Enemy of boredom; friend of your story
When I designed my logo last year I wanted it to express three important things about my philosophy of communication.
First, it uses the figure of a hunter, painted on a cave wall about 4000 B.C.
In the original the hunter is carrying a bow but since he's looking backward it's hard to say whether he was charging his prey or running away from it. I dropped the bow because I am interested in the hunter, not his technology. The hunter is himself a story, appearing on a cave wall. Perhaps in the next frame he triumphed over a mammoth. Perhaps in the next reel he was stampeded by 1000 elephants, or fell asleep on a log and dreamt he was a crocodile. Maybe he mastered arrowheads at Holocene High, and became the inventor of hollow tips. Or fell in love with a woman who started a cave furnishings store called Wall-Mart. We simply don't know. But we care, because he's a human, and therefore his story, every story, is quite interesting.
The second value I hold as a communicator is the notion that I too must be a hunter. A participant in the dialog and the chase, the quest and the questions.
To do that job well, I have to stalk, surprise, and overcome the forces of boredom that are constantly trying to make your story appear normal, banal, and irritatingly trivial. But the tools I use to dispatch this prey are carefully chosen. I do not, as a rule, use the earthquakes of effects or the bombs of bombast to shock our way into the audience's mind, as though we were invading through the backs of their eyeballs.
Nor do I try to find the sex switch to gain access through the back of the brain stem. The only authentic, ethical way to defeat boredom is to attract the interest of the viewer through more noble human sentiments. The real power is in your story. By showing respect, engaging in dialog, reflecting an interest in the audience, displaying a sensitivity for what the watcher feels, the audience chooses to pay attention. They pay you the compliment of spending their time and listening to your story.
And so the third principle of my communications approach is friendship. I am the friend of your story. What do friends do? They listen, they care, they understand, they accept, and they become your advocate with others. By becoming the friend of your story, I can not only help tell it without boredom, I can also increase its chances of acceptance, add value to the brand, create relationships with audiences that can build trust and ultimately lead to greater influence.
When I say influence, I do not mean projections of media power that translate into awareness. I mean acceptance and pursuit by appropriate audiences, who assimilate your message or your product into their lives because it appeals to them and solves their problems. True influence, in this sense, flows from the audience to you, not from you to the audience. The measure of your influence is your ability to listen, and the resonance that inspires in their listening to you.
Like all true friendships, the partnership we forge in communicating your story is a relationship that is personal and unique; so I chose to symbolize that with the thumbprint in my logo. Stories are interesting because they mirror our own life experience. I hope my life experience helps provide the mirror you need to reflect your story wherever it needs and wants to go.
