The stars of this year’s Super Bowl weren’t the Broncos and Seahawks but the adorable Labrador puppy and muscular Clydesdale featured in a 60-second Budweiser beer commercial. At last count, the ad had more than 40 million views on YouTube. Pollster Frank Luntz noted on CBS This Morning that women and men in a focus group he arranged to watch the big game ads were deeply moved by it, some to tears. So why is this commercial so powerful?
While there was no stated theme at the recent Communications Network Fall Conference, virtually every plenary and break out session focused in some way or another on the need to tell our stories better for more effective communications. I suppose this theme isn't surprising among professional communicators but it was fascinating how much of a struggle it seems to be for a group of people, who more than most, really understand storytelling.
The “strategic” part of strategic communications frequently involves enhancing and utilizing everyday communications to manage change and grow leadership in your sector. And integral to this is branding—and developing a brand that has meaning and value—as we wrote in the following contribution to the Huffington Post
Anyone who is serious about message development has to factor in the negative bias of the human mind, as I wrote this week in a blog post for The Washington Business Journal: Have you ever wondered why no one seems to hear the positive messages about your company or cause? It may have something to do with the basic wiring of the human mind.
The headlines about the Bradley Manning WikiLeaks trial offer a great […]
Posted on “The Rock” in Ellicott City, a picturesque and popular historic village in Maryland, the sign reads: “Climbing prohibited on these 300 million-years-old geological formations; let’s all respect The Rock.”
Everyone, it seems, is jumping on the storytelling bandwagon, and with good reason. Storytelling is a powerful communications tool that taps into both our emotions and our minds' most effective way of accepting and retaining information.
How many times have you read an article or seen someone appear on television who is referred to as the leading expert in your industry or field and thought, “it just ain’t so?”
Good message development is a critical part of any communications plan. Despite all the talk about the importance of good messaging, it remains an elusive part of communications planning and in some cases down right mysterious to many companies and organizations.
Netflix this week rolled out a brilliant commercial campaign with wow-worthy framing of messages. It’s a story framed as news so topical and irresistible that Brian Williams dedicated an entire story to it on NBC Nightly News (remarkably airing on a network owned by Netflix’s oh-so-threatened competitor Comcast).
