"How Big Is A Human Egg?"
Stories With Heart – a fortnightly round-up of the best storytelling, for people and organisations wanting to win hearts and minds by telling better, richer stories.
Hello story lovers, Sam Lightfinch here. Welcome to Stories With Heart.
As a strategic storyteller and speaker, I use strategy, ideas and creative executions to craft and share narratives that resonate with people and drive organisational success.
Are you ready to compose the email of story, open up a new message, and stare at the blinking cursor as you resist the temptation to write ‘I hope this email finds you well’? Will you find almost anything to distract you from the task, and only hit send at the very last minute, before closing the window and pretending it doesn’t exist? Me too. Talk soon x
🏆 Story of the week 🏆
“How Big Is A Human Egg?” | Roe V Bros
I’m at that age where I find out about TikTok trends by reading about them on The Guardian. But I’m getting my finger closer to the pulse – I saw this video on Instagram!
I was drawn into Roe V Bros videos by the painful hilarity of the content on offer. But what really makes this stand-out storytelling for me is the twist at the end, when the presenter asks if these men are registered to vote (which might be less of a surprise to a US audience who are used to the political parlance of Roe Vs Wade).
If I were a woman in America who wasn’t registered to vote, I don’t think anything else would do a better job of getting me to consider signing up.
Story-Level Takeaway: Sometimes the only thing you need to tell a story is a question, and to watch the answer unfold.
Societal-Level Takeaway: Men, let’s have zero opinions on other people’s bodies and spend all that free time educating ourselves instead.
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LinkedIn slides of the week
It’s A Bad Day To Be An Avocado | SURREAL
29 images in a LinkedIn carousel. In an awful green. And I read them all.
This is a great bit of storytelling because it takes a truth – people went mad for avocado at breakfast – and turns it into a playful attack. The witty (if I ever use that word in this newsletter again, please creep into my house in the middle of the night and steal all my shoelaces) storytelling gave me a refreshing break from all the thought leadership on the platform and offered me a little oasis of fun.
It’s 24 slides before I realised what the point was. SURREAL is now in Waitrose. But that’s not the only point. I now have a feel for the brand and its character. And they stuck four product shots in there, so I know what their cereal looks like on the shelf.
Takeaway: Stories make people care and remember, even if the story isn’t really about the thing you want to draw attention to.
OOH ad of the week
Underfunding Leads To Knife Crime | Fighting Knife Crime London | TBWA\MCR
Every now and then I see an ad that makes me push a little puff of air out of my mouth, like I’ve inhaled a tiny leaf blower. This out-of-home idea from TBWA\MCR is excellent because of how succinctly these images shorten the gap between the devastating stats and the human impact to practically nothing.
And when the campaign’s aim is to raise donations, putting a face to the numbers and the very real cost of underfunding is a masterstroke to build empathy and drive action.
Takeaway: Hire TBWA\MCR. Their work never misses.
Spoof rom-com featuring a dog of the week
Howl You’ll Know | Milk-Bone | BBH
I watched About Time the other week with my partner because she’d never had anyone willing to sit down and watch rom-coms with her. I’ll be going home tonight and introducing her to Howl You Know, a rom-com about… finding a dog?
It’s actually a spoof trailer that taps into the insight that it’s bloody easy to fall in love with a dog. This video is a knowing smile to dog owners and takes an us (dog-lovers) and them (the-still-to-be-converted) approach to storytelling.
No prizes for guessing how the story unfolds, but there’s a meet-cute and a great training montage moment – ‘Who’s a gooooood boi?. My only wish is that it was longer. I’d like to see how/if BBH have plans to atomise this into different channels and ideas.
Takeaway: Tropes can still work if you find new ways to play with them.
OOH ad of the week 2 (can I even do that?)
LiveOnNY | ???
If the last OOH ad made me imitate a mini leafblower, this one made me mutter ‘nice’ under my breath like someone who’d just landed a sock in the laundry basket from across the room.
One big reason this works is because of how damn recognisable the logo is, but it also trusts its audience to fill in the gaps (unlike this ad for the London Underground that still gives me nightmares). It would have been SO easy for people in this project to weaken the idea.
‘We need to say hearts on there somewhere.’
‘What if there’s a cut-out outlined version of a heart?’
Takeaway: The stories that will stop people in their tracks are the shortest, tightest ones. Keep refining the idea until there’s only gold left.
My story of the week
Desire Paths
I grew up in a tiny farming village in the countryside. As well as a hay bale of emotional baggage, my childhood also gave me a love of starting fires, picking kernels of wheat from the head, and exploring rogue paths.
A few years ago, I entered a one-sided shouting match with my Komoot app when I was trying to plan a cycle route back home, and it wouldn’t show me half of the paths in the village. I asked my Uncle about the one at the bottom of his field.
“It’s not a path, people just walk down there.”
But it is a path – it’s wide enough for two people to walk shoulder to shoulder. It’s bone dry in summer and cracked like elephant skin. And when it’s really rained, you get a core workout just trying to stay upright in its slime. I’ve spent hours walking up and down its bounds with friends, with lovers, and on my own.
At the time, I figured it was just poor data harvesting or something from the app. But more recently, I found out the name of the phenomenon – they are called desire paths.
A desire path is an unplanned small trail created as a consequence of mechanical erosion caused by human or animal traffic.
Just like other animals, we’ve got an inbuilt drive to find the quickest, easiest route from A to B. And we’re also hardwired to follow. Because desire paths really take root when people see them visually beginning to take form and then more and more people use them.
So what are these paths doing here in a newsletter about stories? I think they serve as a great reminder of human behaviour and experience.
Where’s the balance and obligation for storytellers? How often do we need to create structures and paths that people can’t and shouldn’t delineate from? And how often do we need to leave enough wild spaces, untamed bits of narrative, where people can find their own ways through our world?
THE END(ISH)
Hopefully, you’re here because you like stories, and not because you misspelled stotties while you were Googling it.
If it’s the former, I’d appreciate it if you A) share this newsletter with someone who might like it, or B) check out my website.
If it’s the latter, and you’ve got a real hankering for some bread from North East England, grab me one for when I’m gannin’ yem. Oh, and if you don’t care about stories that’s no danger, pet. Let yourself out at any time.