WORKWEEK

Last week, I had the immense pleasure of attending Klaviyo’s marketing on-site. One of the highlights of the week was an hour-long presentation from a Pixar team member on how to tell really good stories. 

Now, it is my understanding that a lot of this information can be found in the book Creativity, Inc, and I plan on buying it and reading it. Just kidding. I’ll probably listen to it on a mid-afternoon walk I take to just get out of the house and not hunch at my computer for 8 hours straight. 

Anyway––the talk was fast, but really, really good. Here are a few takeaways I found really impactful:

All stories are:

• Personal 
• Impactful 
• Memorable 

But what the heck does that mean? 

Well, Pixar views itself as the “What if” production studio. All of their films are based on a “what if”––and sorry, it was a quick talk, so I only remember the “what if” for Ratatouille. 

“What if…a sewer rat dreamed of becoming a chef?” 

• Personal? Sure…we’ve all had outlandish dreams. 
• Impactful? Sure…if a rat can do it, anyone can. 
• Memorable? Heck yea…you never forget a tale of the impossible come true. 

But that’s not where it ends, of course. 

Their team builds stories following this outline:

• Once upon a time….
• And every day…. 
• Until one day… 
• And because of that….
• And because of that… 
• And because of that… 
• Since then… 

Now this is a classic tale of hero, goal, obstacle, change. But the format of it helps turn really any story you tell into a great one. 

For instance, you can tell your own life story in this way. Here’s mine:

• Once upon a time, there was a girl born to a family who owned a cotton production factory. 
• And every day, she saw the ins and outs of running a family business, ingesting the stories, and sure that she’d go that same route. 
• Until one day, her grandfather put her on a cotton cleaning line in the middle of a humid, east Texas summer, and the girl realized that she loved the stories more than she loved the manual labor. 
• Because of that, she decided she wanted to be a writer. 
• And because of that she went to college to get her English degree. 
• And because of that, she landed an internship at Hearst. 
• And because of that, she grew her career in content marketing. 
• And ever since then, she’s been educating her family on what the heck she does for a living, because they just simply cannot believe writing words on the internet pays anyone any kind of money. (How many of y’all’s family members can relate?)

Not so bad, right? Now, there are some details here the speaker highlighted:

• Never spend long on the backstory. The once upon a time sets the stage, but don’t let it drag out. People want to know how things resolve. Set the scene and move on (hello introductions!). 
• Always offer a resolve. We love resolutions! Let people know what happens, how the problem is solved––if it is. Sure, there are some films out there that don’t do this…and kudos, some people love them. But the best stories have resolution. Don’t leave it out. 
• Stories fail because this set up doesn’t make sense. And you need outside opinion to see the gaps. Use a braintrust to present the “What if” and the set up, and allow folks to poke holes. The braintrust should be a consistent group of folks, and a small group. But ideas and set ups build with only one of two people are bound to fail. People have different experiences. Different things resonate with them. You need a braintrust to identify what you can’t even imagine. 

How does any of this apply to content marketing? 

Well, you can build all of this into a brief. 

• What is your “what if” for a content piece? 
• Who is the hero?
• What is their goal?
• What is the obstacle?
• What is the change? 
• What is the set up (Once upon a time…)

Define this for your writers, and watch your content turn into stories––and stories resonate. They are memorable. They are impactful. They are personal. 

Finally, use this structure for internal presentations. I’m on a personal quest to improve my presentation storytelling skills. I need to be more succinct, and tell more powerful stories. Starting with a “what if” and then building a set up for my audience can absolutely help me do that. 

10 slides or less folks. 10 slides or less.