To read in english, click here.

Ela é uma mulher especial, aquela Bonnie Tyler. Ela foi capaz de dizer algo que todos nós já quisemos dizer, em algum momento da vida. Na verdade, ela gritou: “I NEED A HERO!”. Mas não um herói QUALQUER, claro que não. Como ESSE herói deveria ser? Strong. Fast. Larger than life… Fresh from the fight! Não é maravilhoso? É possível não só sentir sua urgência, mas também imaginar seu salvador.

Mas, afinal, o que é um herói? Nós vamos em algum nos aprofundar aqui sobre as definições e conceitos de herói. Por enquanto, vamos pensar no seguinte: todo herói tem um objetivo (mesmo que não saiba desde o início). Para existir uma história, é preciso que haja um desequilíbrio. Algo a ser resolvido. Um problema. Um conflito. E o herói é aquele que pode resolvê-lo. O herói tem uma MISSÃO.

Ele terá que enfrentar obstáculos. Ele terá dúvidas. Ele fará escolhas. E isso mostrará sua essência, do que ele é feito. É claro que isso pode ficar mais claro ao longo da história (conforme o herói cresce), mas ele sempre têm VALORES que guiam sua vida.

E conforme ele cresce, aprende, falha e alcança, fica claro para o herói o que é importante em sua vida. O que é sagrado. Pelo que vale a pena lutar, e talvez morrer. Fica claro o que ele precisa proteger, para proteger o futuro de todos. O herói tem uma VISÃO.

MISSÃO. VISÃO. VALORES. Soa familiar pra você?

Toda boa empresa e toda boa marca existe por um propósito: para fazer, de alguma forma, um mundo melhor. Não só através de seus produtos, mas também através de seu DNA. Através de suas práticas empresariais, de sua maneira de tratar as pessoas, de respeitar o meio-ambiente, de suas decisões difíceis em momentos difíceis, uma marca mostra a que veio. É uma narrativa constante.

E todos nós precisamos constantemente de heróis, que nos lembrem a importância de sermos bons e corajosos. E uma boa marca tem o DNA do herói em sua essência.

E é possível transformar esse DNA em narrativas e conteúdos relevantes para um público sedento por heróis, narrativas e significados pra vida.

To read in english, click here.

Para ler em português, clique aqui.

She is a special woman, that Bonnie Tyler. She was able to say something that all of us wanted to say at some point of our lives. Actually, she shouted: “I NEED A HERO!” But not just ANY hero, of course not. How should THIS hero be? Strong. Fast. Larger than life… Fresh from the fight! Isn’t it amazing? We can not only feel her urge, but imagine her savior.

But, afterall, what is a hero? We could (and will, at some point) talk more about definitions and concepts of a hero. But for now, let’s think about this: a hero has an objective. In order for there to be a story, there needs to be unbalance. There needs to be something to be solved. A problem. A conflict. And the hero is the one to solve it. He has a MISSION.

The hero will face obstacles. He will have doubts. He will make choices. And that’s what will show what he is made of. These can change in the course of a story (as the hero grows), but the hero always has VALUES that he lives by.

And as he grows, learns, fails and achieves, it becomes clear for the hero what’s important in life. What’s sacred. What’s worth fighting for, and perhaps dying for. What he wants to protect, in order to protect everybody’s future. The hero has a VISION.

VISION. MISSION. VALUES. Does it ring a bell to you?

Every good company and every good brand exist for a purpose: to make the world a better place, somehow. Not only through its products, but through its DNA. By its way of doing business, treating people, caring for the enviroment, making tough choices at tough moments, a brand shows what it’s made of. It’s an on going narrative.

And the point is: all of us are always in the need heroes, to remind us of the importance to be of good and brave. Or gentle and caring. Anything that can help improve the world and our relationships. And good brands have the DNA of the hero in its essence.

And it’s possible to turn this DNA into relevant narratives and content for a public that is thirsty for heroes, narratives and meaning for life.

Para ler em português, clique aqui.

Yesterday, I got to experience CAT - Central de Atendimento ao Telespectador.

First of all, I love the concept of “attending the television viewer.” Maybe it’s just that it sounds fantastic translated into English. “Attending” is what a servant, an attendant, does. You “attend to” something that you really care about. When something needs your attention, you give it.

But more important than that, CAT actually does attend. Instead of just taking suggestions, listening to rants, and accepting compliments, CAT has an awesome database of information about all the currently airing programs. Want to know what kind of lipstick your favorite character was wearing today? Call CAT. Want to find out more about that illness that was featured on the evening news, because you think you might have it? Email CAT. And what’s more - they get back to you quickly. If they don’t know, they’ll send your question up the chain - right up to the art directors, if they need to. You will get an answer.

That’s no small thing. Everyone’s sent off that fan letter, asked that question, called that faceless corporate entity and never gotten an answer. It stinks! Even a form letter is better than no response at all. But no response at all is what you get, most of the time, when you try to contact a faceless giant.

Also, I’m thinking about cosplay, thinking about all the kinds of ways that fans interact with television shows. On the one hand, being able to ask questions like this about US TV would take away some of the fun of piecing things together from scanty information - one of the many joys of cosplay. But it would also be a boon. Want to know just how the costumer set that sleeve, what stitches they used? Go ahead and ask!

Of course, there’s lots of unplumbed depths here too. Learning about the data that CAT has collected, I started to drool. There’s at least four or five dissertations’ worth here, and while it’s all being put to good use, there’s so much more than can always be done. I’m thrilled to think I might get the chance to dig deeply in. Really good storytelling starts by knowing your audience - and CAT allows Globo to have actual, close, personal contact with a segment of their audience. I can’t wait to see what we can do together!

A Short Rant about Games, Play & Storytelling.

This really rang true for me. Of course, it doesn’t say much about the question of how to make a good game. That’s because it’s not possible to put that in a single blog post.

In fact, the last bit - about alternate reality games - is kind of misleading. None of those things, not codebreaking or viewing the source code of a webpage or even helping an attractive amnesiac teenage girl - is a deal-breaker in a game. None of them mean that the game’s no good. It’s just that when your game is entirely composed of things like that, that most people start to get bored, because either (1) they’ve seen it all before, or (2) they were never interested in it in the first place.

Actually, his comment about Dante’s Inferno, the video game, is a perfect example. It has nothing to do with the actual book. That’s not the problem, though. The problem is that it doesn’t have anything else going for it either. People who really like Dante aren’t going to like Dante’s Inferno, and people who really like video games aren’t going to like it either. But that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to make a character fight his way through Hell using bladed weapons. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to make a video game out of the Inferno. What it means is that nobody was thinking about the audience.

That’s where, often, people fall down. They don’t know who they’re speaking to, when they’re making a game. Who’s your market? Who are the pre-existing fans? Do you want or need their support? If not, how are you going to make up for it - who will be the new early adopters that you’ll get to play your game? Or are you just making something for the sake of hopping on the games wagon?

Fast Company says so! See? This is not self-propaganda!

Even because, we don’t do branded entertainment. We do transmedia storytelling.

But anyhow, here it goes:

Dirty Little Secret Part Gossip Girl, part graphic novel, this Elle-produced, Tresemmè-sponsored animated series follows a group of New York fashionistas who flash hair products and fight their way up the social ladder.

Directed by The Alchemist Mark Warshaw. ;)

You may not know her work… Yet. But she is the pen behind the characters of DLS. Take a look!

This was originally posted HERE (Talent imitates, genius steals)

There’s a nice write up of the CaT conference by Kunur over on Creativity and also on Adage that pulls out some of themes that percolated up.

They posted a video featuring me delivering a micro-rant about what strategy is.

The word strategy comes from the Greek strategos which translates roughly as general, and then came to mean the art of the general.

This is why MBA business types often used to read the Art of War by Sun Tzu. Or pretend to.

In essence, strategy is very simple.

You have a goal you wish to achieve. You have finite resources that can be deployed in achieving them.

Strategy is simply how.

In my first professional life I was a management consultant.

Whilst I wasn’t a huge fan of the dress code I did like the grounding it gave me in strategy - I started out as an analyst and then moved into the strategy practice, where I became very familiar the BCG matrix, Porter’s Five Forces model and the tenets of business strategy as espoused by Harvard Business School and those that follow its teaching.

And, again, its really simple.

Business exist solely to create value - to make money.

Therefore, business strategy is simply how you intend to go about doing that, using whatever assets you have available.

Everything else, brand strategy [what the brand should represent to whom because of what] and creative strategy [what’s the proposition], exists only in service of that.

The reason, I suspect, that planning is once again coming under the microscope

[apart from the endlessly introspective nature of planners, natch]

and there is a sense that it needs updating, is that it is designed to translate strategy into inspiration for creative minds, leveraging the strategic currency of insights.

But, by definition, creative strategy concerns itself with the content tone and messaging of advertising, which may not be very useful for creating ideas that do, which has led some smart people to suggest that planners need to get their hands dirty and ‘just effin do’.

My superawesome brother has some interesting thoughts about arbitrage as the driver of value over on his blog, and he links to the art project Bud has been running where he makes visualizations of people’s definitions of strategy.

They all look lovely but I think the variety of suggestions in the comments simply reflects how far from understanding business we can sometimes be as an industry, or that fact that how we use the word strategy is probably very different from what a client understands by it.

This is a quick post to share our newest project with Elle Magazine, "Dirty Little Secret". The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about it!

This is a great project involving both teams from US and Brazil with the amazing producing skills of our sister-company Vine Intertainment. And we even developed a brazilian character for the series.

More to come. Soon we will publish the trailer!

I just finished writing my master’s thesis for the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. A lot of it is specifically targeted to academics, and not particularly interesting to people who are outside the academic world.

There’s one important application for business, however. That is: my thesis calls on us to remember the people who don’t call themselves “fans.”

When I’ve spoken to people in the industry, they’re interested in talking about superfans, influencers, the people who are totally devoted to a particular movie or television show or book series. And don’t get me wrong: these people are important. But there are other people out there that we ought to be thinking about.

The key demographic that my thesis focused on was made up of “anti-fans” and “lolfans,” people who love to hate things - or love to make fun of them. Initially, this might seem like a bad group of people to court. Why would anybody want to encourage the detractors of their work?

Well, ask the people who made and starred in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Ask Stephenie Meyer, the author of Twilight.

Ask anyone who’s ever written for a soap opera and knows the power of a character that fans love to hate.

Ask the people who came up with MTV’s Jersey Shore.

It’s easy to think about creating stories for fans. We know how to do fanservice, how to please people who want to be pleased. But it’s important to keep your eye out for anti-fans, for lolfans, for people who are invested in stories solely in order to hate them and make fun of them. If they show up - and if you’ve got a good story, they will show up - you’d be best advised to keep them in mind!

The Alchemists were featured in the new initiative/book "No Apples: 100 other top innovators", that shows the most innovative organizations in the world, from all industries. We are on the Top 10 list of "Catalysts". Which is perfect for alchemists, right? :-)

On the same Rank are the amazing "Digital Vikings" from Perfect Fools - where we stayed for the last two weeks in Stockholm. An honor for us.

Thank you our friends, clients and everyone else that always believed in our company.