American presidential elections have always largely revolved around storytelling. As in many other contemporary narrative wars, the best story wins. Barak Obama was able to clinch his first presidential mandate thanks to the story of his life – from a precarious childhood to the US Senate. But this year the storytelling side of the race…
Author: Joseph Sassoon
Are you interested in brand and corporate storytelling? And do you love Italy? If the answer to both questions is yes – and if you are a student in search of a second level degree – you have now the chance to attend the Master in Storytelling at Pavia University, the first-ever course of this…
Storytelling today is a very mediated activity. We mostly consume stories through movies, books, video games, TV series, social media, and so on. This also applies to brand storytelling, by which companies seek to appeal to increasingly connected customers. But what about traditional, face-to-face storytelling? Is it still relevant and useful? And could it play…
Have you ever tried to define the meaning of Nike’s celebrated slogan? Although made up of three simple words, clarifying it may be more difficult than expected. Especially to people who are not native English speakers, the most famous brand payoff of all time may sound familiar yet not necessarily transparent. But now a very…
With the recently launched Pokemon Go app, the cute pocket monsters have taken the real world by storm. As everyone knows, in the first week from launch there were more than 7,5 million downloads just in the US. And the Pokemon Go mania has similarly grabbed the Millennial generation in many other countries across the…
Joshua Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio, was a special guy. His death, which occurred last May in a car crash on a Florida highway, was no less special. Joshua was a patriot, willing to serve in the US Navy for more than a decade and specialize in disarming explosives – a pretty risky activity. During his…
There is more and more evidence that designing the right experience is key to the success of contemporary brands and companies. And this point was made exceptionally clear two months ago by Joe Gebbia, one of Airbnb’s two founders, in his speech at the TED conference in Vancouver. If Airbnb has been so hugely successful…
Thanks to a smart piece by Jeff Rum in Social Media Today – 3 Steps to Effective Brand Storytelling Using Emotions – I discovered a Google video that I had missed. It’s called Reunion, and it was produced for the Indian market. It was published on YouTube on November 13, 2013 and immediately went viral,…
A Chinese laundry detergent ad went viral last week, attracting a lot of criticism for its disgracefully racist storyline. Named by many “the most racist commercial of 2016”, it features a Chinese woman doing her washing. She is soon approached by a black man, with paint spread over his face and T-shirt. He seems to…
On April 21st 2016 Samsung won the Tribeca Film Festival branded content award with an amazing 5-minute short, beating out other excellent brand productions. The story is about a young man suffering from achromatopsia, a rare condition that makes people totally color blind. But Neil Harbisson did not surrender to it: he just convinced doctors…