How I like to work
Emotional Tension
I love helping brands tell their stories in unique and fresh ways. But before ‘getting all creative’, poring over a clever brief, giving my trusted AI partner Claude a prompt or even picking up a pencil - I first want to know what the brand’s one Hero Emotion is. The tractor beam that will pull the audience in. Next I dive into unearthing unique Emotional Tensions that will make them look up in the first place.
Regardless of the project, big or small, I gather whoever is game and we hunt for a human tension that the brand, its products and services can authentically help alleviate.
Like this one for Dos Equis - whose once adventurous drinker had found themselves suddenly stuck, as Pink Floyd called it, in soft middle age. ‘You don’t realize you’ve settled, until it’s already too late’. This simple unnerving truth led to the very active ‘Get A Dos’ platform. A provocative call to action that could flex to any message and was designed to nudge this older drinker out of their stuckness (whilst very much appealing to younger fans looking for adventure) and reflect a company fast expanding its portfolio beyond beer.
Or, during the pandemic, where the urgent question on everyone’s mind was when will we get back to normal? The tension we arrived at for The North Face was, ‘Normal? Normal sucked!’. This raw tension became the ‘Reset Normal’ platform, a company wide initiative and pledge that leveraged a defining global moment to build a better more equitable future. While scoring another hit for the brand’s restless Never Stop Exploring ethos. And of course selling some quality jackets along the way.
Looking further out across the advertising landscape I instantly connect with emotional nuggets like ‘you’re not yourself when you’re hungry’ (Snickers), or ‘everyone fears the day they realize they’re inevitably turning into their parents’ (Progressive). Excellent tensions that generate brilliant advertising and storytelling. Stories that will connect at a gut level, because they address our emotional needs in a genuine way.
I do not believe fresh insights like these can be surfaced by AI. These illusive truths weave their messy, complicated, layered way through our kaleidoscopic human anecdotes and experiences. An experience which I, like some many creatives and creators, am insatiably fascinated by and compelled to understand.
A brilliant tension can be the foundation on which breakthrough work stands and keeps on giving, and might just open fresh and unexpected spaces for a brand to authentically play. It’s hard work, human work, but always worth it. Especially in this oversaturated and algorithmic era of ‘meh’ we seem to be living through.
Hero Emotion
Great storytelling isn’t directly born from a great strategy, media plan or psychographic study. Story can be helped by, but never conceived in LLM’s, data sets or the latest tech stack. Stories are the original mode of communication that organically tries to make sense of this messy, complicated, emotional roller coaster we call life. We tell stories to help each other get through, to tickle and entertain, but also illuminate, survive and thrive. And the engine that drives the very best stories is emotion.
Brands that tell their stories well, make sure that every message they put they out, every experience they design, every action they take, every package they wrap their products in adds up to one enduring hero emotion. If this emotion has never been articulated, which is often the case. I find it helps my work to articulate one. I once did this exercise for the Pokémon brand and arrived at Friendship. Pokémon doesn’t sell card games or anime series or Nintendo games, no, they sell ‘friendship’, at every output. It made the client’s eye light up and our creatives rally.
Just like Volvo doesn’t actually sell cars, they sell Safety, Rolex doesn’t sell watches, they sell Status and Budweiser sell Pride. One hero emotion. Not a tagline. Not a call to action. Not a tension, insight or observation even. Just one emotion that can give the work foundation, direction and energy. Nike sells Empowerment, Disney Magic and The North Face sells Restlessness.
A brand’s enduring value is measured by the sum of its actions and messages. It is the values that stick. And just like people, or like a character in a great story, a brand’s values are revealed through their actions (particularly in times of stress) more than their words.
The key then is to pay attention to our actions, and how we frame the stories we tell about them. Both to ourselves and to the world at large. Because every story, action and touchpoint build towards that larger brand narrative. Towards that one hero emotion. Stories shape not only who we are, but everything we can can be.
To me that’s good storytelling, that’s good advertising.