The story of StoryMade: How Publicis Seattle is helping startups tell their tales

Enter StoryMade, a story ‘incubator’ from Publicis Seattle.

While technologists and entrepreneurs are strong at the nuts and bolts of the product, marketing pros know how to tell good stories. Those two languages couldn’t be more different, so the offering brings them closer together and provides guidance on creating successful brand positioning and storytelling.

StoryMade, separate from Publicis Seattle but run by the team there, is a natural extension to the agency’s offerings. The idea itself grew out of a realization by the Publicis team that startups spend so much time developing products that they sometimes forget their story.

“Someone on my team had come from the startup world. He identified a big issue for startups in that they’re so focused on making pitches about how they’re going to make money. Then they get to a stage where they say, ‘Wait. Why are we doing this? Why does somebody want this?’ They don’t always spend time crystallizing their story,” says Britt Fero, executive vice-president, chief strategy and media officer at Publicis Seattle.

Fero saw more and more startups setting up shop in Seattle and the team figured they had stumbled on to something useful. She notes that there was a statistic that showed, in 2014, brands spent nearly six times more on media than VCs invested into startups. The question became about the ability for a startup to tell its story. Another, more important question about startups themselves was “why would anyone want this?”

“We saw the opportunity to take brand-building skills, apply those in a much more fast-paced scenario and say, ‘Let us help you identify why someone might need this,’” explains Fero.

When the team initially talked with startups, they found that the storytelling aspect was getting lost in logistics and development. Startups can tend to have tunnel vision as it relates to raising money and delivering returns — it’s a fixation of driving demand to show a VC that an idea is viable and, more importantly, valuable. But, according to Fero, there is lack of clarity on whether or not these are ‘long-term models’. The fact is that building a company from the ground up involves a lot of passion, which these founders have in spades, but they often don’t get to the heart of their story because they talk at length about their products.

“There are founders of companies who can sit down for a half an hour and tell you about their passion for why they want to get into this and why they created it. You tend to think, ‘OK, but it’s been 30 minutes. Can you give me that in a nutshell?’”

The nutshell is the responsibility of StoryMade, ideally. It helps pull out the meat of the story then give it marketing legs. It also works on how a startup should execute and achieve its goals, including making it look back at things it may need to rework or might not even have considered, such as advertising, product and packaging issues.

“You need to be able to not just deliver the big brand positioning thinking but show how that strategy is going to turn into execution,” says Fero. “You want to make somebody say, in an instant, ‘Ah, got it.’”

The process

StoryMade’s biggest challenge was to make sure it partnered with the right types of startups that truly wanted help — ones that wanted more than just advice or a little nudge in the right direction.

It starts with a questionnaire, then a screening call, which gives the team an idea of what they’re dealing with and the readiness of a startup to use their resources. By being able to have candid conversations from the beginning, the team can ascertain whether or not the startup really wants help, explains Fero.

An initial workshop digs deep on information. Then the hard work around strategy and execution begins.

“There are so many entrepreneurs today that have great ideas, but it’s how unique that can idea be and how well you can tell a story that inspires people to buy you over another entrepreneur that might have a similar idea in a shade of grey,” says Fero.

The Sqord story

Sqord is an entertainment platform that encourages healthy habits for kids through wearables and an app. Founder Coleman Greene was working at a digital health company when he saw that a lot of the information and offerings about healthy living were centered around adults, not children. He saw that kids weren’t playing as much and getting more sedentary, which alarmed him.

Instead of talking with adults and trying to get them to change their already ingrained habits, he envisioned a solution that started earlier in life.

“It seemed like it made more sense to try to get people when habits were being formed,” says Greene. “It was depressing for childhood that kids weren’t playing — weren’t engaging in more activity.”

Greene saw that video games were keeping kids inside, so he decided to use technology as a solution to solving the problem of kids not playing. He added that it was positive from an industry perspective as well, since they were engaging them when their habits were in the formative stage.

After hacking an early version of the Fitbit, which he saw as a model product, he sought to make something similar yet different — avoiding that ‘shade of gray’ trap. Through some grant funding and by winning some business plan competitions, the company was able to start making the devices and program. But it needed more than just a good idea, which is where StoryMade came in.

“We knew we needed help. When you’re a startup, you don’t have the luxury of taking on a bunch of different initiatives. You can learn that if you try to take on too much, you’ll drown. We recognized that this was important. This needed to be a priority. What we’ve seen is that big and small consumers connect as much with the company as they do the product or the service. Being able to have a story that’s meaningful and easy to tell was something that resonated with us,” says Greene.

Fero and company helped Sqord sort out how it needed to talk to potential customers, digging through the mounds of information and sharpening focus.

“They were fixated on the data part — fixated on selling to moms. They were all over the board,” says Fero. “We had a really good session where we asked them really simple questions, like, ‘do you want to be a device company? Do you want to be a software company? Are you trying to be a platform? What business are you actually in?’”

Coleman praises the Publicis team and its ability to listen and work with the company to build a story and plan, adding that it got to understand the DNA of the startup, its most important points and what really mattered to create the right story.

“It wasn’t them coming to us and saying, ‘Hey, this is how our framework works’. They understood where we were in our process and then put together the story that was most compelling for who we are and where we wanted to go,” he says.

Coleman notes that the team had the ability to be nimble, yet had all the resources of a big company. “They were sensitive to the fact that we didn’t have a lot of resources. They put a lot work on the research and the output. We could tell it was a thoughtful team. It was awesome just seeing how fired up they were and equally passionate about pulling a story together,” says Coleman.

That passion has led to other companies using the StoryMade method, and what gets uncovered could be transformative for startups and entrepreneurs in Seattle and beyond.

This article was originally published in the Q4 edition of The Drum's US magazine.