Elliott Rayner and the Science of Storytelling

Mikey: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Presentation Thinking, aka the Storyteller's Study Club. And Molly, today, like, we really mean that, don't we?

Molly: Yeah, that's actually true. I'm more, more studious than, than usual. Elliott Rayner, you are the head of marketing at OWow and a friend of the ranch we met at Product Marketing Alliance.

You gave an excellent workshop on the science of storytelling, and we knew immediately You'd be a great guest to have on the cast. So welcome aboard. We're glad you're here.

Elliott: Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, it was, it was a really nice introduction to you because I, I have been teaching storytelling for a long time.

And then to see [00:01:00] you guys with your merch, with hats, with storytelling, I read it on, I was like, Oh, I need, I need to go speak to these guys. And yeah, it was really great to get to know you, but my God, it doesn't it feel like a long time ago now? It was only one. It really

Molly: does. Yeah, totally. It was right before all the holiday Hubbub, and now we're, now we're like halfway through quarter one, if January is crazy, or February now, and no, we're so, yeah, it's really always interesting to see the types of people that PMA gathers, because, and then storytelling being this core, common passion that everyone shares.

Yeah. It wasn't always

Elliott: like that. Right. I think it was storytelling was more of a soft skill that was kind of mentioned on the side. And then, yeah, over time it's really become, I think, a core skill where actually I've seen what I like to use storytelling as a way to describe what product marketing is. I think it's really key to it.

Music: Yeah. Yeah. And

Elliott: so, yeah, I think each time we start to embrace that a little bit more and product marketers are starting to realize, Oh, I. I should probably [00:02:00] become a better storyteller. And that's, I think that's a really important skill to have.

Molly: Yeah, totally. So if you're just tuning in for the first time presentation nation, and you need some story set strategy within your marketing, your product marketing, at least it's got such creative marketing over at OL, we want to talk about that too.

So keep listening. Lots of great insights ahead.

Mikey: My mind was blown by your keynote as well. Like, you packed the room over there at the summit. So many hands were going up, even though you're like, guys, like, I'm going to share the slides. Don't worry. But no, boom, boom, boom. That was funny. What I love is You came to this B2B space from a decade or more in consumer branding, right?

And can you tell us about like what your background was and when you got to B2B, what was your take?

Elliott: Yeah, sure. So you're right. So I started in the sports industry. So I am from Newcastle, north of England. It's a place obsessed with sport, even though we're really not very good at it. But yeah, so I knew I wanted to work in the sports industry.

And really, when you think about it, I think when you think of where the best [00:03:00] stories come from, like the sports industry is, is pretty iconic for it. And it was my first introduction to that world. I spent like 10 years there, really fortunate to create some amazing products and, and amazing stories at the same time.

But this thing in the background was going on, which was called tech, which did not exist when I was first studying to become a marketer, and I was very envious looking at the innovation that was going on and the quickness of the product launches and. And I, yeah, I took the leap into that world and inevitably B2B and yeah, it was funny because I got so many warnings of how different it was.

But really that's, that's my approach to storytelling is that at the end of the day, even if it's a highly technical product, uh, maybe a boring product, maybe it's bought, uh, it's purchased over a year and not in a day and maybe it's decided by a committee. So all of those things that we. We qualify as being different between B2B and B2C.

It's still a human being making a decision. Mm-hmm. And those human beings making decisions have the [00:04:00] same emotions and go through the same conscious decision making process and are equally susceptible to storytelling. And for me, that's actually why, uh, I really got more into storytelling. 'cause I think that there's so much more potential for it to be used in B2B than it is, but there's still some resistance to that, I think from, from the B2B side.

Why

Mikey: do you think that is?

Elliott: Yeah, I don't know. I think for the things that I mentioned, I think they think, well, it's, it's just so much more technical. I think they think of that B2C ad campaign, like a Nike campaign. They think, but we know that marketing doesn't have to be that way. Even B2C doesn't have to be that way.

And I think they think is storytelling is a super bowl commercial rather than storytelling being copywriting. Brand design, sales pitching,

Music: you

Elliott: know, decks evenly. Yeah, everything decks. Exactly. So it's, it's storytelling is a, is a much more fluid term. It does not mean writing a script for a commercial.

It's a skill that you can [00:05:00] utilize storytelling most places. And I think that's, that's the thing that usually clicks of like, ah, and then usually next thing is, well, how do you become a writer? a better storyteller. And that's exactly what happened to me. I really recognized that, why is some products going great and why some not?

Why are some campaigns going great? And usually the red thread between them was these ones had a much more clearer and well thought out story. So how do I get myself in a position where I understand how to create better stories, how to measure better stories? And really, that's what came to the science of storytelling and realizing a lot of smart people have already done this research to understand what a story is.

And I, yeah, I just started digging into the books and research and became, just became obsessed with it.

Molly: Yeah. And I, and I heard you studied marketing, but at what point, like, did that, is that how storytelling was originally introduced to you was? In the context of that flashy Super Bowl commercial, like when did that kind of skill pop in?

Elliott: It was, it was literally, I [00:06:00] think I would, like most of us, I was doing those things without knowing, calling it storytelling.

Music: Yeah.

Elliott: I was, you know, the way I would build a brief or the way I would edit copy. like, you know, adding emotion, doing cliffhanger, all of those things. I just didn't have the terms for it.

And that's what I find with most people. You're telling stories every day, right? No, you don't need to teach people to be storytellers. You just need to teach them to be better storytellers or more aware storytellers. And it was exactly the same for me. It just wasn't until I think I read the first kind of books that came to me.

Whether it be Joseph Campbell's work on, on a hero's journey or, or the seven basic plots or, or some of these just very entry kind of books that made me realize, and this is what we'll get into it, that there's a framework and, you know, product, Mark, you just said, you know, the, the, the cameras go up whenever I do my keynote, because, you know, we just, we just love frameworks.

It's like, Oh, great. Now. You know, cause that, that is the intimidating thing. People think storytelling is, they imagine a white page and you [00:07:00] have writer's block and where, where do you begin? But if you give people a template, it becomes a lot less intimidating and you can start going, okay, let's, let's start hashing this out as a group and building the story together.

Mikey: Even just the, the term is, is almost ambiguous to people. It's like, am I going to write a damn fairy tale? What are you talking about? You know, it's like, but when I think about, okay, what's the opposite of storytelling in business, Elliot, is that, what is it just like word vomit, information dumping, you know, what, what to you is like the antithesis or the opposite of a story semblance.

Elliott: Well, I think, I think it's just getting more features, right? More technical. Just literally bombarding people, um, with features. I think it's what, you know, what, uh, April Dunford's called, like, you know, this was wind funnel of just features, like, where afterwards you just, you're just brain dead. Cause you've just been telling you all of the things.

That this product can do, rather than learning what will my life look like after using this product for a year? [00:08:00] And this, this is really the nice way of seeing the difference between features, benefits, and value. You know, features is, is the, the physical things it can do. Benefits of of are the results of those features.

And the value is the long term result of all of those features and benefits together. And that, that's where storytelling happens. And so I think that's where the opposite and we've all been there where we've been pitched something and it's happening right now. And when you look at most AI products are selling themselves as AI products.

Well, actually the AI part of them is the least interesting thing about them. It's, it's what these things can do for you and enable you. And the capabilities that they have are more interesting. And that's where. You can build a, a story. So I think that's what's, when you take a storytelling out, just a long list of bullet points of what it can do.

You know, the example I gave is the, you know, selling an, uh, an iPod as this thing has 32 gigabytes. I didn't know what a gigabyte WA was, uh, [00:09:00] uh, when the iPod came out and I didn't need to, I wanted to know. This can allow me to have a thousand songs in my pocket. Ah, that's a value. That's a capability. I used to have a mini discs and, and, you know, it took me a long time to have a thousand songs on, on mini discs.

So to have it all on one thing, I am now see the value. Okay, take my money and, uh, I'm ready to go.

Molly: You have to translate it a little bit. You had a great example in the workshop, you had a couple of these where you show so clearly the common approaches to a new, especially a new thing like AI, where you're talking about the way people describe it and advertise it, there's like supercharge your results, like, yeah, hyper, you had a fast track, like synthesize, there's all these like really buzzy words that you skip through and it becomes a humorous thing because of course we want to Talk about something in an exciting way, but when we tell a story about something, when it's talking about to the benefit of someone, it's still like a story has emotion in it, [00:10:00] and all of those words miss the emotion, it's the emotion, I don't care about the gigabytes, I care about the how many songs can I have on the iPod, like you said.

Elliott: Yeah. And the example I use is, is the, the word unlock.

Molly: Unlock. Yes. Unleash. And that

Elliott: is the one, but you know, game changer is the one that the copywriters, I think, cringe at now, because that's what their CEOs want them to say. Like, and this falls into storytelling. You want to build contrast. So if it's a game changer, it's different to everything.

It's different to all the competitors. It's different than everything that comes before. So it's got the, it's. It seems right and that's why it's used so much. And it's the same as unlock. I always say like, you know, marketing, we're not lazy. We just do what works. And the reason why you see unlock the powers of AI and unlock the benefits of the metaverse, and you'll start seeing it now listening to after this podcast, you'll start to see it everywhere because now it's planted in your head.

But it works. It actually follows the rules of what a great [00:11:00] story is. You know, for something to be on, it has to be a before and an after. And that creates a timeline like story. To be locked up is not a good thing. You go from a place of a bad thing to a good thing, that's fortune. And as Vonnegut said, that's all a story is, rising and falling of fortune.

And then once again, it's It's inviting you to unlock. They're not unlocking it. You, you're invited. And that puts you as the protagonist and the hero on going on a journey. And that's in six letters. So actually, I, I really love the, the science behind it, but it's just overused once you notice it. But yeah, it's, uh, I just, I'm obsessed with copywriting.

I think probably like you guys and, um, You just spot these words that start to, you know, you can follow them on Google, right? Like really trendy and then they fall off and it's really interesting to see why.

Molly: Can you speak, you've referenced Christopher Berger's The Seven Basic Plots, Kurt Vonnegut's got his own take [00:12:00] on how many, how, how stories are different shapes.

What kind of sent you down your storyteller's rabbit hole is what we kind of call it for us. What sent you studying on your own terms?

Elliott: Yeah, maybe it was that that Vonnegut has a great YouTube video of him brilliantly in a storytelling way and making storytelling as simple as possible by by putting it as simple lines on a graph and saying that, you know, a story is basically the rise and fall of fortune.

And it's just such a simple dimension, right? And you can understand that, oh yeah, every movie I've ever seen and every novel I've ever wrote or any, you know, uh, ancient Greek or Nordic poem, they all follow this very similar routine, like, like, as Joseph Campbell says. But I really like the Vonnegut one because, you know, as marketers, we're obsessed with fortune, that that's fortune is our game.

We're trying to communicate how your life will be so much more fortunate with my brand, with my product, and with my feature. And like I say, When I found that what made it interesting to me is that we can [00:13:00] move away from, you need to have a story, to saying something like, you need to make sure you can communicate fortune and have a template for it.

And I think the other example you gave of the seven basic plots, that's another great example as well of like, oh look, there's these seven ways that since the beginning of time, we've been following these generic ways to tell stories. And there's some great lessons to be learned there. So one of, one of those is called the rags to riches, you know, like following someone with nothing who gains everything.

And I mean, if you're selling a FinTech app, then maybe there's a great, you know, template there for you to go into or, um, you know, overcoming the monster is another one. I always give the example of, of, uh, how many times you see cleaning products that, um, build their story of a little green man. Who's In your bathroom or and you, you spray it and it's gone.

And, you know, there's a great example of taking that very archetypal story and using it as a way [00:14:00] to get a product message off really quickly and emotionally. So, yeah, it was really just finding these frameworks and being a framework nerd and wanting to collect them all. And that's really what sent me on this, uh, this, this ambition to just really understand the science of storytelling.

Molly: Mikey, I'm glad we're not alone in this, you know, I appreciate that

Mikey: you are, yeah, like aggregating, curating all these different frameworks. You're a framework collector because certainly there's no one, right? Like one framework can't work for every scenario situation. So it's kind of fun to have them at your hip for the right context, the right scenario.

Right.

Music: Yeah.

Elliott: Yeah. Well, I, I did it the wrong way. It's that I, everyone I found, I was like, this is the one, this is solving all my problems. And that was true for six months and I'd find another one and actually this one works better for this scenario. And then that's when I started really what the course became is that actually when you boil all of these down, [00:15:00] they're all kind of approaching the same thing in different ways.

And in the course, I, that's what. brought me onto this idea of Aristotle's triangle is, is that's the three things they're trying to do. You can put all of these three works in three categories. They're trying to, you know, build contrast. They're trying to create conflict and they're trying to communicate credibility.

And, and once I realized that I just better to. Encourage the people I teach storytelling to experiment with these frameworks, but don't treat them as gospel and you know that they, they, they're not perfect, but they, they can get you from a blank page to the next step. And that, that's the most important thing.

Yeah,

Molly: yeah,

Elliott: yeah.

Mikey: Molly, I would love to hear a little more if we have time to go into maybe a little bit about what you mean about contrast, conflict and credibility, Elliot.

Elliott: Yeah, so one of the ways I present my, my course, my keynote, and even the clients I work with at UOAO is this idea of Aristotle's triangle and Aristotle believed that in order to effectively [00:16:00] persuade someone of anything, you need to use a combination of logic, emotion, and credibility.

And I give the example in my keynote in London that, okay, Molly, if I say to you, hey, let's stay for one more beer, I would say, Hey, it's half happy hour. We're going to save some money. That's logic. You can understand the money you're going to save. Or I can guilt trip you and say, Hey, you know, I haven't seen you in a long time.

Just stay for one more. I'm appealing to your emotions. Or I can say, trust me, trust me. It's just going to be one more beer. And that's relying on my credibility and all of those. Could work, but if you use a combination of all three, that's when really great persuasion works. And for me, that's what storytelling is, is a form of, uh, of persuasion.

And that that's when we see, if you look at what is this, how do you quantify the success of a story? We use this word that we only really use within storytelling, which is to resonate. Like, did that story resonate with me? And for me, what resonate means is, do I think or feel differently after the story than [00:17:00] what I did?

And for me, you need those three things to be able to do that. So those three things of logic, emotion, credibility in the course, I break those down to, well, how do you do that? So for logic, it's about contrast. And for me, that's what all marketing is, is can you effectively communicate the contrast between life of our product versus the alternative, our brand versus the alternative.

our product versus another product or life with a feature or without a feature. And if you can communicate that, then you logically can get in the person. I understand the value of this. Next, you need to be able to shape that value because we're all very different and we've received value in different ways.

So that's when you bring in your ICP, your personas, all of that great product marketing stuff. And what you want to achieve there is conflict. And this is where Vonnegut's work comes in because, you know, nothing works if you haven't got conflict. That's what a bad story is. You need to have that. And this is what we do.

This is what pain points [00:18:00] are, right? We find what your pain point is and we say, that sucks, we've got a product that can cure that. That's, that's getting rid of the conflict. And so you need to change your story for your ICP. Then the most important one, it's where I spend most of my career now, because I think marketers are very good at logic and emotion, but it's never been more difficult to be credible.

Because maybe you can communicate your value, and maybe you can shape your value, but why would I believe you can deliver it? And that's where credibility comes in. And that's where you need to work really hard to show, don't tell, why you are the best at what you do, or why I should believe your story.

And so those are the three things. And I encourage anyone if you If you don't want a nice, simple trick and you don't wanna get in all to the frameworks, just hold whatever you are working on accountable to those three things. Is it logical? Is it emotional? Is cred, is it credible? And I think it's a really good start to get a good story.

Molly: So useful. It was so I could tell people resonating so much in the [00:19:00] workshop because. People are taking pictures of the slides. It was, it was, you were very engaging. I really loved one of the proof points you had to kind of like show that all three of those things show up in any story was when you presented this little video animation, really simple animation of like a couple of circles and a triangle, right?

They're moving in and it looks kind of like a, like that old snake kind of nineties animation, almost really simple. And the kind of the dots are moving in and out of the box, the triangles kind of chasing them a little bit. And you call on a few people after the fact, and they're like, what was the story there?

And no matter what, everyone assigns some kind of conflict to it. You're like, oh, the triangle was attacking the circle or, or, you know, the triangle was being bullied. You know, like there's someone who was, we assign inevitably conflict to a story when, when we're asked to, you know, it's just human nature.

It's really interesting.

Elliott: Yeah, the animation you're referencing is, uh, created by two scientists, uh, neuroscientists called Heider and Simmel back in [00:20:00] the 1930s. And it's a great thing that I use whenever I have a some, you know, a lot of the time I present to marketers, but sometimes I have to present to sales and product and they're a little bit more resistant to storytelling.

I sometimes use that as a way to kind of get them on board of like, Oh, okay. There's something, this, the psychology of it, because. Basically, what you're seeing is just triangles and circles, like you say, Molly, around a screen. But by the end of the minute, you put agendas on those shapes and characters and motives, and you might even feel a little bit of sympathy for some of them and anger towards others.

And then you realize, I'm only looking at shapes. Yeah, I'm feeling and predicting all of these things. And that's what I always try to get across by showing that is that Um, storytelling very rarely happens on the page. It happens in your brain. The story's not there. We are creating the stories and, and, and placing them on them.

Uh, but yeah, it's a really good way for, for some of your audience as well. If [00:21:00] you're already convinced of storytelling and you need to convince people around you, uh, maybe people who sign off your budgets, show them this one and it might just surprise them to the, to the power that stories have over all of us.

Music: Yeah, you have so many good examples.

Mikey: Yeah, Molly, like in the keynote, I think it was toward the end, Elliot, you had this picture. I think this was to demonstrate credibility or a lack thereof. It was of a janitor mopping inside of a store, which was the, um, the Roomba store. So like the, yeah, which was hilarious.

Was that a credibility point? I can't remember.

Elliott: It was exactly that. It was about show, don't tell. Show, don't tell. Yeah, exactly. Which is part of credibility of what I, the point I tried to make is that. Actually, there's many different ways to, to build credibility. And, you know, that's what thought leadership is.

And that's what testimonials are and case studies, the things that all of us do. But the best way to do credibility is, is not to even need them to trust you, if they can trust their own eyes. [00:22:00] And I gave the example, the analogy of what B2B world is like, because B2B is really not good at this. They, they, They hide their product.

They're incredible B2B products that I've worked with and consulted with, and it takes a long time to actually experience it or see it. And I have this example of a lady in an airport who is selling Roombas, like electronic robots, vacuum cleaners, and yet she's cleaning her own store with a 3 mop. And when she's got the perfect chance to show the power of a product to everyone who walks by.

And I think that's the analogy and the challenge put towards B2B tech storytellers is, how can you find a way that someone doesn't need to trust you? They can see your product in action and then go, Ah, I understand what that is. I understand why that could be good for me. And, and, and I could understand why.

This one is better than the next guy's one. It's not easy, but if you can do that in, in four or five seconds, um, [00:23:00] that's really great. And really, when you look at the numbers, and this was part of my keynote as well, that, uh, you've only got around four or five seconds these days. The days of being able to command people's attention for a long time is long gone.

Molly: And now, a message from our sponsors.

Mikey: Hey. If you're not doing anything late July, I'd love to personally and cordially invite you to something I cannot wait for. It's called Story Camp. It's a ticketed event. It's a retreat. Three nights, two full days of programming in ridiculously cool Park City, Utah.

We're bringing in three premium workshops. There's going to be opportunities to get up on a stage yourself. There's theory, there's practice, and best of all, camaraderie. It's going to be intimate and it's going to be awesome. We'd love for you to check out storycamp. com and we hope to see you in Park City.

Molly: What do you think people are, I mean, [00:24:00] definitely in the show not tell. That's such a great example of sweeping up the Roomba store. What are most people getting wrong? Like with those quick stories, like. I know it's like stuffing the features into stuff and that just gets suffocating and and especially when words and but jargon becomes the same that can that can get blended and blurred together.

But yeah, what's what else are people getting wrong and what would you give like off the cuff? Yeah,

Elliott: another really simple one is, is it's, it's, it's very rare that the same story works the same for everyone. And I've always been surprised at how many companies might have one pitch deck for everyone they speak to, especially if you think, like I say, B2B, if you're, if you're selling to committee, which means by the end of the day, the people who are going to write off and convert might be a CMO, might be a head of legal, might be a CFO and a CEO.

Those people think, very differently, and their conflicts are very differently. So why would the same deck and the same narrative [00:25:00] and the same anchoring of features, like what order you put the features of the product in, work with them? It wouldn't. And, and so that's why I think another really simple thing you can do, and this is what comes into the emotion section of the workshop, is How can you just, you don't have to do a completely different story because you are one brand and you're saying one thing, but there are, is there one slide you can change?

Is there one line you can change to make sure that you are speaking directly to that person? Because that, that's a, a really successful. quick change you can make. And also this is what with the product marketing side, that's, this is where the more you know about your audience, the better set up you are to do this.

And it's never been easier to understand your audience now with AI and, and so many of these other solutions, it gives you an opportunity to learn what the customer wants to hear and then adapt accordingly. But yeah, That's always a quick fix is to make sure that, um, you're not seeing one thing to seven [00:26:00] different sets of diverse audiences.

Molly: Is that customizing like the pathos, the logos and the ethos every time? Or is that, would someone be like, okay, well, I've got the same story for my own company. So how do I customize? But you've got to think about what the audience. perceives as the hero and the villain of the story.

Elliott: Yeah. I mean, so usually like the, the differentiated value, I try to keep the value the same.

Like, you know, this, this product is trying to solve one all encompassing thing. And that's true for all of them, but it's then it's the emotion side of it. Because that, that's why I say it's this, the rule number two is customizing conflict because. Yes, we all want a Roomba, but maybe you want a Roomba because, uh, to clean up after your pet and I want it after my kids and you've got a huge house and I've got a tiny house.

And so you need it. The most important thing for you is to have a battery. that lasts forever because you've got a huge house and it can pick a pet hair, but I needed to survive my toddler pouring water over it. And, [00:27:00] uh, you know, these are the things the robot can do all of it, but this is where the learning about your audience, you can think, actually, you know, so it's this thing.

I really like just a nice psychology factor or concepts called anchoring, which is proven that. The first feature you learn about carries the most weight. So it's the one that's going to influence your final decision. It's the one you're going to remember the longest. So it's, you know, a lot of time we just, we pick our five features and then we say, we just put them whichever way we want.

But you really, you should be changing the order of them. To who you're speaking to, because it will make a really big difference. So that's a nice little tip as well, is like, it's important to prioritize your features, depending on who you're talking to.

Molly: Yeah. The hierarchy can change. Yeah.

Mikey: That's so helpful.

Music: Yeah.

Mikey: You got it. Okay. Ellie, we know you, you love copy the other side of that. The showing this at a glance age that we live in, what's, what's the role and importance of visual storytelling today? How have you seen it change too? [00:28:00]

Elliott: Yeah, like it's, it's something I've, I've made it the basis of my latest keynote was to talk specifically about visual storytelling one, because I joined, oh, wow, and oh, wow, is.

got incredible designers and I just learned so much from them last year. And then I always just talk about each year, the thing that I learned the most, but it also hints back to something that I say in the course, which is, I have these three facts of why storytelling is important for marketing. One that you remember information 20 times more when it's delivered as part of a story.

So 20 times increased. memory retention. Number two, 92 percent of people prefer ads as part of a story. But then the third one is we are able to digest information 60, 000 times faster when it's delivered as part of a visual.

Molly: Wow.

Elliott: It's really incredible, but that's why, and I think everyone thinks that that can't be true.

And then I always in the keynote show three or four images. which I call one [00:29:00] second stories, where these, these images, and you would have seen them before, where you see them and immediately your brain just builds a story around them. And I think that's where visual storytelling is so important, because that speed has never been more important than now.

I gave the example that, you know, TikTok is the, the number one social media platform in the world, going through a little bit of a rocky time right now, but still the number one in the world. And the average watch time. on TikTok video is 3. 3 seconds. So it's an incredibly short amount of time that people are now dedicating to content.

And so it's just never been more important to be able to get your message across extremely quickly. And that's where visual storytelling can, can be a great weapon.

Molly: I want to hear a little bit more, you are passionate about visual storytelling and the copywriting, what's going on at Olau and what kind of led you there and you're serving as head of marketing, like what's the kind of, um, yeah, projects that you guys are working on?

Elliott: Yeah. How I ended up [00:30:00] there was it was really meeting the two founders who are incredible guys. They've been running a well for 10 years, uh, in brain port here in, in Eindhoven in the Netherlands is they call it the smartest kilometer square kilometer in the world because some of the world's best engineers are here.

Oh, I really responded to them is that the, the, the just creating incredible products. So super talented engineers and designers. And it was an opportunity for me to come on and help them do that because. All of these things are going to end up as stories, and, uh, it was an opportunity for me to get an even better storyteller because Now, instead of working with one brand, I could work with dozens at the same time.

And so, yeah, that's basically what we do. We, we have an elite product team here and we help brands build things that they might not be able to build. So hit deadlines that are becoming too difficult, uh, build things a little bit different than they're able to build. And right now it's for us, because we're always about technology, it's AI and automation.

So [00:31:00] it's really. going into companies and helping them become better by just using the talent we've got. And then from my side, just bringing my experience of storytelling to help companies understand like one thing, which is what is the story that you can tell better than anyone else? That that's really what my job is, is I just come in and help any brand try to understand that, because it's good to understand that before you build.

Something big, because if you build this and then go, Oh, maybe we should have done this different. So really that's, that's my role.

Mikey: Elliot, as a consultant, then, you know, like if you're working on lots of different types of projects, certainly you're not expected to be like the subject matter expert in their space.

As you mentioned, like these are brilliant people and SMEs. How do you approach that? When, when you like, are you just there to try to pull it out of them and, and repiece it? Or yeah. How do you get over that feeling that, Oh, they might know this better than I do?

Elliott: Yeah, but they, they do. Uh, and that, that's what I asked them to do.

So [00:32:00] I, I asked them before to basically, um, come with what they have, bring your personas, bring your research, bring those two salespeople who have been in the company 50 years and know everything and everyone and are cynical and. And, and let's get it all out in the room and, uh, let's repackage it and let's mine into it and find, and usually the thing that I'm bringing out, it's not a creative thing that I'm saying it's me.

It's something they already know. It's stuck on an email. It's stuck on an old deck. It's something that they've said. And it's like, well, that, that's it. So it's, it's just cutting through the noise and, and, yeah. finding the thing for them to focus on. But yeah, that, that is one of the challenges as well is having to learn about new industries that I haven't worked on.

But I think that's, that's really nice as well. The reasons that I've left any job in the past is when I realized, Oh, I haven't really learned anything. in a while. And I think, never think that's a great thing. And I think that's, what's nice about now is that it's, you're in a [00:33:00] position to, to learn a lot very quickly, but once again, AI help helps as well.

It's never been easier to say, Hey, show me every single competitor within manufacturing within Belgium and have AI printed, you know, five years ago, I would have needed a research team or a hundred of my own hours to do that. It's a really nice way to be able to do the things that you couldn't do before.

Molly: Elliot, you're here because we saw your keynote and this is presentation thinking. I'm curious what your relationship with presenting is like. Have you always been such a skilled, smooth presenter? Because it was pretty, pretty flawless. And also we love your slides. So we'd love to get a little more insight into how you go about building a deck.

Elliott: Yeah, that's so nice of you to say, but the honest answer is absolutely not. And I've had like a. A mixed relationship with it that what helped me was to have one great boss when I was at Adidas, who, who really just gave me some great advice. I wish I needed. And that, that carried me a long way. [00:34:00] And so I still remember the rules that he told me and they were really simple things.

So that helped. But even, even recently, even a couple of years ago, I remember telling my wife I was going to speak and I, I just really was not looking forward to it. And so I recently, I've had a kind of a mixed relationship with it, but I think that the difference for me is. There's nothing easier than speaking about something you love and maybe you know a lot about.

If you asked me to get on stage and talk about physics or maths or something that I don't know a lot about, but you gave me the script and you gave me great slides, I just, I just, I would be very nervous and I couldn't do it. And so for me, that's, that's the secret I think is that it then it becomes actually not really speaking or presenting or acting.

You're just trying to, you know, get the knowledge of as best as you could. So I always think that's a, that's a good lesson to take. And regards to decks, I spent my whole life in slides. I love it. Even before like [00:35:00] note takers, I used to build my notes in slides. I used to build like my weekly plans in the slides.

I've got zero design in me or creativity, so I've always been held back. All of my briefs, I'm just copy pasting, copy pasting, copy pasting into templates. But there's one thing that I really loved, and I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of it, and I bet you guys know it, uh, is this Japanese style of presenting.

Is it petu katsha, or? Oh, yeah.

Molly: Yeah, petu katsha. Petu katsha. Thank you.

Elliott: Okay. You're good, Jay. So this, your audience, yeah, this, this idea of you just put one image on the slide and, and rather than having 10 things and, you know, by the end of it, you really associate what the person's saying to that thing.

And for me, that was really after learning that is to really make my decks as clean as possible. And so if I'm speaking a big subject, but it's like I [00:36:00] 20 times. more memory retention, even just having a big 20 on the screen, it just big, impactful. So these kinds of things really help just really distilling it.

You can see more with, with less, but now the deck that you guys saw, I'm very happy that awesome designers at OL helped me bring that to life. So that makes my life a lot easier.

Mikey: Does, does that give you like any different level of confidence or anything, or is it just like, ah, Much better.

Elliott: Insane. Yeah, absolutely.

Like it's, um, it, it makes it so much easier for me because you know, then you, you don't have to remember as much and you know, people are looking up at the screen and it's kind of a crutch, right? Like you, you can rely sometimes just on the, the slides. And I, I love the visual storytelling element of it.

So I give you an example. This wasn't in the deck that you saw, but the, one of the ways that we've been kind of communicating AI is this line that we created. It's a. [00:37:00] AI not as a tool, but as a torch, because it's just to solve a problem. It uncovers, it illuminates and gives you new information. By doing that, you're part of it because you're holding the torch.

But the visual for that, I just found a great. Stock footage, video of a caveman with one of these old Yeah. Torches going through a cave , you know, uh, if I say that and they watch that for five seconds, they, they just, people get it right away, right? Mm-hmm . Like istan, that's a, like, and I just love things like that, that are, that are key visual people use their own context.

Yeah. Uh, and that's kinda my challenge for this year is how can I. Bring more of those elements in and really build a true storytelling deck, which is telling each of my things with a, with a, with a nice visual story like that.

Molly: Yeah, it's

Elliott: lovely. I love the torch.

Molly: Yeah, we talk about like live sketching a lot at the ranch, Mikey, because I relate to your plight, Elliot, of enjoying the writing and enjoying the story, but struggling with the design and needing other people [00:38:00] to lean on for that.

But if you can just get like a little sketch or like you have an idea of an image that could just convey, show the big 20 for the stat. Can be that simple. I think people really overcomplicate it. You don't have to have a whole stack of bullets on your slides. It's really, it can be so simple.

Elliott: If you track your analytics of your decks, like, like I do, and you realize like the deck, I always give away the slides for the reason I said, to stop people worrying about taking the picture.

The one I presented in London, I had like over 500 people going through it, but the 1. 5 seconds on each slide, right? Because they just, you know, going through. Yeah. That's

Molly: what he talked about. Yeah.

Elliott: Yeah, and you spend so much time on them and then that makes you realize, well, if I want to speak to them in 1.

5 seconds, they're not going to read 10 facts. So let's get them with one and you can already, you know, you know, still have the information there if they want to dig deeper and, and be a bit more [00:39:00] dynamic about how they can explore on their own time. But I think. leading with a very clear hook that can, can keep them going.

It seems to be this day and age where attention spans aren't as good. It seems to be a good method to have.

Mikey: We know it's getting late over there. I think we should jump, Molly, into the spice cabinet because you're, you're like a collector, like a resource junkie. I bet there's no book you haven't read on this, on these topics.

Are there any recommended

Molly: books,

Mikey: podcasts, like other people you follow that you're If someone's just on this storytelling journey right now, what do you recommend?

Elliott: Well, I'm going to recommend a book that I'm reading now, and it's an author who's inspired actually a lot of the work I do in storytelling, which is Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote the book Sapiens, which is a fantastic book, recommend to anyone who wants to understand more about humans and yourself and society.

But his latest book is called Nexus. And it's really [00:40:00] great, uh, and just in typical fashion, like his previous book, he tries to explain something very, you know, foundational, which is very difficult to do, uh, which is information and information networks. But why I love it, because as, as, as probably if we're learning through this conversation is that there's two things I'm speaking about, which is storytelling and AI.

And I've kind of been balancing those two things and in the book, he needs to try to explain that all AI is the latest technology to form information together. And before he says to start the book, we're going to look at the first technology to form information together, and that is storytelling. And so when I was like, Oh, this is great, and there's a great chapter in the book where he talks about the power of stories.

And so I can really recommend that because it's such an easy read. He's such a great writer and it's such an important subject. You'll probably finish it before me because my reading pace is, uh, my type of reading isn't as good as I [00:41:00] want it to be, but yeah, that, that would, that would be my main recommendation and everything else.

Yeah. On my LinkedIn, I'm usually. just reposting and sharing the things that I love. And so you're happy to follow me there as well.

Molly: I was going to ask where can people find you? LinkedIn, you're a killer follow. And you've got, yeah, I mean, where people download your ebook. I would love to toot your horn here.

Elliott: Yeah. I mean, it's, uh, like I say, uh, it's, it's just, uh, an ebook, uh, not on the, uh, the grand, uh, product marketing, uh, author level, but it's just basically what I wrote to stay sane during my second leave. where I had taken some time off and I just wanted a way to basically make sure that if I took three months off, the next time I did a storytelling workshop, I wouldn't forget it all.

So I started writing and it was just a great way of bringing everything together. And yet more than happy to share it with any of your audience, just add [00:42:00] me on LinkedIn. I'll send it to them as a PDF. And it's a, it's meant to be just a great way to start your journey. If you're interested in science or storytelling, this can be something that gets you, uh, gets you started.

Molly: So

Mikey: as you know, you're on the presentation thinking podcast, what does that, that combination of words, presentation thinking mean to you and what do you think it should mean to other B2B marketers out there?

Elliott: Yeah, I wanted to ask actually, I think, I think a few different things, but presentation thinking the way when I read it is like, yeah, type of mindset that a person has where.

You're thinking about how it's going to end up at the end. So, like, if you're thinking of building a product, the way I always think about things is like, how am I going to talk about this on stage or how, how is this going to look as the final campaign? And so I've always got. What I would call my presentation thinking hat is that when we're building a feature roadmap, I'm like, move that feature up because that's the one I want to present.

So that's the [00:43:00] kind of way I thought about it is that, uh, yeah, but I would love to know, uh, what, uh, what your guy's thoughts on it as well.

Mikey: Yeah.

Molly: There's no wrong answer, but I do love the hat analogy of like putting our presentation thinking caps on. I've never said that.

Mikey: Totally. And even you said it earlier in the, in the talk about.

Just, just recognizing that perhaps we shouldn't have one deck that tries to appeal to all these seven different personas. And so that intentionality of like, maybe this small tweak would actually help us seal the deal or, you know, resonate for this hook for this particular audience, et cetera. So we've, we've noticed some people bring a lot more intentionality.

Into their presentation discipline, you know, and, um, certainly that's why you're here. Cause we, we saw you nail it, you know, in, in London and I'm sure every workshop you go to is Yeah, we'll have

Molly: to show you, I feel like you would appreciate as an Aristotle fan. We have a bit of a little Truvian Shakespeare, if you will, the world's most inappropriate illustration of Shakespeare.[00:44:00]

And on each of this four, four pillars is, you know, the art, the science, the delivery was the fourth one.

Elliott: This sounds like a framework that I use. Yeah, and so that's kind of our

Molly: ethos of presentation thinking is like it combines so many of these things.

Elliott: Yeah.

Molly: To think about the delivery and what the stage is like, what the, what the visuals look like and all of that is storytelling too, so.

Elliott: Yeah, I love the, the amount of passion and, and thought you guys put into it because it's, Think of how many incredible ventures, brands, deals have been won and lost on a good, bad, great, or terrible presentation. It's, it's, uh, yeah, it's incredible. Like I always say, it's, uh, it's not about having the best product anymore.

It's about convincing people you have the best product. And a presentation is a vital part of doing that. So, yeah, I think it's great that you guys are. leading a charge to for people to get their act together when it comes to presenting.

Molly: Good. I'm glad you don't think we're [00:45:00] crazy. Thanks, Elliot. Thanks, Elliot.

All right.

Mikey: Presentation Nation, they're waiting for your answer to this. Elliot Rayner, up on the next TED Talk stage, what's going to be your walkout song?

Elliott: Oh, man, you asked me this in London and I thought I should think about this. Well, I'm just going to go very simple of my, my, my favorite song is, uh, is, uh, By a guy called Sam Fender, who's from where I'm from, and he's got a song called Borders.

Not only is it a great song, but it's got a great intro. It's got guitars, it's got saxophone, it's got some good lyrics. So I think that would pump me up and that would be my choice. I

Molly: think. I recognize his face. I just pulled up his Instagram. All right.

Elliott: Yeah. Maybe I brought Sam Fender over to a new audience, but yeah.

Yeah.

Mikey: We're here for it. Well, Elliot, this has been amazing. We're huge fans. I'm sure there's. A whole lot more fans out there [00:46:00] now. Appreciate your generosity and sharing. And, yeah, like, best of luck. Listeners, stay tuned for anything else from, from us. We'll always share anything we see from Elliot. And we appreciate you being part of the network, man.

Elliott: Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me on. Really enjoyed it. More presentation,

Molly: pals. Yeah, it's like a

Elliott: therapy session for addicted people.

Molly: For story nerds, yeah.

Mikey: Awesome. Well, everybody, thanks for listening. Until we meet again,

Molly: Keep

Mikey: on Pitchin