I've got soul but I'm not a soldier

When I was in the games industry I spent a lot of time writing and thinking about how to deliver narrative in an environment where the progression of the story depended entirely on the end-user's ability to navigate the obsacles we put in their path, all under the guise of gameplay. It sounds counter-productive, but some of those games can go for upwards of 60 hours, and running in a straight line while a plot unfolds is fun for about 67 seconds, so you have some space to fill.

One of the other crucial elements is understanding what stories you can and can't apply. Design is invarably driven by experiences designers believe players what to have, you almost never hear a designer say "This is the story I want to tell, what is the best way to do that?". Funnily enough, while that was my approach, very few people wanted to make my re-telling of King Lear set during the handover of Hong Kong...I can't say I blame them. Games are, for the most part, engineered so you play the hero and affect the main course of the narrative (what little there is), so the stories are constructed within cumbersome paradigms of good vs. bad, triumph over impossible odds, saving the day and winning the girl's heart (because you're almost always a guy).

This may all sound fairly abstract under the harsh light of day in marketing, but the parallels are there to be drawn and should be if we want to get better at telling stories with and through our brands, products and services. I've said hundreds of times now - experiences facilitated by but not about a brand; this is key.

When dealing with brands we need to understand the parameters within which we have the opportunity to engage narrative, both for the benefit of an audience and for the brand itself. I'm proposing that there are three types of story-telling we engage in in marketing, and each one should be employed in different circumstances depending on what the aim is:

1. A traditional, linear narrative where a single point is meant to be reached, leaving the audience with a very distinct idea of what the brand, product or service is about, what it means and what its intent is.


2. A narrative with the brand at the centre of the story but with the story being generated by consumers, leaving the direction of it loosely defined, usually through a particular campaign moving in a very particular direction.


3. Narrative with the audience at the centre of the story, narrative where the story is in fact the customer's own, one where a person doesn't inform the brand's story, rather the brand plays but a part in a much larger whole. Hardest to affect, though I'll argue the most compelling by a long way.

I'm really looking forward to getting into this. If you have any ideas or if you think there are other categories story-telling with brands can fit into, I'd love to hear from you. See you tomorrow when we tackle the first one on the list.

**Update** Tim Beveridge left a great comment below and then wrote some more on Insight + Ideas. Worth checking out!

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Image courtesy of Doğuş Kozal, with thanks to compfight.

I know what you're about to say like your hype man

I was going to spend the week talking about story-telling in interactive mediums and the ways brands can leverage it, and I'l get to that, but I've woken up with something on my mind that I want to get to first.

Over the weekend when not lying in the park or dining with friends I was working on my latest (overdue) column for Marketing Magazine. It will be out in their December/January issue and I was talking about brands finding their voice online, which I'm quite excited about, I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts when it comes out.

I feel though like that's the running part, and we're struggling to get the walking right; we're doing that because the fundamentals of success in business and marketing are shifting and we're not keeping pace with it. I harp on about it, but only because I think it is important enough to do so: intent. Intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent.

While you're at your desk this week, in each situation I want you to ask yourself "What's my intent here?". We make sales calls under the guise of building relationships, we dump on other agencies under the guise of offering advice. We put energy into things that distract us from our main purpose in the hopes that people won't really get what we're on about.

And then we go do it with the brands we're supposed to be building.

Let's all agree, week beginning Monday October 13th, 2008 to gut-check what the intent is in the work we do this week. Let's not discuss "new ways to talk to our customers" when the reality is we need email addresses added to a database. By stripping away the stuff we cloak our actions with, we get to the heart of the matter much faster.

And I promise, the campaigns you run are going to be all the more effective for it.

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Image courtesy of The Alieness Gisela Giardino, with thanks to compfight.

The company and kindness of strangers

A month or so ago I was interviewed by Brad Howarth on social media and blogging for an article he was writing for B&T. That has just hit the news stands, which is great. You can find the article on page 34 (it's also available online).

Brad also contributed an article to Smart Company and I've been included in a list of 15 of Australia's best business blogs. A couple friends such as Julian Cole and Gavin Heaton are included, along with a great new blog I've only recently discovered, Get Shouty which is written by The White Agency's Katie Chatfield. In addition there's a collection of other blogs I haven't had the chance to read yet, but I'm looking forward to getting into them.

One thing I'm quoted as saying in the B&T article which is absolutely true is the comments on this blog at times have been far more insightful and valuable than the post they were attached to. To everyone who stops by and shares their two cents, it is really appreciated.

When I was young like you

I was doing some house-keeping, cleaning up old files and I came across this image I snapped when I was logged into Facebook on my house mate's laptop.

You'll need to click on it to see, but those yellow boxes are help tips - the one in the middle is a message telling her she is using Internet Explorer 6, and should upgrade to IE 7 or switch to a different browser. On the right is a message introducing Facebook Chat, which also says she'll need to upgrade her browser or switch to Firefox in order to get the most out of it.

Interesting stuff here:

• Browsers listed are IE 7, Firefox, Safari and Flock! Big coup for them, I wonder how many readers have actually heard of it, let alone people who would still be using IE6.


• FB is using data that is freely available to everyone in order to make these tips appear


• They are aware of the possibility for people to have negative experiences that are usually outside the scope for the service to control, yet they're going an extra step to ensure that doesn't happen.


• Has me wondering how I can provide better service for my clients by doing the things that take no time, but have far reaching effects


• Since FB delivers me my FB emails straight to my Gmail, I don't log in to check them. So they stay unread. Someone please tell me the ability to reply to them without having to log in is coming...?

...the more it stays the same...

I got sent this by a friend who thought I'd take some pleasure in it. I don't really, I'd rather just have some more good magazines to read that treated me like something other than a sex-crazed, sport-loving neanderthal on account of my gender.

Maybe they should read my handy guide to creating a men's magazine worth reading. I do it for the love people.

The love.

Dogma 2.0 - The rules are there ain't no rules

This is the fourth post in my series on the A - Z of 2.0.

Get a pen & paper, or open Word or an email client, or whatever it is you use to take notes. Please watch the below video, and write down the first thing you think when it finishes. I'd love it if you shared it with us in the comments.



Indeed, we are going to have to re-think a few things. I've written in the past about not necessarily being right, just being least wrong. It is almost impossible to talk in absolutes these days - in Borders 2.0 I said the lines don't run where we say they do, this begs the question "Do the lines run anywhere at all?". The direction, if any, points not to a particular destination, just to an idea; open beats closed. The direction points endlessly to being open.

Transparency itself is a funny thing; for some reason it terrifies our selves, yet we respond to and admire it in others. It is interminably linked with confidence, an idea of "I don't care if you see what's in my bag of tricks, because what is important is not what I do, but the way I do it". If I can put the rabbit into the hat myself, and yet still be surprised when it comes out, I can remain one step ahead, because the trick becomes "How did I get this thing inside my hat!??!" and not simply what may or may not be inside it.

You see it in music a lot, chord progressions, melodies and harmonies designed to elicit a certain effect. I can tell you that playing a B over an E chord will produce a pleasant sound, or I can tell you to listen to the chorus of this song and you'll smile when you hear it. There are rules that work, for whatever reason they work, but when put in the wrong place the effect is nil.

It doesn't matter what you do, it is how you do it.

Last Sunday I caught up with some friends and met a whole bunch of other people I didn't know. Two guys, entering the last few months of their degrees were talking about plans after university; all their friends were starting their careers, meanwhile these two wanted to jump on bikes and ride around Europe for the summer. They felt an extraordinary amount of pressure to play by the rules, to find a good job, to start their careers. They were still bound by the dogma our parents worked through, and hadn't realised yet things were no longer as they seemed. They have their entire lives to build a career, and what nobody is telling them is they can get on their bikes and ride into oblivion, and their careers will still be able to be begun when they finally get off.

People, old and young, underestimate, endlessly underestimate the power of passion. There is a light in the eyes of a person when they start talking about things they are passionate about, an energy in their voices that cannot be manufactured. In this moment people are their most transparent, most honest, most happy not to fake it. They're speaking their truths, what is pure and personal to them, and it can exist outside logic and reason, outside dogma and regulation, and it can succeed when all evidence to the contrary suggests it will fail, because it operates in an entirely different schema to the one everyone else exists in.

Dogma exists to refine and control passion, which does about as much good as building a sandcastle in the middle of a sand storm. Somehow, for some reason, we've let that be par for the course throughout the bulk of human history. There exists such an extraordinary opportunity now for people to be who they are, to follow their hearts relentlessly. Dogma 2.0 says the rules are there ain't no rules, it says the lines don't run where we say they do.

It says open beats closed. So open up.

It's the only way any of us will get wherever it is we happen to be going.

I only speak the truth

If you don't already partake of Indexed on a daily basis, what are you waiting for? Go there now for more sarcastic Venn diagram goodness.