 human behavior isn't it? Like you should wanna give them everything that exists within that story up front and tell them exactly what's gonna happen. I mean think about it, if you went to a movie, it was a two hour movie and in the first 30 seconds they told you exactly what was gonna happen on screen and then they played the movie. That's how we advertise. (chuckles) That's exactly what we create with every banner ad we make, with every email we send, with every print-out, we say everything. And then we tell them go take a look for yourself. Well, you've already told them everything. That story isn't any good anymore. What if we protected that reveal? And there are certain stories that allow us to protect that reveal. There's a great piece of content out of an Argentinian shop for an organ donor, and it's an organ donor ad, and now I told you it's an organ donor ad so you know what's coming. But it's a story of a man, an elderly man with his dog and he has a heart attack. And he goes in the ambulance and the dog follows the ambulance all the way to the hospital. And then they won't let the dog in. So the dog stands outside of the hospital for days. You see days pass with the dog standing outside the hospital.  And then it fades and says, become an organ donor. And you're like, ahh! And you had no idea what this spot was about until you saw it. There's a reveal that happens at the end of that that makes the entire story play. And when we see movies like Sixth Sense and there's a twist at the end, and we're like, oh my God, it's such an amazing experience. We can give people that experience. It just takes a little faith. It takes a lot of selling, but it takes a little bit of faith. Let me give you an example. So you see they held on to why they were in the wheelchairs to begin with.  That the choices that you make reveal who you are. The choices that these men made to learn how to play wheelchair basketball for their one friend is the same choices that they make when they go to the bar, and they sit around and say no we're not gonna order any beer, we're gonna order a Guinness 'cause the choices that we make reveal who we are as from a character standpoint. We begin to see that from an advertising and a marketing standpoint they didn't talk about the beer at all. They didn't talk about the product at all. They didn't lift the product up whatsoever. They attached their brand to a characteristic, a characteristic that their audience shares and that they were able to hold onto the reveal of that and that's why that particular marketing was so effective. Shared tens of millions of times within the context of three days as it came out. From a buy standpoint you save yourself millions and millions of dollars by developing story that people care about, story that touches them from an emotional standpoint. So protecting the reveal. Questions? What about the story that you remember, but you don't remember whose story it is, Sure. what the brand name is? Sure, Which happens, by the way, all the time. It's the usual question, like I can remember the story but I can't remember who it's for. My answer is always the same in that particular instance. If you didn't remember the story, you wouldn't remember anything. At the very least you can go search for the story. At the very least, if it was just an ad, there are millions of ads that you've seen that right now you can't recall a single one of them. You don't remember what they were. You don't remember what they did. You don't remember what product they were for. And in that way, then that advertising may or may not have failed. At the very least there's a story in your head and that story has stuck when the brand maybe hasn't. If you seek out the story you'll find the brand. At the very least somebody left you a bread crumb, and that bread crumb could lead you to find that brand later, the alternative being they left you nothing, and you never go seek out anything ever again. There are times with which the rational purchase drivers are the right decisions. In most cases, those are when you're deciding between two things already. It's usually POS, it's usually point of sale, when those rational purchase drivers become important. Outside of that, attaching yourself to a motion creates threads, trains of thought that exist, that you can recall then and go back. I can tell you story after story after story of ads that I've seen that, because I'm a story freak, I remember who the story was for. Like the organ donor ad. I can't remember the brand. I can't remember who it was, it's Argentinian, part of it's a language thing. But I can't remember exactly who it's for. But I can remember what happened into it. There was a Canadian ad that I remember, that I can't exactly remember who it was for either. It showed a young man. He's running and he's got on one of those paddles, you know when you've lost your leg and they put the paddle, and he's running around a track. And it's at night and there's this driving track. And all of a sudden he starts running through scenes, and we're kind of trailing him with the camera. He's running through scenes and it starts off with normal scenes of being a regular person, and him lifting weights and doing everything. And then there was an accident, then there's an ambulance and there's a doctor, and he's running through these scenes that are taking place on the track. And basically it was he had this terrible thing happen and this is how he's come over, and he's running through it to show the triumph that existed. I cannot remember who it was for. But because I remember the story I can search it. If I didn't have that story I wouldn't have anything, I wouldn't have anything to search. So that makes it successful? In my opinion yes. I have given you the thread of things. Every day in the mail you get mailers. You get coupons. And there is lots of money spent to create those things. For you to take them from your mailbox and put them into your trash, right?  And the first thing you saw was a Pizza Hut coupon, was what you kept, right? Because it mattered to you in that moment. Three days later you might go, man I wish I had a coupon. I know there was a coupon for Pizza Hut. I know for a fact there was and I threw it away. I don't have that thing. At the very least, you've got a connective thread with which you can go back. And in that moment you may have shared that ad that you might not have shared it otherwise. That is the one nice thing about, for instance, Facebook, is I've got a running tally of every single story I've ever come across. Because I share it, that's the natural action I wanna take. And I can go back through my feed and look at all those wonderful stories. And every time I watch them I'm being marketed to. Nike did something way back when, where they had Marion Jones who was a track star at the time. And they had this ad where she's running, she's being chased through Santa Monica, or no, she's chasing somebody through Santa Monica. She's chasing somebody who tagged her and now it's a game of it or whatever. And she's running through these buskers and running through this house and she's chasing and running this guy down. And then the ad stops and it says finish the story at whatever.Nike.com. And you go to whatever.Nike.com and this was back when video was a big deal. You're dealing with modems, right? 28.8 modems and the amount of time it has to spend to go through them. And you found multiple endings to that video. And you sat there for a half hour going through each ending. And what you don't realize is you just spent a half hour with a brand because you wanted to. Not because they made you, not because they were selling you anything, but because you wanted to. You spent a half hour with that brand. It became so popular that the media companies were having difficulty selling the ad right after that on TV because everyone was leaving the TV and going to their computer to see the endings to the commercials. So they were struggling with having the eyeballs, the right eyeballs. But the story is kind of what creates that connective thread. Without the story you don't remember anything. In my opinion, at the very least, from a marketing standpoint, if we are remembered, whether we're remembered for our brand character or remembered for a story that we moved somebody, it's worth it. We've got a couple questions over here from the internet. Alright. Sort of as we wrap things up, sort of Sure! kinda bigger picture questions. ]Stefan] Okay. Brent Ellis wanted to know, and I'm just gonna elaborate a little bit. You showed earlier the print ad for Lego. Yeah. Which was a great example of how graphic design can tell a story. Sure. Can you elaborate on how more ways that you bring storytelling into graphic design? Sure. I'm a designer by education. That's where my start began. Design, like photography, is a lot about single communications having to do a great deal of work for you. It's communicating an idea but it's also communicating the emotion behind an idea. And in most cases they're very singular in the things that we create. We might design a logo or a trade show booth, or