Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

Campaigns

How to apply a narrative arc

Within public relations it is taken as given that we are good storytellers.

Most PRs will have developed their craft by writing stories for journalists. These stories have a fairly standardised structure. They come in the form of a press release, with a headline, a lead paragraph, then more detail and some supporting quotes, and finally there’ll be some boilerplate.

Structure is often likened to a pyramid; the further down the page you go, the more information you get. It is designed to grab attention and, once that’s been achieved, it throws in additional information. It is a sensible and solid format.

But does this format work for a tweet? Or a video? Or a GIF?

The short answer is, “No.”

So if the pyramid doesn’t work, what does?

Enter narrative arcs

This is where thinking about a narrative arc helps. A technique that I was first introduced to by TV writers, it is a device they use to think about changes in their stories. We all know the classic story of the underdog who succeeds. Here the narrative arc starts low and ends high. In a tragedy, the play Macbeth for example, the arc starts on a high and ends very low indeed. Arcs can go up and down. They don’t have to start at one point and end at an opposite.

They are useful because they help writers think about the audience. Do we need to make them feel sad or happy? And if we want them to feel really happy, perhaps we need them to feel sad first so the shift in emotion is more dramatic?

Practical application

If you’re writing copy the purpose of which is to sell, you might want to build up to a high so your call to action is powerful. If you’re trying to pull together a quick six second animation, you might want to start on an eye-catching high so it grabs attention straightaway.

The trick is to recognise two things, one is that stories need to move down as well as up. You can’t keep an audience consistently in a good mood or it gets boring. The second is that you need to identify the sources of tension in your story. What’s the key the bit of information that causes change?

For PRs, this way of thinking about copy is useful because it offers flexibility and it lets us draw upon the experience of master storytellers from film, TV and other creative sectors. Above all though, it helps us focus on how the reader or viewer feels, and ultimately if we can make them feel strongly enough we might even elicit action.

Promote Mode: Twitter’s flat-fee subscription advertising product

With the launch of Promote Mode, has Twitter built the ad product small businesses need?

Twitter has launched a new ad product, called Promote Mode, that’s targeted squarely at small businesses and individuals seeking an easy way to build an audience on the network.

For a monthly fee of $99 Promote Mode will automatically promote your tweets and your account. No need to set up ads, just tweet as normal and the algorithm will take care of the rest. Twitter says that those who tweet regularly and subscribe to Promote Mode should gain an additional 30 followers a month and reach an additional 30,000 users on top of their natural reach.

Promote Mode also allows some simple targeting by allowing subscribers to choose up to five interests or cities or locations within a country. At the moment, the product is only available in the US and the UK. Roll out is expected soon in Japan too.

Early sightings of Promote Mode in the wild have shown the limitations of this approach. If, like in the example below, you’re not producing lots of tweets that would suit an advert format, some fairly mundane things will be promoted.

Despite the potential for odd tweets being promoted, this is a genuinely useful product. It takes out the (perceived) hassle of putting together Twitter ads and fixes a price in advance, thereby addressing two issues all small business owners will recognise: time and cost certainty.

For Twitter, it’s also unlikely to cannibalise its core ad business. Those who want tighter targeting or to run bigger campaigns will unlikely show interest in this product.

The launch of Promote Mode delivers one additional thing: a public benchmark of price and performance. We all advise clients that reach and follower numbers have severe limitations as performance metrics, but plenty of people are obsessed with them. If Twitter thinks it can deliver you 30 followers and reach 30,000 users for $99, those running paid campaigns need to outperform that price.

Simple or meaningless?

Social media is awash with quotes. Some accurate, some less so. Some deeply cherished by those who post them, others seemingly churned out of some quote sausage machine. Many love them, many loathe them. However, what is not in doubt is that they elicit engagement.

People are drawn to simple, clear messages. If those messages bring simplicity to complex issues, well then everything’s rosy. But there comes a point when something is made too simple. When so much context is removed that the message is meaningless.

Design

There is an excellent documentary series on Netflix called Abstract. In the first episode, Christoph Niemann, who designs covers for the New Yorker, discusses abstract design. He uses the example of communicating love. Everyone uses a heart shape. From a design perspective, the heart shape is the most abstract a drawing of a heart can be before it becomes meaningless. It doesn’t have the complexity of ventricles and arteries, but it is definitely a heart. If you made it more abstract, by turning it into a square or a circle, it would go from simplified to meaningless.

Language

Let’s apply the same thinking to language. A popular refrain in communications at the moment is that there is no longer B2C (business to consumer) or B2B (business to business), there is only business to human. The idea being that in the age of social media and the blurring of work and personal lives, we need to communicate to people as people. It is superficially appealing, but it is meaningless.

B2B is a useful simplification. It tells us, at a very top level, that we’re communicating to people who are making decisions for businesses. Similarly, B2C tells us we’re communicating to an audience who are making decisions as consumers.

Business to human, tells us we’re communicating to people. What’s helpful about that? It is shorn of useful context. It is the equivalent of communicating love using a square.

Fake News Memes

This year, fake news has made serious inroads towards toppling house prices and Rupert’s Tesla as the dominant dinner party topic of conversation.

While chatting and chomping with Stephen Waddington in the more down to earth surroundings of Frank’s cafe on Southwark Street, we talked about the demise of the sub-editor, rediscovering the lighter side of Twitter and the joy of making and doing.

The conversation led to the idea of creating memes based on word plays of fake news. Over the following week, I peppered social media at odd hours with a range of these memes. The full collection is displayed below.

This isn’t a clever commentary on the news business. It’s not an analysis of the state of our civic debate. It’s certainly not content marketing designed to build trust, show leadership or sell consultancy. It’s a little bit of fun. Because it’s fun to have fun.

Twitter ads, disclaimers and highly regulated industries

Twitter is a tricky medium for advertising but its user base is valuable.

On average, Twitter’s UK user base is better educated and higher earning than the population as a whole. That makes it a bit of a prize for some products, including some which are highly regulated like financial services.

Twitter users are also an opinionated bunch who often angrily coalesce around an issue and their regular flare ups become fodder for news outlets. So there’s a notable risk when advertising to them.

A look at financial services

So how to advertise Twitter users? Let’s take a look at some ads by financial services firms to see the approaches different firms are taking.

Hargreaves Lansdown, which provides investment services to retail investors, has been running ads that link to information about the funds that are most popular with its ISA clients. They have a clear disclaimer that there is a, “risk of loss.”

Meanwhile, UBS bank’s digital wealth management offering, called SmartWealth, is running ads with a clear call to action telling investors to, “place your money into UBS SmartWealth.” They too run a disclaimer that informs us, “Capital @ risk.” The disclaimer is certainly less blunt Hargreaves Lansdown’s but is just a clear. Interestingly, UBS SmartWealth only uses Twitter to run ads. It has not tweeted in an effort to build an audience or a conversation.

Standard Life Invest, use no disclaimer in this Twitter ad. The account, which in its description says it’s only for investment professionals, instead takes an approach whereby you click through to a screen which requires you to confirm you are an investment professional before proceeding to take you through to the advertised content. This approach certainly frees up characters in tweets and also allows for longer and more complete disclaimers. A drawback to this approach is that the bounce rate is likely to be quite high.

Brand building

BNY Mellon take the approach of using Twitter as a brand building tool. A simple ad, linking to a nicely designed (if a little too self-reverential) quiz that seeks to place BNY Mellon as an innovator.

What should we take from this array of approaches? Well, firstly, on Twitter there’s no standard way to deploy the disclaimers highly regulated industries need to use. That’s probably a good thing from a creative perspective. Certainly, in the examples cited, when sharing information that might be seen as financial advice, the disclaimers are delivered before you get to the content.

Another point to note is that targeting is poor. One of the ads is for investment professionals (and I’m a long way from being one) and two others promote wealth and investment management brands which provide services that, to put it politely, I’m probably not the target customer. That’s not to say those managing the accounts have chosen the wrong audience targeting. We all know that Twitter’s targeting can be a little off sometimes.

Finally, we should note that Twitter, in its thus far fruitless drive to turn a decent profit, is constantly developing new ad products. Financial services and other highly regulated industries tend to be cautious spenders but also big spenders. It’s likely Twitter will keep launching new ad products and tweaking its services to capture this lucrative market.