Live blogged at MRS in London. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.
- Why do stories work? Lets us understand what it is like to be someone else.
- Stories are what make us human
- Why do people tell stories? We want to communicate with other people. We don’t want to live in perfect isolation.
- Poweropints and numbers are fine but we don’t get an emotional response from that
- Stories reduce chaos to order, seek order shape and balance, sense of ending and world is okay
- Stories don’t have to be nice but you form an emotional bond and you have to care
- Jaws – sharks goes into public beach an eats person. Now that’s boring but a story turns it into a problem to be solved.
- Every story is fundamentally the same – go on quest, overcome problem, meet romantic partner, all is well.
- Why do we want to see more stories if they are basically all the same? Well, we don’t know that, plus it’s the power of curiousity of what happens next
- It’s all driven by curiousity, also happens in advertising, in politics.
- We cannot cope with chaos and randomness, we have to wrap it in a narrative
- Stories are how we learn
- Tragedy – I expected good but got bad
- Heroic story – I expected bad but got good
- First half of story is you get the information, second half is you respond to the information, halfway through is when everything changes
- Best writers didn’t study structure and yet they all use perfect structure
- Ronald Reagan was good at making a large group of people empathize with him and delineating an enemy
- Politics is the power of story, people get elected based on their story, it can be a very simple story
- People don’t respond to logic, they respond to story
- AirBNB, two guys with nothing and nobody believed in them but they went after their dream – it’s the Cinderella story
- Narrative advertising is amazing when you don’t even have to name the brand
- Google commercial of man missing an old friend who is then found by daughter who searches Google, implication is they have reunited a continent 🙂
- Most powerful stories are when the audience infers the story, more emotional involvement, show not tell
- Never give the answer until you obsolutely have to
- Politicians need a goal and lots of people who will sympathize with the goal. Bernie has a great story, Hillary doesn’t seem to have a story
- [John is a fun speaker! Lots of good tweets, head over to the #MRSlive twitter stream]
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