Jesus Smith

Reflection - Storytelling

Challenge

I was working for a TV show that contacts celebrities for interviews about their history and  accomplishments. This program has had a very significant ranking across America, however, it  stalled at a certain point, I needed more celebrities, but I couldn't get them and they didn't know  what was going on.

Selection

Now, because of my background in design thinking, I understood that one of the tools that  could help us was Storytelling, as this tool allows us to be able to convey stories in a clear and  meaningful way to have a greater reach to people. And I knew that if I could convey the  problem in a clear set of stories, then we could find a solution and bring new celebrities to the  TV show.

Application

To apply this tool, what we did was to contact celebrities who had already been interviewed,  we asked them why they had accepted our invitation to the interview, we listened to their  stories and we even made videos of them telling us how, since they were children, they had  wanted to appear on television. The director of the program was present and connected a lot  with these stories, which we then translated into images and even small comics that  represented this in a clear way.

Insight

We realized that, through these stories, what was the true essence of our program, what  excited people to want to participate and contribute from their story, we were very surprised  how beyond an interview, what we were doing was transmitting the voice of a person who  impacted the hearts of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people across America. So, this  led us to rethink how we were doing to get new interviews and we saw that we were not using  the right approach, so we decided to make changes.

Approach

We proceeded to change the way we were inviting celebrities to participate in the interviews,  we made new designs, new presentations and we oriented a lot of the stories we did using  Storytelling in order to get deeper into the heart of the celebrities. All of this turned out  amazing, because not only did we have an 89% acceptance rate in the interviews, but we even  received proposals from artists outside of America who wanted to participate in our events. I  am excited that using Storytelling will help us improve our television program and reach the  hearts of many more people.

