It's the people
Content marketers love to talk about storytelling. Yes, people might read material about products or services or even annual reports, they’ll tell you, but what they really want to read about is other people.
So it’s worth remembering that ‘people stories’ need people – people who are willing to give their time, to talk, and to hide their awkwardness while having a camera pointed at them. So as the Christmas elves work busily somewhere in the far north, we want to give a shout out to all the people who have allowed us to tell their incredible stories during 2017.
This year, we’ve spoken to a café worker about what it’s like only earning enough to eat once a day and an entrepreneur who spent a year covering his bedroom in receipts. We’ve heard from a legendary mountaineer about why caring is the most important leadership quality, a Columbo-loving economist and a health campaigner willing to go against the grain for his beliefs. We have filmed postal workers in a freezing depot in Belfast, photographed the former Prime Minister’s wife and talked to a technologist whose first love is vintage.
We’ve also caught up with the organiser of a ‘World Cup’ for people with Parkinson’s, chatted to a celebrity photographer who has raised $44,000 for charity, talked with an abstract artist about how his health condition has made him more creative and crossed paths with an award-winning inventor. It’s been a busy year
So people, we salute you. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to do this work. Well, we might, but we’d have to make it up. And real life tends to be so much stranger, and more interesting, than fiction.