What struck me watching the impeachment trial last week was how artfully House members prosecuting former President Trump threaded together tweets, broadcast, social, and CCTV footage to demonstrate that amid all the noise that day, there was a suspicious quiet in the timeline.
“Our commander-in-chief who is known for sending 108 tweets in a normal day, sent five tweets and a pre-recorded video,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas. Begging the question, what was he doing? And why did it take more than three hours for him to issue a strong rebuke to the rioters on Capitol Hill?
We’ve become accustomed to nonlinear narrative — a storytelling technique in which events are depicted out of chronological order. Think: Dark, Firefly Lane, I May Destroy You, Big Little Lies, Tenet or Lupin: a lot of what’s streamable at the moment thrusts us from flashbacks to backstories and even different dimensions. And hey, if your script gets optioned for eight hour-long episodes rather than one 90-minute movie, you’re afforded license to explore storytelling devices like this. But the return to linear, is part of why the House presentation was so powerful.
Vulture just wrote about Framing Britney and the Empathy of a Simple Timeline, explaining how the hour-long doc runs through Spears’s life with a detailed, chronological timeline. “There’s a little bit of foreshadowing here and there; it starts with the existence of the “Free Britney” movement and then jumps back to explain how we got to this place. But mostly, Framing Britney Spears makes the call to just walk through Britney’s life, step by step.”
It’s remarkably disarming to watch unfurl and Vulture ends its review with the especially salient point that, “People experience their lives as one event after another. Honest portraits of people should consider doing the same.”
In strategy, like in story, we often have to play professional empath. Perhaps the single most important thing to do is take clients and creative partners on a journey into someone else’s life — someone you need them to empathize with so that when you convince them of what they’re up against, why you’re fighting for them, and how you’ll do that, your clients and partners are all in.
When I was thinking about what the House managers achieved in laying out their argument last week, I was reminded of the times I’ve used a timeline in my work to make my point.
I took my men’s personal care clients, who back in 2013 were struggling to keep pace with culture, on a journey into the life of a boy born in 1994 — a boy who at that time was squarely in their consumer sweetspot. Most of the insights I’d seen in agency work and briefs back then seemed anchored to a hackneyed notion of lad culture. So as we plotted the timeline of the things a boy coming of age in the early 2000s had witnessed, we noticed it looked quite different to that of the lads who had come of age in the 90s. From 9/11 to firedrills in schools not being for fires but for active shooters, the things he’d experienced had a different weight to them. There was more co-ed’ing going on. More self-help. More sharing of EVERYTHING. So when we explained why some things weren’t funny or weren’t landing with this “new generation,” instead of fighting it, the brand and agency teams had extraordinary understanding. That timeline was like empathy on a page.
I recently used a timeline to help a European company understand why American women’s relationship with empowerment is different, given the way that four waves of feminism have unfurled and what the tone of the conversations have been on this side of the pond — ultimately steering them toward a platform that wouldn’t be tone deaf when it finally hit our turf.
Strategists tend to seek out human truths: insights that are so transcendent, they spark resonance across mass audiences. But between us friends, I find the pursuit and touting of these kinds of human truths a bit trite if they lack context-setting. We often fall reflexively into 5Cs analysis: Company, Competitors, Consumers, Culture, Conversation… I’ve seen Connections but I think that’s ambiguous and more likely the mucus around the other C membranes. If you’re building software or products, you might have Collaborators or (more sexy) Conspirators. I like Context as a sub for Culture. You might have Climate, which I think is useful in comms planning, especially where there’s risk mitigation involved.
While I’m not suggesting you throw out your alliterated enumerated analysis of choice, I offer the timeline as a tool so simple it feels like a cheat. Oh and you can do it for any of the Cs, if you like e.g.:
- combine social listening and trend analysis to track how a conversation has evolved over time, look at specific words and hashtags
- examine who has been the dominant voice/protagonist in a topic over time e.g. sexual wellbeing might reveal a trend from scientists to pop stars, to actor-turned-founder CEOs
- map competitor product launches and their marketing spend to quickly spot your biggest problem (and opportunity)
- plot legislation around a topic area to get a sense of how public opinion or even behavior shifted as civic life evolved
- simply go back and unearth nodal points in a businesses founding, was there a moment that changed things? could those conditions occur again
- draw out a day or a week in the life of someone to better see their stressors and struggles at an intimate level
