 So my name is Jeff Leifer and this is a panel about storytelling in the connected age, the age of new connectivity. We intentionally kept this panel small so we could have some real conversation with each other and with you and the audience. So don't be shy when the time comes. This is a broad topic and it's a topic that is not something that pops up at most capital markets conferences. So I really feel this is a positive sign, the direction that this community is moving. It's all because of the crowdsourced ideas that come from the SOCAP community. I'm really excited to have Jonas Sacks from Free Range Studios and Jesse Shapens from Ziga here today. A lot of people wanted to be on this panel and I kept saying no so I could have them to myself and to yourself. So there's a lot of directions that we could go with this topic and we don't really have time to cover all the possible pathways. But some of the things we're going to be touching on today are really around how storytelling is even more than a tool for narrative framing and for expressing the values driven communications that we all are engaged in and encouraging our communities to participate in. So just even that, just understanding storytelling as a tool for communication would be enough. But Jonas Sacks is going to talk about how it goes so much further and how these universal themes are timeless and resonant and how there's certain key elements that are going to determine who wins the battles, if you will, of the story memes and the grand mythos and how do we reach communities that we want to with the messages we're trying to tell. So Jesse Shapens is going to be talking about literally one of the most audacious undertakings as well. While Jonas has been revolutionary with Free Range and defining a whole new space, Jesse Shapens and Ziga and his team are revolutionaries in terms of literally remaking the Internet. Completely ambitious vision and as far as I can see it's working but of course the jury is still out. So we're going to start with Jonas and I just want to say a quick word about him and each Jesse and Jonas will introduce a little bit more about themselves, do a brief introduction with some materials just to give a little touch in around some of the issues that they're interested in and then we're going to jump right into conversations. We only have 60 minutes so the interviews will be kind of short. Real straightforward and casual around Jonas. Jonas is a co-founder of Free Range Studios and Creative Managing Director and as I say is just revolutionize the space of working with progressive nonprofits primarily and telling their story and really identifying the story brand, creating narrative framing and executing on communications and then building the infrastructure that's needed to really realize the true potential of those messages, not just to have the message out there in the know sphere but to actually have infrastructure to harness the energy that's generated from these impact campaigns and communication strategies. So Jonas has put his thoughts down at the request of a number of publishers including Harvard Business Review Press and written this wonderful book called Story Wars Why Those Who Tell and Live the Best Stories Will Rule the Future illustrated by this wonderful illustrator who's in house at Free Range Studios in Oakland in the East Bay. This is a fantastic book. I read it, I love it and I really am hoping Jonas will talk to us about what's in it a bit today and some of this conversation is around brands but brands in the most expansive meaning of that word so whether you're involved in a venture startup, an educational NGO or a technology company, the idea of brand I'm sure is not lost on you and how to really fashion that based on universal and deep archetypes is part of the message of this book. I really loved it. So Jonas I'm going to hand it over to you. Thanks Jeff. My work has been about trying to figure out how to change the world through storytelling since 1999 and at that time I realized as the internet was starting to fall into everybody's hands that our media landscape was fundamentally changing and that that broadcast model was starting to fall away and that soon people would be able to pass messages along of passion as seamlessly and frictionlessly as brand messages were being passed around and I knew at that time that this could revolutionize the world of social change and that we had to harness these tools and quickly before big corporations took them over and made them just another tool for consumer advertising and so the last 13 years of free range has just been an exploration of how to get people to speak to their passions through their social networks and that's why projects like the story of Stuff and The Matrix have reached 20 million people with no actual platform to speak of and in doing that work I've seen how certain stories just resonate and blow up the social media space and other stories are forgotten and as I've learned what works and what doesn't I've stepped back and begun to help people who are building enterprises see that these story patterns these ancient story patterns in human beings don't just work for getting a point across but for giving purpose to an enterprise to as I say brand but it can be the enterprise of a single leader the enterprise of a social change network or of a consumer products brand and so what I've been doing recently is really trying to help people see how their own stories and their organization stories create these giant epics and how to understand the underlying structures of those epics so I'm going to show just a four minute video here that gives you a sense of what a story actually is why they're so important right now and how enterprises are built on stories and I think it'll be helpful for framing the conversation that we have going forward we humans have always been obsessed with communicating it's how we turn ideas into the glue that binds us together into tribes and societies in oral traditions an idea spreads from person to person everyone briefly owns it, modifies it and can choose to pass it through social networks or let it die its survival of the fittest and only the most compelling ideas thrive but the last hundred years of the broadcast era changed all that here, audiences became consumers of ideas not participants in spreading them brands and causes with access to broadcasts could guarantee attention it became survival of the richest now that the broadcast era is ending what will come next? with audiences again in charge of what ideas they seek, skip and pass along we are entering a time that looks like a digitally empowered version of the oral tradition the digital era here it's survival of the fittest again and what kind of ideas survive in any oral tradition? stories it's time we all became storytellers again but how? it starts by thinking of your brand itself as a story every communication you create is another chapter in an unfolding epic starring you and your audience on the surface of any story you'll find characters, settings, conflict none of these things are placed there by chance every visible element of a well-told story is there to illustrate a core truth about the world a moral of the story morals are themselves expressions of values that the storyteller wants to share different values create vastly different morals and story surfaces Joseph Campbell, who studied stories across cultures and millennia discovered the most universally successful stories or myths call audiences to hire human values like community, justice, truth and self-expression Campbell also uncovered the hero's journey a formula for iconic storytelling that has always worked we still see it everywhere and it provides huge insights for a story-based brand an unlikely hero, a powerless outsider muddles through a broken world she wants to live out her higher values but feels powerless to do so then she meets a mentor who tells her so much more as possible he gives her a magic gift and calls her to a dangerous adventure of self-discovery on this adventure she confronts the evil source of the world's brokenness and seizes a treasure with which she comes back to heal society audiences thrill to hear this story again and again brands can use this formula to become storytelling masters too how? start with the hero this hero doesn't start out as the insider, the one with the power she is an outsider to your brand so she's not you the hero of your story is your audience so if you're not the hero, who are you? the mentor you are the character that reveals more as possible you work to connect audiences to their deeper values you teach a core truth, a moral of the story that provides hope to heal a broken world stop talking about how great you are and start telling stories about how great your audience can be and give them a magic gift something that makes the adventure you are offering seem likely to succeed a great brand gift has taken good story brands and made them cultural icons any brand can become a story brand by finding its relevance in its values its consistency by building every communication around its moral it finds resonance in its unique voices mentor rather than hero and its differentiator in its gift but that's the easy part in the transparent world of the digital era mythic success will take something more a commitment to live the higher values you espouse those that don't will lose credibility and their stories with it brands brave enough to live their values will reach iconic status and light up the digital landscape they will tell the stories and create the myths that will win the story wars so I realized in going down this road of writing this book and exposing these ideas that I was doing something incredibly sacrilegious I was leveraging Joseph Campbell's hero's journey the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Moses ancient Native American myths and legends in the service of marketing and branding and that made me pretty scared for a while and I was thinking is this the right thing to do is the right thing to take this sacred human art and use it for marketing but one of the things I realized in this process is that marketers have become our modern myth makers the stories that give us purpose in our lives the stories that give us ritual in our lives the stories that tell us how the world works are primarily coming from marketers and because they've created a marketing language steeped in this broadcast era in which the brand is the hero and the audience is the damsel in distress in which the only way to be happy is through consumption in which these ancient storytelling tools are twisted and used in ways for pretty nefarious purposes they've taken over our mythic landscape and that marketers who have a belief in changing the world need to learn to use these tools and these ancient mythic properties in order to create new kinds of communications and what I'm excited about is that in this world where everyone gets to decide what messages to pass we're going to return to this time where we have a preference for stories that speak to higher values as Campbell said all oral traditions did we're going to return to a preference for stories that empower us to be the heroes as all oral traditions societies have preferred and companies in this transparent era who use this methodology or any story methodology are going to find out that at the core of every story are values and if you're not living those values you really don't have a story to tell so this is enormous hope in the fact that marketers need to be storytellers stories need to be based on values and make audiences heroes and that's going to help us change the media landscape and let these more positive messages rise to the surface and we'll talk a little bit today about these tools to make that happen thank you Jonah yeah I look forward to diving into that more deeply I want to introduce Jesse Shapens so our second presenter is a media theorist documentary artist and a social entrepreneur and Jesse Shapens is running a company called Ziga with a really unusual and diverse team of technologists architects and artists multimedia documentary artists and they're located out in Cambridge they're funded in part from the Harvard Berkman Center on the internet and society they're funded from a substantial grant from the Knight Foundation and a number of other clients and they're a hybrid model of non-profit and for-profit as a media venture and so it's you know Jesse wears a lot of hats and you can get on a lot of panels because you can work in a lot of directions I'm pretty blown away by you know what Jonah and Free Range have done in their space and I'm pretty blown away by what Jesse Shapens and Ziga have done in their space and that's what motivated me to make those phone calls and say you know these are the two people I want to have at SoCAP I want to read you just a little bit from Ziga's mission statement because it's pretty unusual the internet is a wild place we like that too often though we're overwhelming and full of too many choices little by little we want to help remake the internet to make it a more beautiful place to make the webs wilds accessible to anyone for new forms of creative expression Ziga is a community of makers passionate about creating immersive experiences that combine original content with media from across the web so the scale of the projects that Ziga is undertaking are literally from the smallest generation up to the largest potential scaling that you can imagine the partners that they engage with are people like Mozilla and Vimeo and SoundCloud and just a host of really interesting people at the forefront of the web and its functionality and its tools it's an opportunity for crowdsourcing within a curated container for empowerment of flattened authorship a transparency where people get dirty making media in a sense and have an experience and magnetize a community and learn about collaboration by actually working together to express themselves to each other so I know we're going to dig in more and what we're going to see is that there's two fascinating world views here and two fascinating models they're both successful they're both effective so if you look at where do you locate the mission the social good at the heart of the DNA of each of these ventures and I want to talk about that after Jesse makes an introduction Jesse Shades Well thank you so much Jeff and it's an incredible honor to be here at SoCAP and it really is an incredible honor to follow somebody like Jonas Sacks I followed his work and his studio's work for many years and there certainly are differences there's definitely an underline inspiration that definitely cuts through our practices so what I wanted to do today is talk a little bit about Ziga Jeff has already done a tremendous job introducing our work and then talk a little bit about our kind of philosophies of storytelling and the landscape today online so just to kind of get started Ziga is a platform for inventing new forms of interactive storytelling and the mission is really to deliver online a creative expression for anyone and I think this is really vital it's important in terms of the question of social good really thinking about creative culture and expression and the tools for creative expression as being vital social social values that are really crucial to support and to grow so one of the things that this then points to and this may be kind of a bold jump but I think it relates actually closely to what Jonah talked about I think one of the big misconceptions that we have today in the context of sort of a post broadcast world is that authorial voices are being lost I think that a lot of the work that we do is with journalists and filmmakers people trained media makers trained in great storytelling telling powerful narratives I think that that experience and that perspective is extremely important today I think that it's changing the ways that we see that operating and in particular the way that I think we like to think about this dynamic is the traditional media model the maker and the author is really an experience sort of expert in the frame you know designing a sort of video that really kind of very succinctly clearly frames a topic and a message and distributes it out and we understand that all media is inherently framed there is that perspective I think the big shift that we're seeing online today is an increasing shift to authorial agency around frameworks the difference there is really taking initiative around designing a structure that is finite it is constrained but it's open it's open for creative expression and there's open for chance within a really kind of thoughtful structure so to put a little texture to that I want to talk about a project that my partners and I Cara Oler and James Burns and Ann Hepburn created in 2008 called Mapping Main Street so this project started four years ago in the context of the last election you had Obama McCain talking about Main Street versus Wall Street and what occurred to us is that Main Street wasn't just some abstract people or place but there were literally streets named Main all across the United States and had this idea of this wild notion of what would it look like to create a collaborative documentary that told the stories of every street named Main Street so this is a little video that introduces the project can we get volume on that there's beautiful fantastic music music I'm here on Main Street in the City Metro Diner we're in Lexington, Virginia we have a soda we live in Arizona on Main Street when you think they live on Main Street you think of all the shops the ice cream vendor on the corner you picture in your mind a place our particular Main Street connects the United States and Mexico it's a bunch of hoes and drug dealers that's all I know about Main Street good place to start a business there ain't much as far as it goes right there this project consisted of a series of audio documentaries broadcast on NPR so professionally produced investigative stories then this website which continues to operate today where and here's the look at the site now so you have these stories these kind of featured works this one happens to be in Chattanooga, Tennessee where Main Street is primarily a prostitution strip this is a story that we told there a couple that met and live on Main Street and are homeless and now we're moving around looking at the different content that's been contributed from across the country around different topics all on Main Street so this is actually a little bit more playful topic but we're looking at all media related to animals on Main Street and what we're about to see is actually a series of photographs by somebody named Amy Fitchter in Iowa she's somebody that found out about this project and took it under her own kind of inspiration to go out and photograph over 45 streets in her region places that she'd driven through but it never stopped organized her own photo exhibition and that really points to in this world of the kind of new potentials of storytelling what I love the most is that it creates context for the emergency unexpected when you design a framework that has real kind of narrative drive and hook and inspiration you capture people and they do things that you have no idea what they're going to look like it's so fun about it it's also what's daunting and so different than a broadcast model it's really setting up that structure though that makes sense and is engaging we could have done a project called Mapping A Street and nobody would have cared I mean it's a weird kind of like oh weird topic those are some strange like urban geographers but nobody really cares about A Street Main Street is what matters it has resonance there's a real kind of power to it in thinking of those frameworks those narrative frameworks that capture people it's really challenging but I think really one of the most exciting creative prospects we have today and in that sense what's really important to think about is that in the context of social change that engagement is also authored although there is the context now where there's openness around participation it doesn't mean you just say share stories and everyone is going to come to your storytelling platform and tell you stories related to your mission it's really about designing that this is not one that myself and my colleagues have been involved in but one that I just absolutely love called the Johnny Cash project and this is a documentary film that was then animated about Johnny Cash and what you're seeing now are individual frames that are drawn by a community that's been invited to participate and so below there you see all these different individual kind of interpretations of a single frame in the film and what we're about to see is how participation actually works here so what they designed is a mechanism by which we can see the original frame and then draw on top of it so we're just watching the film but let's skip the head anyhow it's a great site we can go to it sometime but really what's important there is to create structures for people to succeed in contributing to not just have it be a totally open wild landscape and to be simple simplicity around this stuff is so important and to limit choices so just a little bit more on Ziga what we're really aiming for then is to create a platform that enables makers to actually author frameworks we've seen a lot of great platforms today online that allow people to author media to share media to post videos to YouTube to hold different animal to think about actually a platform that lets individuals that don't have the resources for technology in huge budgets to actually author frameworks that invite participation so this is an example of a project that we just launched with partners in Boston at WGBH an air produced by Val Wang called Planet Takeout we have a little audio on this one too you go to the site and you're immediately in a takeout we just saw that and then you have the ability to click into and start to hear and see stories from different folks at these takeout restaurants so the notion is takeouts a very simple kind of structure as an organizing principle for gaining a perspective into the changing lives of cities and so here are different folks connected to Yum Yum a takeout in Boston and here's now an overview of all the different takeouts that are part of the project organized by place as well as by topic so here we're looking at the regulars a really kind of classic category of visitors and here we're going to then see a short video a short narrative when you spend as much time inside of Chinese takeouts as I do you start to notice some patterns like every takeout has its regulars so pause that there's a map and what's important here again is that this is authored by somebody without technology experience and this is running and it's available for people to contribute from Flickr Vimeo SoundCloud new takeouts around the country we're interested in mapping takeouts here in San Francisco and just to jump ahead this is managed then through a user interface that's extremely accessible so this is all the content from many different sources that Val the producer is able to access she's able to see all the takeouts they're mapped they have tags and she's able to set up these sort of collections around the different locations and around topics so there what we're looking at now is regulars so she had the agency to say regulars is an important topic within this larger framework and to create that system so that's a lot hopefully it made sense it's fun sharing thank you so you can see we've got two fantastic backdrops against which to start to explore storytelling as a narrative tool and if this video gets to be too busy they're not seeing it maybe it's too busy for us I'm hypnotized it works I was going to just about to ask Jonah a question about values and sort of archetypes of storytelling but I want to just start with you Jesse based on what you were just sharing around Ziga's tool do you view Ziga's tools as having positive values in and of themselves or is there a way to contextualize that that makes more sense that's a great question I mean I would love to believe that there's a way to design tools in a way that carry a mission and a purpose in their design inherently I think that's possible it might be a crazy idea but I think it's possible I think a big part of that is actually the constraints and the kind of character that the tool has and more than anything almost it's actually also the initial frame and the framework of the tool and how the story is told in the community that starts to form around it we're working very closely with partners that have a really similar sensibility about new forms of storytelling and that work is really driving and building the identity of the tool and even though the tool itself is a piece of technology that conversation that story around it is inescapable and that spirit follow on question is I've heard you talk before about just how important it is to even though making this accessible and simple is one thing but doing that well is another and how there's a lot made out there's a lot of proliferation but in order to tell good stories the framework itself is a lot of thought put into it and design absolutely I mean I think this and this is something I'm sure Jonah can speak to in great depth is that to really identify kind of that essence that kind of that those kind of core this core value is that kind of essential quality which I think you need in a framework you know as well as a frame whatever kind of vocabulary we choose to play with to get that in a way that has real resonance is really really difficult and I think one that is not only it's one level to kind of achieve that around a specific message it's another to achieve it in a way that is open enough that a community feels invited and excited that they have their own agency but it's also constrained enough that they don't feel intimidated and overwhelmed there's this really fragile balance that's challenging to achieve Excellent so Jonah you know we're sitting here with the creator of story of stuff and the matrix and over a hundred other unbelievable films that really pioneered a space how do you see the positive values coming through these multimedia ventures or do you hold it that way that they're being communicated in that way is that a fair way to talk about it Yeah I think when I first started my goal was just to get stories based on values out into the world so you know the matrix overthrowing the tyranny of factory farming seemed in itself the the act of telling and spreading that story was an act of spreading new values so people could see their food differently and create new rituals in their lives about how they ate new knowledge but I think what I didn't realize that just like in Jesse's work there's another level of value of values that you're embedding in how you tell stories when you have to partner with your evangelists when you don't have any tool to reach the world like a big broadcast machine you have to go out and arm the choir as I say the people who care about the issue with something that they can use to then open up their networks then pass it by way through more and more networks it's an active respect for your audience it's an active partnership for your audience and it's an active empowerment for your audience and you have to tell stories fundamentally differently so when you own a broadcast machine you can threaten 50 million people within security with a touch of a button and they literally cannot do anything about it they can't comment or embarrass your brand in response they have to sit there because they're waiting for their show to start again and they have to take it now when you say okay you have a hundred thousand other things you can look at and what I want you to do is I want you to clog your friends inbox with the message that we both share caring about you better respect them you better give them the power to talk about what they most value and you better help them build social currency around something that matters to them so the whole way that you approach audiences is completely and fundamentally different and I think that that kind of approach between broadcaster if you will and audience is a far more generative positive force in the world than what we saw in the broadcast so is this what you mean when you talk about storytelling is being more than a messaging tool is that where you're going in a sense well storytelling has always been a that the the mechanism by which human beings share values the reason that my two-year-old climbs in my lap and asks me literally 25 times a day for a story is that he wants to know what's important to our family he wants to know what's important to our tribe and he doesn't just want me to tell him he wants me to illustrate in the world what matters and we never outgrow that so if you're telling a story like I say in the video you are illustrating you're putting characters in conflict and plot in on a stage to illustrate a core truth about how the world works that's the moral of the story and that moral of the story is based on values what's important in the world and what and what's not and so if I tell you a story and the deep moral is he who hesitates is lost you're going to walk away valuing risk and adventure and reward if I tell you a different story and the moral the story is better safe than sorry I'm transmitting those values of safety and security so there's no such thing as a good story that doesn't transmit values now which values we choose to transmit that's what's up to us in the culture that we're going to be building story time so when say a corporation like Nike utilizes mythologies of empowerment like just do it which you refer to in your book in different ways are they empowering stakeholders and citizens towards a better future or just towards a better bottom line how do you reconcile that okay so you have to look at this I choose through my hands I think our nails right in the book trying to wrestle with this question for a really long time and I think I have an answer for them you have to look at that you have to look at that question on two levels the first is we can all agree when we look out and see our media landscape that it is doing great harm these inadequacy marketing messages these consumer messages that make us feel insecure and then something to feel better we all agree that that's not good for our kids that's not good for us so if we could change that landscape just in the 3,500 messages we receive a day to something that's more empowering that's a good in itself and yes Nike is doing that right so Nike comes along when every other product says let's make it easy for you let's make it convenient Nike says actually no not only is it going to be hard work not only to be difficult but everything that you need this is one of their tags is inside of you not inside of our product that does may has we made millions of people get off their asses and do something better in their lives now the question is okay that's one level is it deceptive is what Nike stands for true to that message now the fascinating and wonderful thing I think about brand storytelling is that the more you use empowerment marketing which is what I call this type of marketing the more you use it the more iconic you become and throughout all of history even before the digital era iconic empowerment marketing has created these iconic brands like Obama and Apple and Nike the more iconic you become the higher the expectations are for you the reason we all associate Nike with sweatshops and human rights abuses is not because they were the worst actor because they were the brand that people most loved and wanted to love and so they came under that fire and coming under that fire has made them a more better corporate citizen so they led with a story that maybe wasn't entirely authentic live the story in values that wasn't authentic that caused the audience in this new transparent era to wave the flag and say hey that's not real which caused them to become one of the most sustainable companies in the world now it's a beautiful kind of cycle it's not as easy to lie as it used to be and that's why I say those who tell and live the best stories of the future really interesting so Jesse question playing roughing off a little bit of this interplay you know between sort of the consumers and the producers of media and stories can you talk a little bit about that balance you were alluding to the the deft guiding hand and the free play of the user and is it sometimes you do things and then later the power point comes together here's what we did but when you were creating these things with your team what were the impulses and what was calling you what were the organic impulses that you were following in dividing that balance that's a great question I think so a couple of things this is just constantly charting through my mind as we're having this conversation and maybe this gets to the answer and we'll kind of follow this as myriad path is I think I think one of the most driving passions for myself and for our team in this context is actually is looking at the context of information society today seeing an unbelievably overwhelming quantity of information choices messages also seen by and large really kind of although changing modes of engagement and relationships of you know messages to recipients consumers to producers not seen much that surprises and just kind of has moments of what the hell just happened that really took me off kilter and changed my frame of mind and I think that there's something that distinct in this notion of surprise that I think really motivates our work it's how do you actually engage in a world today where people are so overwhelmed with with information how do you do things that don't just carry a message in a social meeting but how do you actually there's a certain inherent value I would say today and having one's mind change even for a moment in an experience of surprise I would use the word delight looking at your stuff there's a sort of delight that happens right oh that's it's delightful to talk about Main Street it's delightful to talk about to take out Chinese takeout is that it's that surprise combined with it's not a shock but a uplift of joy that you get thank you that's I mean I think I mean part of the nuance there though and challenge becomes there is a passion and inspiration around I mean a core set of social values I think is where where a lot of your work sits and it's and it's what does it mean to actually at times have a little bit of restraint around message to let a little bit more openness and delight and surprises I think we're a little bit more of kind of like the artistic culture aesthetic experimentation where that sort of risk of uncertainty actually of meaning there's ambiguity like it's it's you know the map of Main Street project part of I think the appeal was it actually didn't easily tell a story about championing the values of Main Street versus Wall Street it actually had an openness and ambiguity that was that opened up a different channel to think about and reflect on the culture in the state of the country without sort of falling into a standard to me in the standard narrative that we were used to hearing it brings a thought for me that is just ubiquitous in this part of the country which is scaling you can't really go you can't even go to Chinese restaurant without people talking about it so and I want to I want to hear from Joan on this as well but where do you come in on when you're designing these things and when your team is thinking about this community that's going to form around these values but also around this sort of ability to create interactivity in the storytelling that brings the individual voice in do you sit there and go boy we really need to monetize this or we you know this thing's got to get you know we got the night grant but we need the renewed grant if we don't get more eyeballs or you know metrics of impact and if not that then how do you know do people listen to you because you know if you have one million instead of a hundred million users for instance well this is sort of the cusp of the moment that we're at and exploring right now we're about to sort of release the tools more widely and in the process as you know of transitioning and building a hybrid model of a non-profit and a for-profit I think our initial inspiration around this was around scale and impact I don't think we imagined a hundred million I think we were if we were wildly successful it was more the eight million users that Vimeo has maybe crazy successfulness in the Tumblr range who knows that's really like but that was part of the inspiration and I think that the for-profit model has a lot more to offer in terms of supporting that type of scalability I think one sort of dimension in relation to that is I think what we're when this gets to the authoring and activity I think what in some sense one of the barriers to our success very well might be we have this vision that we believe that there is a large population of people that actually want to have agency over authoring frameworks not just operating on the terms of platforms that are given to them and there's you know it's you know there's the agency empowerment that tools like video sharing and photo sharing give but there's another dimension which says we want to let people actually author how internet the internet operates not just be able to participate in the web but actually edit and author the web and that's where our mission aligns with groups like Mozilla the truly you know the web maker initiative is about actually really putting into the hands of people the power to understand and to change the DNA of the web not just interact with the web but actually author the web itself that makes a lot of sense so Jonah for a guy in a company that you know had 60 million viewers see story of stuff or whatever whatever it is 20 thank you this feels pretty analog and it's kind of a wonderful compliment you know especially with the art the hand drawn art and what not and so I'm curious a little bit about scaling are you surprised 20 million viewers is well it's the top of the heap and so free range is mentioned in all these ways in conversations not just about doing this big work in the progressive movement not working primarily for or maybe exclusively for non-profit clients and you know more than a decade profitably just really near impossible to imagine how to do that and then on top of it to have this scaled you know viral receptivity on some of these projects are you surprised as everyone else or you know can you talk a little bit about how it came to be what the thinking was originally not are there any lessons or takeaways from that I mean it's definitely surprising and it was definitely surprising when we first you know I think the matrix is the first time Mark and it was definitely surprising to check in every day and see another 150 thousand people had seen it and that was really exciting and really alluring and this is the days before YouTube where I think we thought we just basically we can be the entertainment of the Internet let's just keep making these things you know and that's we were thinking like broadcasters though we think we thought we had this audience that we owned and we could just keep giving them content and that's really not how it works nor is it great for social change people to be chasing the enormous impact of the 20 million view mark which is seems to be where we pop out so like with grocery store awards which we made about organic organic food we got to about 25 million very quickly and but actually that was not good for our client our client was overwhelmed by that response and actually brought up all kinds of political issues within their coalition of the two was too much attention on their issue and what they were trying to say was another story for another time but this pop of wow the world just notice me for my 15 minutes of fame that's not necessarily what we all need to be chasing and when we look at scale we look at authentic conversation we look at authentic storytelling we can't always be thinking about how can we draw the widest public to this thing because the truth is they will come to that thing and then they will dissipate to the next thing so this is why the book when I started to write the book I actually it's much more about how to build a strategy upon which everything that you do is part of an unfolding story and how can you over 10 or 15 years of your organization or your enterprise be for those people who most love you and stick with you be a story that's richly imbued with meaning that they can carry and move on to the next thing and then there's your relationship that the relationships and the power that you can get from that is much more important than have you touched the 300 million people you know that like a cat falling on a toilet might get because there's no way to capture that value so I think that you know one of the core stories that we need to change in our society is the obsession with scale and as storytellers we also need to question that obsession with scale and really figure out what are we authentically are we doing and what you know Jesse's working in this kind of this kind of as am I straddling art and activism which they've always gone together but maybe he's a little bit more on the art side but you know have the greatest artist of our time had the 100 million views as their goal and the answer of course is no and you've got to figure out model at the same time which is another challenge so in the same way that Jesse was talking a little bit about this this effort that goes on kind of under the water where you don't see the legs swimming really fast around creating the framework or making sure the tools work in a certain way around the user experience being you know collaborative and accessible and simple but also very very elegant and very potent my understanding from a bit of work at free range and having the real honor of sitting in a room and seeing you in action when people come in with an idea which is a mind blowing experience by the way is that you know to do it right you and your team will spend days even sometimes if they're lucky but at least a day listening to a client's talk about their space, their vision, their raison d'etre and so it just sounds like there's so much that's going on before your storyboarding and your producing and you're like oh yeah we know how to translate your story I don't see it that way, I see them coming in and you're really listening and kind of reframing and recasting and listening for the key memes can you give us a little bit of insight on how that process works I think that one of the first things that we do with our clients is we use this hero's journey model so when we're doing a story strategy one of the first things that we do is we want to reorient them, we want to say tell me who the hero of your story is tell me your story and they'll usually say that their founder or one of the people there is the hero of their story and their story is about how they got going and now what they're doing in the world and so the first thing we'll do is we reframe them say no, the hero is the outsider the hero doesn't even know about your brand the hero is the powerless one which is a complete which they may not and say we kind of we're trying to do that but they don't know how to do it no one really is doing that so how do I make the hero the audience and then understand that the hero is going to be this kind of reluctant hero they don't know their hero Moses is 80 years old when God calls him to go back and free the slaves and he's like I'm a stutterer, I can't go, I'm scared it's not me so we have to approach our audiences in that way so the first thing we ask them to do is what values are not being met and lived out in the voice of this audience member and the conversation that happens around that is a stepping out of the inward focus that most organizations are working on and then we then ask them from the framework of this hero to be that you are calling to greater action and with you as the mentor what values, not the operating values that you work with in your office every day but what values can you share with this person essentially and how do you make those values not the transactional values of just I need to be safer I need to be more esteemed by my colleagues and friends, I need more money but how can you help them reach for those transcendent values and the kind of stuff that comes out of that gets very rich and then we move them into this archetype thing which is sort of like what is that core again in the Moses story when God comes down and tells Moses to go free the slaves the first thing Moses says is what is your name what is God as a human being and the Christian tradition what would Jesus do is the same thing not what does the teaching do but what does that man do what does that person do and that's what people want out of these brands they want to know the storyteller so using archetypes you can figure out what is the voice of our storytelling once we are starting to build around that then we can talk about once we know our values we know what core truths we're standing for because one thing that's just so important and I see it the same in Jesse's work if you're sitting down to hear a story or you're watching a movie every detail of that story has to be clean, delightful and keep you under the spell of that story and this is like same with user interface this is really cool I'm being sucked in and then there's some janky user interface or some character that comes along and you can't act or the storyteller like loses can't do that voice they're trying to do the spell is broken we have to work with our clients very much to understand to understand the story before they go out and tell it into the world because it's so easy to break the spell of the story but if you can hold it you can rock people's worlds and it just resonates at this universal level beautiful before we run out of time I want to see if there's some questions I really want to allow people to participate yes sir oh sorry Bjorn's got a mic he's on it thank you Scott Kleinman I'm an MBA student at Duke University for both Jonah and Jesse what are the implications of this for thinking about how to segment an audience it's so echoey up here can you just maybe say it what are the implications for the audience how do you think about that yeah so this is really an ongoing challenge but it's a great question so you don't have one type of audience maybe your audience is investors partners customers on and on and on your audiences are moms and also kids whatever that may be but you have the best brands and do not wear two masks don't have two faces you want to be able to consistently communicate and you can't control the chat you can't segment and say we'll send this message over to the moms and this message to the kids because information flows freely now so you have to find that key audience and if you say okay look if I'm speaking really effectively to those micro finance grantees the funders are going to see how effectively I'm speaking and be inspired now that means thanks to the beauty of interactive media the funders can go off to their little side of the site and find more information but how can I tell one story that in its success will rally the entire community around that story so I'm sure with your stuff you don't tell stories with the night foundation as your core audience you tell stories so that the night foundation says whoa these guys really know how to speak to the X community so I would say that if we nail that one thing it's going to really impress the hell out of those other heroes that's where I like to start because it can be completely overwhelming to be like hey kids check this thing out we know kids that really does not work and it's unmanageable for almost any brand I completely agree I would have said something very very similar and I think another dimension to that I think is also what we found is really also just living that story through a team and sort of the interaction of your project in a community which is to say that your team itself embodies different communities in different segments of a potential audience and actually building a diversity into a team that is working daily on that story on that project I think really offers sort of a mechanism to ensure that there is kind of a multiplicity of perspectives but you are kind of coming up with a central story that really kind of resonates out and I think that in that process as well that diversity of getting yourself out into different contexts not into every possible context but also sort of living out a network that is also authentic and intuitive talking to you know talking to people that you feel connected to around the story that you're telling other questions can't see so well Hi Christy George I run New Media Ventures I've got a question for both can you hear? I have a question for both Jonah and Jesse Jesse in terms of Zika you mentioned a few different things as you're sort of where you all are at right now is it that you are trying to chase more users trying to get more use cases trying to figure out financing what's the next step and Jonah I appreciate what you said about people chasing the 100 million views or 25 million views from your perspective what is the thing that people should be chasing is it action, are those views toward something else or what are those views toward? Sure so quickly I mean where we're at in terms of our work is we received the Knight Foundation grant a little over a year ago and have been hard at work assembling a team in the kind of initial alpha product which we have a limited user community that's been fantastic to interact and to learn from and to push the development we've been working on that level as well as having a sort of division of our group that is a certain sense in R&D lab for innovative storytelling projects where we ourselves bring our creative capacity to bear working with filmmakers, radio producers, journalists on a series of interactive documentary productions around the world and what we've found is that those two things are extremely complementary in this sort of first year of experimentation but that over time those models actually are challenging to do simultaneously the kind of creative productions very intensive on the human resources and human capital doesn't scale very effectively but extremely rewarding and important and also very great for learning the product is something that I think as I said when we got into this we really wanted to see a large impact so we're moving the product technology into the for profit going through developing the model financing around that and continuing to operate the nonprofit but at a somewhat smaller scale until there's the number of productions. What people should be after I think with storytelling of course is engagement on some level depending on what their theory of change is and we spent a lot of time with our clients on theory of change but I would say what the Holy Grail is in my mind and what the most amazing brands have done is they create new myths, they create new identities for people so that they see their actions aligned to everything they do in the framework of the story that you're telling and where I've seen the counterpoint to grocery store wars which was a great success as a storytelling project but not as a change project is a story of stuff where Annie got out there and she reached millions of people but really what it did was for millions of people they didn't just click off they thought of themselves differently they started telling their own story to themselves in a different way and it did exactly we built all kinds of interactivity tools into that project and they got a lot of clicks and take actions but it wasn't about how many take actions can we get or how big can we build our list it was can people actually think differently when they go to the store can they vote differently can they find each other in community and create new identities because all the consumer brands out there are allowing us to like express ourselves and express our sense of identity through their products as social enterprises we also have to do that and that's the process of myth making which I write a lot about in the book and I think that should be the ultimate goal it's not the easiest thing to fund it's not the easiest thing to measure but it can be done and it's beautiful we're gonna have to stop we're gonna have to stop and get in the hook this has been so great I just want to say thank you Jonas Sacks, Jesse Shapings Thanks guys