What can Cinderella teach you about Data Storytelling?

Welcome to the first edition of my newsletter! While I’ve been writing for many years, publishing a newsletter wasn’t on my list until recently. Maybe I was dreading the publishing deadlines or I was unsure about building a mailing list.

A few months ago when this came into my radar, I decided to experiment first on LinkedIn. I started making 200-word posts, every single day.

I learned many lessons: ideating on a deadline, writing concisely, and importantly, finding what worked with the audience. I was thrilled to see the love and the level of routine engagement that got many of my posts trending.

So, here I am with my first newsletter. I value your time and attention. Thank you for subscribing, and for giving me access to your inbox. I promise to use it wisely. Read on and let me know your feedback.

Cheers!

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What can Cinderella teach you about Data Storytelling?

What’s your all-time favorite movie? Chances are that you watched it a long time ago. My favorite movie is ‘Shawshank Redemption’. I watched it 15 years ago, but it’s fresh in my mind like I saw it just a few weeks ago.

What makes these movies so memorable? Researchers say that there is a common thread that runs through all great movies, novels, and speeches.

It’s the emotional arc, also called the ‘shape of story’.

What’s the shape of stories?

Good stories have a beginning, middle, and end. But, great stories go beyond that. They sequence the events through a series of emotional ups and downs that hook the audience. Like a rollercoaster ride.

Kurt Vonnegut analyzed the shapes of popular stories and constructed their emotional arcs. A plot in which a struggling boy reunites with his girl may be cliched, but it works like magic. Remember, Pretty Woman, The Notebook, or Slumdog Millionaire?

They use the time-tested emotional arc of ‘Boy gets girl’. Here is its shape:

(Pic: Column Five Media: Visualizing the most popular stories of our civilization)

Looks simple, right? But, notice how the emotions vary in the y-axis. As viewers, we bite our nails when things fall into the negative. We cheer for the hero as he rises again to reclaim the girl, lifting the emotions high up again.

Kurt reconstructs the shape of many other interesting stories, including one of the most famous ones of our times - Cinderella! Here’s the shape of this story.

(Pic: Column Five Media: Visualizing the most popular stories of our civilization)

Why does the emotional arc matter?

Teams at MIT and McKinsey analyzed thousands of Vimeo videos to see if their emotional arcs could predict audience engagement. They sketched out the second-by-second arc for every video by using computer vision and audio analytics algorithms.

Clubbing the arcs into 8 story families, they analyzed how many ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ each one got. They were surprised to find that the emotional arcs could predict whether the audience will love a story!

The picture below plots the shapes of these story families, with the Y-axis showing the positivity of a scene’s emotion. The family highlighted below in red has a lot of emotional variations and ends on a strong positive note.

This generated the highest user engagement.

(Pic: McKinsey article - AI in Storytelling: Machines as cocreators)

How can you put this to use at work?

Pause for a moment and think about your last business presentation. What was its emotional arc? Did it have any variations? How did you end it?

Most of our presentations are informative but very flat. Or worse, they have a falling emotional arc. They don’t end on a high and fail to connect emotionally with the audience.

Try applying these learnings to your next presentation. To summarize the takeaways:

• Remember that you can do a lot more than sequencing the insights logically

• Build an engaging emotion arc by sequencing the good news and bad news

• Close on a high to excite the audience and highlight your call-to-action

You can apply this not just to presentations, but to any communication where you want the audience’s undivided attention.

Good luck storifying and spicing up your business communications!

Does this spark any ideas? Got any follow-on questions? Just reply and let me know.

PS: This post title was inspired by Cat Dundas, who posted a review of my recent talk at the IABC World Conference on the same theme. Here are my talk slides.

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I won the CSuite Digital Leadership Awards 2020!

The CSuite Digital Leadership Awards recognize business leaders who inspire and influence on digital channels. The results for 2020 were announced last week. I’m thrilled to share with you that I won the award in the ‘Best Blog or Op-Ed by a Business leader’ category.

Here’s the list of winners and a snapshot below. If you haven’t checked out my articles, you can find them on my website, here.

Hope you enjoyed reading my first newsletter. If you loved this post, please spread the message!

Yours,

Ganes.