1. BRANDING BY
ASSOCIATION

2. Truth Well Told.
-h.k. mccann, 1912

3. The building blocks of story.
Anecdote // Bait // Reflection

4. Maybe we’re doing it wrong.

5. Humanize my brand.

6. “Idioms are an anathema to innovation. They fuse
organizations to assumptions, cultural mythologies and
fossilized ways of seeing and talking about themselves, their
business and, more importantly, their consumers.”
-Morgan Gerard

7. “The insight.”

8. We are not telling stories. We parade stereotypes, platitudes
and observations as insights.
Our tenacity to turn cultural problems into simplistic solutions
has kept us only a few steps beyond the jingle.

9. Three things to see our way out.

10. 1. We search for people like us.

11. Breaking down the other.

12. The birth of transmedia storytelling, 1993.
“transmedia intertextuality works to
position consumers as
powerful players while
disavowing commercial manipulation”

13. Obama stole his distribution
from Howard Dean. And the
Republicans stole it
from him. His message
didn’t spread the
furthest only because
it was spread the most.
Distribution bits vs. Content bits

14. TRANSMEDIA
a description of the distribution
INTERTEXTUALITY
a description of the associations within

15. Join the Procession.

16. Intertextuality can be a way of finding
humanness through common reference.
A brand cannot be human,
but it can get an inside joke.

17. Dog-Whistle Politics
coded language that appears
to mean one thing to the general population
but has a different or more specific meaning
for a targeted subgroup of the audience.

18. Never put a period where God has put a comma.

19. Noah Kalina and NBA
OKGO and Nike+

20. 2. We like to figure things out.

21. “Often the more you understand something the less
interesting it is because there are no questions to be
considered or explored, there’s no mystery, there’s no
tension, there’s no life.”

22. Our job (apparently) is to find clarity.
Not to raise the right *&^%#(o3’s or find
proper gaps.

23. Remember the gaps.

24. 3. We search for meaning.

27. “Worry not that no one knows of you; seek to be worth
knowing.”
-Confuscius

28. Don’t hide.

29. Stand for something.

30. Give me the back story.

31. “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And if
you talk about what you believe you will attract those who
believe what you believe.”
-Simon Sinek

32. "I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company
exists simply to make money. While this is an important
result of a company's existence, we have to go deeper and
find the real reasons for our being.”
-David Packard

33. In Summary.
Associations + Interestingness + Purpose

34. Thanks. You can find me on the internet.
Paul McEnany
Director of Strategy at Twist Image.
heehawmarketing.com // @paulmcenany