” According to Avlon, the site’s voice is characterized by short sentences, short paragraphs and vigorous English. “We rely heavily on Hemingway as a style guide,” he said.
Launched in 2006, The Daily Beast takes its name from a fictional newspaper in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop. Avlon, best known as a television journalist with a long list of credits including The Daily Show, CNN, MSNBC and Real Time with Bill Maher, took over as editor-in-chief from Tina Brown in 2013. Brown was a former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
With a focus on original reporting and breaking news, The Daily Beast has been able to avoid the commodity news carried by many competitors and create differentiated stories. “Competitors have content farms that create partisan news,” he said. “We carry columns across the opinion spectrum and avoid commodity news from wire services.” With his trademark bluntness, Avlon stated that commodity news kills a news publication because voice is critical.
Hiring writers who are already known on cable news is another important part of The Daily Beast’s strategy. Avlon is himself a regular contributor to CNN. “We get television coverage because our writers are known entities on cable,” he said. At the same time, the publication looks to cable news commentators as a talent pool. Each of The Daily Beast’s writers also pays careful attention to developing their own brands.
According to Avlon, while many partisan news sites are seeing declines, The Daily Beast continues to prosper. “Our competitors have had a rough period but we are growing with a lean team of 100 people,” he said.
“We have built a great team and we are hard to poach from. Our journalists have a sense of mission and that’s why we have a high-morale, high-metabolism newsroom,” he said.
According to Avlon, his team is not solely measured on traffic markers. Instead, the focus is on identifying and creating the stories that readers love.
“We have to be nimble. We are a pirate ship fighting a guerilla war,” he said. “But we understand that quality content creates a quality audience.”
The Daily Beast is not only a breaking news site. There is an increasing focus on the lifestyle sector. According to Avlon, the publication understands that people have a variety of interests. “You can appeal to different sides of their personality to create a site that is less siloed,” he said.
The business of news at The Daily Beast
The Daily Beast’s main revenue stream is content marketing which allows it to bring quality content to its quality audience and help advertisers avoid adblockers. “We have found that quality branded content will do well. It involves a shift in thinking about what advertising is.” According to Avlon, his team takes the business side very seriously. “We all need to think entrepreneurially. If we don’t there are major threats,” he said.
“Our business is a mix between science and jazz. We are reactive to the news cycle but we use data to anticipate what readers are interested in,” he said. The Daily Beast team aims to be transparent about data so that everyone in the newsroom understands what is working and what isn’t. Avlon is quick to point out, however, that his team cannot rely solely on algorithms. “If you use algorithms only, you will lose your differentiation. You will end up with celebrity gossip, sex scandals and will miss out on the real meat,” he said.
Embracing social platforms
The Daily Beast is amongst the many publications including The Washington Post, Slate, and Gawker who are embracing Facebook Instant Articles. “Facebook is a major player in content distribution and can be an enormously powerful way to get some of our branded or sponsored content out,” he said.
The team has also been aggressive with Facebook Live to create intimacy with reporters. Earlier this year, The Daily Beast launched two new original live series on Facebook. “Cheat Sheet” features Avlon and other editors breaking down the top stories of the day and answering questions from the Facebook audience. “Drink Cart” features author and cocktail expert Noah Rothbaum talking with a Daily Beast editor about the latest culture news over drinks.
Keep them hooked right to the end
“With his mouth full of fast-food poultry and his hands gripping a knife and fork, for a blissful few moments, Donald Trump told no lies at all.” So ends Olivia Nuzzi’s article 15 Hours of Donald Trump’s Lies. A great reminder for all storytellers to find their voice, create unique content and stay committed to the last period.
The Daily Beast is one of the companies that participants of the 2016 VDZ Akademie Digital Publisher’s Tour visited in New York City this June. The Tour was co-organized by Boost! Collective.
This is the second in a series of pieces we are writing about the storytellers we met on the tour. Read the first piece Powering passionate storytelling at The Atavist Magazine
Boost! Collective is a strategic messaging and story-driven communications firm. We help clients discover, write and tell powerful stories which drive engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | Jul 20, 2016 |
Perspectives from the 2016 Digital Publisher’s Tour
As the co-organizer of VDZ Akademie’s 2016 Digital Publisher’s Tour, together with Seattle-based innovation journalist, Ulrike Langer, we had the amazing opportunity to meet with a wide range of companies in the “digital publishing” space. What do all of these organizations—ranging from industry stalwarts like The New York Times and the Associated Press to upstarts like Chicago’s Rivet Radio and New York City-based The Daily Beast— have in common? A deep commitment to the craft of storytelling and a passion for embracing the change that new audiences and emerging platforms demand.
Marching to your own drum
Conversations with a variety of publishers, but in particular the Daily Beast, underlined for us how important is it for storytellers to have a distinct point of view and a clearly identifiable voice. At Atavist, we learned how a company can fund long-form narrative storytelling without relying on advertising. This allows writers to create content on their own terms without relying on page views.
One of the other themes that emerged for us – particularly after a conversation with the visionary Jim Kennedy, Senior Vice Vresident, Strategy and Enterprise Development at The Associated Press: the importance of recognizing the realities that the future holds and then adjusting what you are doing today. According to Kennedy, the AP has realized that now is the time to start angling towards the future rather than clinging to old ways of finding, writing and packaging and distributing the news.
To this end, AP is contributing news feeds to IBM’s Watson as a data source, which in turn is combined with other data to create new offerings across segments. The AP believes that digital voice interfaces are going to be a key to how information is accessed and consumed. Working with partners like Rivet Radio, AP is now converting news feeds from text to audio.
For many of the German-based tour participants, the Amazon Echo or “Alexa,” whom they met for the first time at the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, was a revelation. Echo is a voice-enabled wireless speaker that is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic and other real time information. It was evident that this new technology creates powerful new opportunities, while at the same time, requires that content publishers develop new approaches for thinking about content.
When virtual worlds collide
Many of the tour participants also had the opportunity to go face-to-face with virtual reality content and headsets at Framestore’s VR Studio. One of the highlights was experiencing a VR movie created by the Framestore team for HBO’s Game of Thrones.
It was another clear demonstration of how virtual reality is pushing the boundaries of storytelling for content producers across the spectrum and how it provides an incredible opportunity to drive unprecedented engagement.
Music to our ears
Tour participants particularly appreciated being the first live-studio audience for Rivet News Radio’s daily news podcast. The visit cast a bright light on how an organization is advancing new business models for audio-based content including a platform that delivers a cost-effective and efficient way to produce, digitally distribute and monetize branded audio content. Rivet also offers a solution that provides businesses with informative, curated playlists of bite-sized news and information, tailored for a business environment and proven to keep callers on-hold longer.
As the week-long tour progressed, it became increasingly apparent that today, storytellers have many powerful tools at their disposal, whether their medium is the written word, audio or video.
Go deeper with some of the Digital Publisher’s Tour companies
The tour offered a unique and exclusive opportunity for first-hand experience and an insider’s view of technology and media companies at the forefront of innovation and trends.
What follows is a four-part series that aims to provide a glimpse of some of the many innovative and groundbreaking developments taking place at the companies tour participants visited.
First up is Powering passionate storytelling at The Atavist magazine which describes how a group of journalists in Brooklyn, NY is pioneering a new version of long-form storytelling without the constraints of having to be profitable. How are they doing this? Via a self-publishing platform for rich interactive long-form journalism which is available to content creators via a monthly subscription.
Boost! Collective is a strategic messaging and story-driven communications firm that helps clients discover, write and tell powerful stories that drive engagement.
by Jacqueline Koch | May 2, 2016 |
By Janinne Brunyee
It was a long and winding road that brought Stackla co-founders Robb Miller, Peter Cassidy and Damien Mahoney from Sydney, Australia to an office in San Francisco which is where participants on the 2016 Digital Innovators’ Tour met Peter yesterday.
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It all began when Cassidy was working for the digital rights holder to the National Rugby league and Miller was working for the League itself. All three founders had a keen appreciation for the challenges organisations face around content and to use content to engage fans.
After winning a services contract to create content for the rugby league, the trio teamed up to start an agency. “We were creating 40 long form articles a day and many videos and we quickly realised the more effort and time we put into content creation, the less traction it got. In fact, long form pieces got less engagement that short videos,” Cassidy told Tour participants.
“We wondered what would happen if we flipped the model around and instead of competing with the content on social networks, the answer was to embrace it instead,” he said. This led to the idea to create technology that enables publishers and brands to collect existing user-generated content and use it as a powerful source of information. And that was when Stackla was born.
“We pitched the idea to an Australian broadcaster who had the rights to the Tour de France and were surprised when they said they would buy it,” he said. The new company then quickly pulled a prototype together and launched the company in time for the 2012 Tour de France in 2012 to great success for the broadcaster.
On the basis of this early validation, a new engineering team was assembled in Sydney who started to build the technology platform. The next year, the company set up an office in London and a year or so later, the founders moved to San Francisco to set up the US operations.
Stackla: The problem of fragmented content
According to Cassidy, the team saw that content marketing was becoming increasingly important to brands and after being approached by agencies to help them with brand content, Stackla expanded their focus beyond publishers to include brands.
“What we were seeing is that publishers and brands are creating content and then using social media as a distribution channel. At the same time, organic reach is diminishing which means that today, you really have to pay-to-play.” But the key question remained: Is this driving the right people to the right destination at the right ROI?
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