New Work: Storytelling is What We Do

Take a look at the latest work from Rockhill Strategic. Created for Travois, an amazing Kansas City company that prides themselves on being a mission-based for profit corporation. Since 1995, they have been the leading builder of housing on tribal lands and have had a positive impact on tens of thousands of lives. 

Be sure to keep and eye on them, as they are growing fast and doing a great deal of good both here, and globally. 

Now, back to our project. Travois approached us to help them better tell the story of their investing program. In partnership with the incredibly talented Rhymes With Style, we created a brand vision platform and then developed the following investor video around a story and design concept that is expandable to their other business units.   

Not only are we proud of the work, we are proud of the story it tells and the result it has had in helping them to raise investor dollars to further their mission. 

Great work always begins and ends with a story. We love helping our clients to find the story within them and then tell it in a fun and interesting way.

We hope that you enjoy it as well. 

Travois: Low Income Housing Tax Credits Explained

Storytelling is Joke Telling: Why it Matters in Advertising

When you are in the industry that I am in, it is all about telling a story. That's not true actually, it should be about storytelling. What it becomes all too often is terrible regurgitations of creative briefs. This results in near plagiarized ideas of other successful advertising and campaigns and commercials designed to shock or simply grab attention. Now let's look at one of the most successful storytellers.


Andrew Stanton is a filmmaker at Pixar/Disney, and is responsible for some of the most iconic movies of the last 25 years. Finding Nemo, Toy Story and Wall-E, just to name a few. Simply put, the guy knows how to tell a damn compelling story. The advertising industry could learn a lot from him. Here are a few of my thoughts from his great TED Talk.  

• "Storytelling is joke telling." Using humor is indeed a great device in advertising, but it has to lead to a bigger pay off. Humor is not the reward, it is the device that leads the customer to the reward.  

• "We all want affirmations." We want shared experiences. being part of a larger community is a must for emotional connection.   

• "The greatest story commandment is: Make me care." To care about your brand they have to understand your brand. To understand your brand you need to relate it to who they are and what they stand for. Confirming some truth that reinforces who we are. Mr. Stanton uses a great quote, "There isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story." -Mr. Rogers. This is it in a nutshell. 

• Humans are born problem solvers. The audience wants to "work for their meal." They just don't want to know it. Don't craft your story so simply were it is obvious. Leave a few gaps and let people fill them in. Wall-E is a very pure example of storytelling where you have to work. No dialogue will do that to a movie. However, with beautiful flow, design, sound and music, we are able to complete the story. In my estimation we complete the story better than if there had been dialogue.  

• Be true to yourself, your story and your brand. Without truthful storytelling all the rest is just window dressing.   

Now let Mr. Stanton weave a story for you...

The Best 3:51 of Your Day: The Technology of Storytelling

Do you know Lothar Meggendorfer? You probably don't, but you most certainly have enjoyed his invention as a child and perhaps as an adult. This talented 19th century German illustrator is credited with inventing the pop-up book. The self proclaimed story telling artist and creator, Joe Sabia (on Facebook) gives us a brief and entertaining glimpse into the technology of storytelling. Using his own humorous style based in technology, he gives us a nice starting point for further conversation.  

Does technology harm our storytelling abilities? I would say yes, but it doesn't have to. 
Did we falter in creative storytelling when moving from oral tradition to written? How about to movable type, or radio, television, computers... These are all simply devices that are there for us to shape and use. A child can explore amazing worlds sitting in the pile of dirt with a stick, but having the majority of all human knowledge at their fingertips shouldn't be the limiter to that exploration. Shifting how we educate our children is what will preserve, and even grow our creative spirit and our storytelling abilities. 

Robert Sabuda "Wizard of Oz" 

It is crucial that we encourage freedom of exploration and allow kids to explore the full gamut of storytelling traditions. Give them the basic tools of language and grammar to fully tell their story and stop fighting so hard to confine their learning to standardized tests. We are already seeing that simple acquisition and retention of knowledge is not what sets us apart anymore. It is the ability to efficiently seek out knowledge, curate it, build off it, create new ideas from it and convey it to others. Funny enough, these are the same skills that most employers need to be looking for.

Once again, TED has given me fodder for exploring my own new ideas and storytelling. Thank you.   

Joe Sabia: The Technology of Storytelling

The Best 17:16 of Your Day: How Beauty Feels

Designer Richard Seymour paints an incredible picture of beauty and why it matters. Not a whiny appeal that we need to appreciate beauty that you hear from designers from time to time. No, he outlines for us how we subconsciously know beauty, appreciate beauty, respond emotionally to beauty and most importantly, know what is not beautiful.

From a branding and marketing perspective, this reinforces to me that as professionals we need to do a better job of selling quality design to clients. We need to work to convey to them that an immersive brand experience is valuable. That they need to invest in their brand, their packaging, their total experience. Not just because it will look beautiful, but because the consumer will respond to that beauty. They will act on it. Ultimately, if it is on message, they will buy it and regard the product more highly.

Richard Seymour's design company, SeymourPowell is a leader in product and packaging design. You should check them out, view their work and see how it makes you feel.

This is a TED talk that all designers should watch. More importantly, this is a talk that all agency owners, strategists and branding experts should watch. Enjoy...  

Richard Seymour: How beauty feels

Angry Birds Stealing My Wallet?

Angry Birds are Everywhere

The Atlantic recently published an article, Estimating the Damage to the U.S. Economy Caused by Angry Birds, that caused quite a stir.

In the article, Alexis Madrigal offers up how much American productivity is lost by employees playing Angry Birds at work. He uses a a variant of a calculation that a consulting firm has used to determine lost productivity from the NCAA Basketball Tournament. I am not here to question his math, just the basis of the assumption of "lost productivity." 

In my professional career thus far, I have been a lowly account coodinator at a huge advertising agency and the director of accounts, with large teams of employees. I have also been the president of a region of a company and an entrepreneur of a tiny startup. Through all of these career moves I can assure you of one thing. People at work don't need a specific smartphone game to lose productivity. They (myself included) are perfectly good at seeking out ways to distract themselves from work. Referencing the hot new game is simply a device that journalists use to get the readers attention. An article titled, "Various Means Employed by People to Lose Productivity" isn't nearly as exciting as picking the hot new game or industry.    

Courtesy of The Atlantic

If we look back through the archives of 'lost productivity" articles I assure you they list causes such as the personal computer, phone, water cooler, windows, air conditioning, co-ed working environment... and so on. Therefore, the lost productivity idea is a fallacy as it relates to specific new technology advances. What the advent of smartphones and social media has done, is make it easier to hide the actual activity from their boss. But banning Angry Birds and social media doesn't solve the problem. It only leads more secretive activity and alternative forms of lost productivity, such as people standing around talking about playing Angry Birds!

I am certain there are plenty of great Human Resources professionals that could chime in and offer a great deal of suggestions on how to increase productivity in the workplace. I am not going to attempt to tackle the complete productivity issue. I do feel that it all stems from proper supervision and pro-active management with a human understanding of how people work and live.

I do want to take a minute and address the Angry Birds and larger social media challenge that employers face. How to best solve it? 

Employers should stop directing their IT staff to block offending games and sites. They should stop issuing corporate policies designed to prevent game play and social media (specifically Facebook and Twitter) usage at work. Instead, they should look at their customers and understand that they are probably using the same channels of social media and games. Enterprising marketing officers should be challenging their company to see how they can turn their most avid game playing employees and heavy Facebook users into defacto developers, idea generators and online brand advocates. By engaging with employees about their online activity, a company can better understand changing trends. If employees as unafraid to talk openly about what they are doing, ideas can be shared. 

- Integrate social gaming into company team building.

- Offer incentives for employees that bring ideas on integrating company products into social gaming or online advertising

- Focus less on restricting activities of employees and more on accountability of delivering results.

- Offer at work education on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. 

- Conduct education on what information employees can share about the company and its products. 

- Let social sharing about your company occur naturally.

- If you have active social media marketing staff already, they should add monitoring and reporting of social media activity to their responsibilities. 

There is a great deal of potential in leveraging the ideas from social gaming and the actual reach of social media. If handled proactively and positively by a company, you will be creating a large innovation team and social media marketing team from your existing employees. 

The Best 5:51 of Your Day: Doodlers, Unite!

This one is short, simple, to the point and best of all PERFECT. Doodling needs to come out of the hidden margins and to the main page. As a doodler myself, I am happy to know that it actually reinforces the messages I hear at conferences and meetings. I use doodles as meeting references and often place pages of doodles in my client files. many people in the advertising and design world think that only graphic designers are visual learners. As a strategist and writer, I can assure you that visual learning is at the core of my daily life.  

Doodle while you listen/watch this brief TED talk by Sunni Brown. Sunni has a deep passion for the study of visual learning and is great at conveying the information. Find out more about her and the work she is doing at her website.

Enough copy, to the video and doodling. Enjoy... 

Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!

Your Cure For Writer's Block

From time to time we all struggle with the dreaded writer's block. Those who write many column inches for a living struggle with it, and so do us branding and marketing types. For me it is concept creation and short form creative copy. My clients look to me for the next "big idea." They expect something that will stand out, fit their brand and be clever and creative. All of those things are what they should expect of course.

However, being creative and relevant to a brand in an on demand fashion can be taxing. Ideas don't work 9 to 5. That is why there is the handy Moleskine. One travels with me at all times, and one stays on my nightstand. They get filled with ideas. Some of those ideas eventually become workable solutions to a client challenge. Some become dreams for future work and some are simply terrible. The edible bike helmet "dream" for instance seemed great at 3am.

So, what do you do when the ideas are are clogged up somewhere in your head and just not flowing? How do you get those ideas going again? I have already mentioned that watching some TED talks gets me going. A little Spotify music helps. Taking a walk. Finding inspiring  work in unrelated fields, such as architecture and fine art. All help me to break the cycle of a creative block. But there is one other little secret that I would like to share and that is the New Yorker Magazine. Specifically, their cartoons.

You may not know this, but they have a weekly contest to write the headline to a published cartoon. It is a fun weekly challenge and blends a visual idea with short form copy. 

The Caption Contest is certainly a fun secret pleasure of mine. Though I have yet to win and have a caption of mine appear, it is a fun challenge to try and meet. Go give it a try and see if it works for helping to break your writer's block. 

I would love to hear what other ways people have for breaking their creative block.

I will update this post as people send me ideas.