Last year, Myfanwy McGregor, co-founder of Adhesive PR in Sydney, had an idea for a campaign – was there a way to measure the happiness levels that Singapore can create?
And so the agency for Singapore Tourism Board worked on a programme where it brought a team of influencers and neuro scientists with their families to Singapore and put EEG (electroencephalography) headsets on them to measure their levels of brain activity at various locations.
“We wanted objective data to review various locations in Singapore,” said McGregor, speaking at the STB Marketing Conference on the principles of storytelling.
The headsets recorded the five families’ emotional responses to 20 different activities and experiences and the visitors recorded emotions like excitement, fun, happiness, interest, stress and relaxation. (EEG works by measuring the activity of billions of neurons inside the family’s brains.)
EEG headsets were placed on parents and their children to monitor their brain activity at various locations
McGregor said the campaign gave them family-specific insights and contained some surprises – for example, it is widely believed that children do not enjoy galleries while their parents do but the experiment showed that the level of interest among children in places like the Art & Science Museum were as high as in the Zoo.
And she observed, “There’s as much stress eating a durian as there is ziplining.”
Media reports generated at the time said that happiness and interest levels experienced while sightseeing around Little India for free were the same as the levels experienced while enjoying more expensive tourist attractions, such as ziplining.
Children were happiest with experiences involving wildlife and adults also felt happy visiting Jurong Bird Park and Merlion Park. The highest levels of happiness were recorded at experiences unique to Singapore, such as the Garden Rhapsody light show at the Gardens by the Bay.
Another insight was that the children’s interest levels were higher by 10% when eating local food vs Western food.
Singapore Emotion Travel Guide
The results were put together in an interactive map called the Emotion Travel Guide.
Using this as an example of how technology can facilitate storytelling, McGregor said, “EEG helped us facilitate the idea.”
And it has spawned a new category of “neuro tourism”, she said.
Another principle of storytelling is to keep the messaging simple and to do it over and over again. She cited Qantas’ campaign on “I still call Australia home” launched in 1997 and which featured a video of a school choir singing in Uluru.
Today, some of the kids who sang have married – and the message has been adapted to “Feels like home.”
Principle #3 is to be “beware of handing your brand over entirely to influencers”.
“Make sure the influencers have shared brand values and are good, credible and authentic,” she said. “It is easy to buy influencers but it’s better to work with those who are credible.”
Principle #4 is to be agile and listen.
She cited the campaign in 2014 by motor insurance company AAMI, featuring Rhonda and Ketut, which became, according to this article by Buzzfeed, the “greatest Australian love story”.
McGregor said the company made it part of pop culture by listening to its customers (and the nation) and kept evolving the campaign over years. (The analysis of the campaign is here )
On trends that are emerging in storytelling, McGregor said that just as there was the rise of slow food (to counter the fast food phenomenon), there is the rise of slow content – footage that just captures things like uninterrupted train journeys such as this video on “The Ghan: Australia’s Greatest Train Journey”.
Another trend is the switch from reality television content to purpose built quality content – such as the “Making A Murderer” docu-drama produced by Netflix.
In summary, McGregor said, to be a good storyteller, you have to “practise, look at what you don’t know and do it better, read a lot and be humble and listen. Things are changing so quickly, no one is an expert.”