Episode 22 | Recap of Brand Storytelling Conference at Sundance Film Festival.. and a bit of CES

 Mike Summers | Geoff McHenry | Ryan Chappell | Yesenia Bello | Stewart Cornelius

On this Episode, the crew discusses a bit of their lack of excitement for CES and Yesenia’s experience visiting. And then we spend a bit more time discussing thoughts on Mike’s takeaways from the Brand Storytelling Conferences at Sundance Film Festival.

In January 2020 I had the pleasure of visiting the Brand Storytelling Conference as a part of Sundance Film Festival. Coming off the heels of it, I wanted to share a few takeaways with a random assortment of my larger team, friends and family.  It was an amazing conference that I would highly recommend focusing on longform content. 

There are a few reasons I would suggest going:

• Creative inspiration
• Understanding value of long form content
• Exposure to new creative partners
• Exposure to differentiated content development approaches from brands

This is of course a tip of the iceberg, but I’ve attempted to summarize some key takeaways that really stuck out for me. If you have any questions, please let me know and happy to continue the discussion!

There has been a consumer shift from gaining attention to garnering emotion.

Agency: Twitter

Mike’s 2 Cents: We have become hyper focused on short attention spans and how to communicate a message in 2 seconds. However, as we see behaviors emerging like IGTV and binge watching on streaming platforms—there becomes the question of how you can evoke enough emotion in consumers to incent them to watch a 2-minute video instead. Twitter positioned two key ways of doing this are to humanize your voice and/or exchange value.  Disney+ executed this on twitter creating a super thread of nearly every Disney property interacting with Disney+ after announcing their launch. Consumer interaction with use of the word “nostalgia” or “childhood” went through the roof.

Begin with ideas and content over brand?

Agency: The Marketing Arm

Mike’s 2 Cents: As marketers we can consistently be so focused on building a message that we want to communicate—that we can at times miss the plethora of amazing stories and ideas already in existence that consumers are looking for. In addition, the industry’s agency model has fallen out of whack in many ways as we have cut costs and are asking huge agencies/companies driven by profitability to stretch creativity—which in many ways are contradictory goals. A differentiated way of approaching this is to explore creators with an excellent idea and explore how we can use our funding and branding to be a catalyst to this. An excellent example of this is the 5B documentary series executed by our J&J corporate equity team in collaboration with UM Studios, Highway 61 films and Saville