Tag Archives: Northwestern

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An important part of video storytelling is focus. Not keeping the camera focused… keeping your story focused.

Northwestern football provides us with a great teaching opportunity. Fitting, right? Great school… alma mater to website consultant extraordinaire Brian Bender at Net Elevation (plug, ding!).

Anyway, NU produces a terrific web series called, “The Hunt,” which details the team’s quest to return to the Rose Bowl. A side note… the last time the Wildcats played in Pasadena, T60 client Jeremy Hogue of Sovereign Healthcare (double plug blog post!… ding, ding!) was leading USC to a victory over the Wildcats.

Learning from Northwestern

Okay… so… Northwestern does a great job of taking us behind the scenes. We get some flavor of campus life, as well as action on the field. It’s good stuff. It’s professional and well-produced.

Having said that, we can always find some room for improvement, and this lesson is great for business, PR and marketing leaders to note. NU’s latest video is titled, “The Student Athlete.” Like all the videos in the series, it looks great… the problem here is the storytelling.

If you watched the video without reading the title, you’d think it was a recap of the team’s game against Maine. Read the title again though… “The Student Athlete.” It isn’t until the end of the video when we get a mini-feature on one of the ‘Cats players talking about what he does in the classroom.

Actually, it kind of feels like a throwaway piece because we don’t really learn anything significant, and that’s a shame because highlighting how hard these athletes work in the classroom could be a GREAT story.

Video storytelling takeaway

The lesson is simple. Keep your video storytelling focused. If your title promises viewers something, you better tell that story. If what you deliver isn’t what the audience is expecting, how likely do you think it is they’ll watch your next video?

Focus your storytelling and deliver on promises.

–Tony Gnau

Tony Gnau is a three-time Emmy-winning journalist. He is also the founder and chief storytelling officer at T60 Productions. T60 has won 11 Telly Awards for its work over the last eight years.

I ran into an interesting guy yesterday. We got to talking and he asked me what I do. I told him about T60 and that we produce mostly PR and marketing videos.

That peaked his interest.

Turns out he teaches at Northwestern’s business school, and specializes in… wait for it… marketing. That started a back-and-forth, and I don’t know who was more interested in what the other had to say.

The big takeaway I got from the conversation was that we’re on the right track. I told him how I don’t think of us as marketers, that I believe we are storytellers first and foremost. He loved hearing that and talked about how he’s teaching the same thing in the classroom.

Nice to hear the next generation of marketing students are going to be on the same page as our story when they graduate.

–Tony Gnau