In conversation, we regularly use expressions without really knowing their origins. “That’s the ticket,” “put your foot in your mouth,” “bite the bullet”—researching the meanings and origins of these and others can sometimes provide surprising revelations. Visuals have similar long-running tropes that no longer have a clear tie to their origins, and during the Tokyo
There’s something inherently weird about reading an article that purports to seriously examine humor. I think it’s in the bloodless effort to analyze humor with exacting, almost scientific language. Like this from Universal Class: “Humor events are defined as ‘discrete social behaviors that a producer intentionally creates for an audiences that influences audience positive affect.’”
If you’ve ever watched the special features on a DVD or Blu-Ray of a film you enjoyed, you may have been introduced to Hollywood storyboarding. This tends to take the form of a series of single, hand-drawn frames, designed to give the filmmakers an early idea of what they want key scenes (or all scenes,
There aren’t a lot of wholly unique takes to have on the space flights of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, so I won’t really pretend that I’m creating one here. Typically, responses are somewhere on the spectrum between “Billionaire joyrides are foolish” to “These were indeed historic moments,” and I’m not going to bother giving
Marketing content creators tend to focus on best practices, and zero in on what they can and should do to achieve maximal engagement with their target audiences and produce the best outcomes for their organizations. But even the best marketing efforts can be derailed by making even one or two major mistakes—so let’s take a
If you’re in the consumer packaged goods (or CPG) space, you know better than most the unique advantages of challenges of the business. As Shopkick puts it, “Companies that produce or sell CPGs have the advantage of enduring demand, as consumers will always need these products… but, the CPG market is saturated, and switching costs are low for consumers who
If you work in the financial sector, storytelling might not be the first technique that comes to mind in handling complex, often difficult conversations with clients and associates. You might be more interested in ‘getting down to business,’ and explaining concepts, predictions, and approaches directly. Despite this understandable hesitancy, though, your conversations probably already involve
Creativity has become sufficiently understood and celebrated that, looking back, it’s hard to imagine a time when it was considered unimportant. But pieces like Theodore Levitt’s 1963 article “Creativity is Not Enough,” provide a full-throated opposition to the value of creativity in business. To let the fantasy-prone creative types have their way, Levitt insists, would
We use visual storytelling for many different business needs, from enhancing marketing initiatives through the sales cycle and beyond. Telling stories through the power of imagery is a great way to strengthen a message and drive engagement in your audience. In this piece, we look at how visual storytelling can transform your organization’s training programs,
There are a lot of ways that whiteboard animation can truly supercharge your audience’s engagement and retention—but there are also a lot of ways that it can miss the mark. Instead of exploring these positives and negatives through purely theoretical discussion, let’s use the following script segment to show the results of best (and less